She shut her eyes a moment more in gratitude, trembling, and then threw off the coarse, hay-smelling cloth and scrambled out meaning to flee back to the roof; she stood up in a gold-glitter cloud of hay dust, pinching a sneeze down behind her hand with her eyes squeezed shut, and when she opened her eyes, she halted. The old knife-scarred table where the knights played their idle cards was in front of her, and three queens sat round it, with coins and cards heaped between them. They turned their heads and looked at her.
She did not think of running. There was no use in running, of course, but it was not only that there was no use. If the other had seen her, she would have run until there was no more running, no matter how useless. But they were not like him. Terror and calm nestled together in her belly, but she took the folds of her skirt and she curtseyed to them low, and said, “God give you all grace, noble ladies,” and the one in the middle, tall and pale and clad in black answered her, “And to you, my lady.”
They were all strangely beautiful and strangely alike: their faces might have been cut from stone by a sculptor making copies, long and graven and unlined, and each of them wore upon her breast a jewel strung on a chain: one golden-brown and yellow like tiger’s-eye, one the deep red of blood, and the one in the middle, who faced her, a jewel clear as water.
“Come and play,” the red-jeweled one said to her. There was one seat empty at the table, and cards left before it.
“She has no stake,” the yellow-jeweled one said. They were different at a closer look: her face and lips were narrower, her cheeks hollowed and gaunt, and her hands where they came from her sleeves were so thin the bones strained against the skin.
The other scowled at her across the table. “I am tired of waiting while our sister goes roaming upon the world.”
Isabeau wished to say she did not know the game; she wanted to excuse herself. But on the discard heap, the king of coins stood face-upwards, and it was Sir Gaubard: his frowning anxious face painted so real to life he might have been caught up out of the world and put into it whole. She held up the fold of her cloak so the tower would show, and timidly brought it to the table and held it out. “Will this serve?”
The yellow-jeweled sister eyed it hungrily. The sister in the middle nodded once, and gestured to the empty chair opposite her. Isabeau sat down with them and picked up the cards. The air had warmed; she was not cold anymore. Now her hands shook because she lifted faces she knew with every card from the hand before her: the old sour cook on the nine of coins, Father Jean-Claude with his cross as the ten of cups; a groom who liked to sing on the four of spades. There were so many she could barely hold them all.
“The play is yours,” the red-jeweled one said. Isabeau hesitated, and then took a card from the deck: it was Estienne, one of the younger knights, on the nine of swords. The queens all watched her, silently, as she worked it in among the others. She hesitated and asked softly, “Must I discard?”
They all inclined their heads. She looked down at her cards and blinked away stinging. They were crammed so close in her small hands that the faces were covered, and she could only see the suits and numbers. And yet there was a face upon each one. She could not take one out.
The red-jeweled queen shifted impatiently and made a loud sigh, and with a sharp jerk Isabeau pulled out the lonely six of coins and threw it out onto the pile before she could look too close at the young man upon it: she thought his name was Lucien, and he was an apprentice to the smith.
The play went round and round. New cards marched into her hands, threatening to spill over: more than there ought to have been, and sometimes it seemed to her that she already held a card of the same markings, but when she looked into her hand, she could not find it. Sometimes she drew a card and laid it on the discards straightaway; she made herself a rule she would not give away one in her hand unless the new was better, to make it less of a choice. But she was too quick at cards not to know that this card would bring her closer, and that one further, and which was the best to throw away.
The red-jeweled queen played impatiently: she drew cards and sometimes threw them out again a few turns later, as though she had changed her mind, and she liked swords best; the yellow-jeweled queen greedily snatched her card from the deck as soon as the turn was hers, and frowned long and lingering before she had to discard each one, grudging. Between them, the queen in black velvet played steadily, without much passion; she took her cards and laid the discards down almost to a measured pace.
They had already been playing a long time when Isabeau drew the king of cups: Jerome with a golden goblet in one hand and a book open upon his lap. She put him at once into her hand, pushing the card in quickly near the knave with Father Jean-Claude upon it, which she had not yet been able to bring herself to discard, on the excuse that she had the ten of cups as well, and some little hope of the nine. But she had a sharp painful sense that she had seen the queen of cups thrown out already in play by one of the others, and two of the other kings were already gone.
As if to taunt her, the nine of cups came on the very next turn: sister Brigitte, who led the singing every Sunday, and so she and the priest were safe on either side of old retired Magister Leon, who slept in the north tower and rarely ever came down to dinner. But the king of cups continued to stand alone as the turns crept onward, and on every side the others were shifting their cards as though their hands were nearly formed. And then Isabeau took from the deck the king of swords, and it was her husband, with his stern marked face and his kind eyes.
Of the swords she had now the knave and the ten and the nine, so she put him beside them, and threw out the very last of the solitary cards she had saved, a three of spades with a little boy who tended goats upon it. She did not know his name, but she remembered his grinning pride: she had been sitting high up on the castle wall with Jerome when his mother had told him he might take the herd out alone for the first time. She looked away.
The yellow-jeweled sister drew a card and her hungry eyes brightened; her lips curled with satisfaction as she put the card into her hand and threw out another. She looked over with that thin smile as the play continued on, and Isabeau did not need to be told that she had nearly finished. The play came round to her again. She reached out a trembling hand and drew a card from the deck with her own face upon it, a queen, and where the suit ought to have been only a jester’s star.
The yellow-jeweled queen was drumming her fingers impatiently. The game was done: Isabeau had to make one hand, or the other. She swallowed and chose, and laid down her cards with her face looking out from between Jerome and Father Jean-Claude, making the long line of cups, and she put the Comte’s card last upon the high heap of the discards.
She wiped away tears as the yellow-jeweled queen threw down her cards scowling, and the red-jeweled queen sighed and tossed her own atop the discard heap as welclass="underline" the Comte vanished beneath the cascade. They rose from the table and walked out the doors and into the dark, their long trains whispering over the floors until they were engulfed. Across from her, the last of the queens with her black clothes and her clear jewel gathered the heap, and held out her hand for the rest of the cards.
Isabeau hesitated with her hands spread over them, protective, but the queen said, cool and implacable, “All the cards are mine in the end. Only fools forget it.”