She took a fresh shift from her wardrobe, leaving the clothing she had worn for the last two days folded over the chair beside the bowl she had used for her bath water. She put the shift on, and then stood staring into her wardrobe, not knowing what to put over it. It was dark, she could wear a nightgown, go to bed; in which case she should take the shift off again. Or did she mean to escape, put on dark clothing, find some way over the garden wall, two stories high as it was, escape from what was happening tomorrow.
But what was happening tomorrow? She could not remember. Why was she standing, in her shift, in front of her wardrobe? It was too much trouble to take the shift off, to put a nightgown on.... She turned away and went back to bed, curling up on her side, as she had done the last two days and nights; and Ash came and lay down beside her again, and nosed her all over, and finally laid her head down with a sigh, and shut her eyes.
This night Lissar slept, and if she dreamed she did not remember. But she knew she woke to reality, to eyes and ears, and breathing, and the feel of her shift against her skin, and of the furry angular warmth of Ash, when there was a terrible noise from the garden.
The garden gate was opening.
It creaked, it screamed, it cried to the heavens, and the ivy and late-blooming clematis were pulled away and lay shattered and trampled upon the path; the little tree that lay just inside was broken down as if a giant had stepped upon it. But the ancient key had been found for the ancient lock, and the key remembered its business and the lock remembered its master; and so the gate was ravished open.
Lissar heard the heavy footsteps on the path, and she could not move; and as the possibility of motion fled, so too did reason. A little, fluttering, weak, frightened fragment of reason remained behind, in some kind of helpless loyalty, like the loyalty that left bread and water by the antechamber door, like the loyalty of the relatives who take away what the executioner has left. And this flickering morsel of reason knew that it could not bear what was to happen; and the princess, dimly, observed this, and observed the observing, and observed the sounds of footsteps on the path, and did not, could not, move.
But Lissar remembered herself after all when the door of her small round room was flung violently open, because Ash, in one beautiful, superb, futile movement, launched herself from the bed at the invader in the door.
It was the best of Ash, that she be willing without thought to spend her life in defense of her person; and yet it was the worst of Ash too because it brought the scattered fragments of her person into a single, thinking, self-reflective, self-aware human being again, who saw and recognized what was happening, and her part in it.
As Ash leaped, Lissar sat up and cried, "No!"-for she saw the gigantic hands of the invader reach out for her dog, like a hunter loosing a hawk in the hunt, with that swift, eager, decisive, predatory movement. And she saw the one huge hand seize the forelegs of her dog, and for all the power of that leap, that threw the both of them around by the force of it, the invader kept his arm stiff, keeping that snarling face well away from him, where she could waste her fury only on his armored forearm. And in a blink, as the leap was completed, he seized Ash's hind legs with his second hand, and as she sank her teeth uselessly into his wrist, with the momentum of her leap, he grasped her legs and hurled her against the wall.
It was an extraordinary feat of strength and timing; almost a superhuman one. But it was not only the wall Ash struck, but the protruding frame of the door, and her head caught a pane of window-glass, and Lissar heard the sickening crack her dog's body made beneath the shrillness of breaking glass; and she screamed and screamed and screamed, her throat flayed with screaming in the merest few heartbeats of time, till her father stripped off his great gauntlets and left them on the floor beside the broken body of her dog, and strode the few steps to her bedside, and seized her.
She could not stop screaming, although she no longer knew why she screamed, for grief or for terror, for herself or for Ash, or for the searing heat of her father's hands which burnt into her like brands. Unconsciousness was reaching out for her, that bleak nothingness that she knew and should now welcome. But she had no volition in this or in any other thing, and she went on screaming, till her father hit her, only a little at first, and then harder, and harder still, beating her, knocking her back and forth across the bed, first holding her with one hand as he struck her with the other, first with an open hand, then with a fist, then striking her evenly with both hands, and she flopped between them, driven by the blows, still screaming.
But her voice betrayed her at last, as her body had already done, and while her mouth still opened, no sound emerged; and at that her father was satisfied, and he ripped off her the remaining rags of her shift, and did what he had come to do; and Lissar was already so hurt that she could not differentiate the blood running down her face, her throat, her breasts, her body, from the blood that now ran between her legs.
And then he left her, naked, on her bloody bed, the body of her dog at the foot of the broken window; and he left the chamber door open, and the garden gate as well.
The whole had taken no more time as clocks tell it than a quarter hour; and in that time he had spoken no word.
Lissar lay as he had left her, sprawled, her limbs bent awkwardly, her face turned so that one cheek touched the torn bedding; she could feel something curling stickily down her cheek, and the taste of blood was in her mouth. She knew where she was, and who, and what had happened to her, because her eyes could not stop looking at Ash's motionless body; starlight and moonlight glanced off the shards of broken glass, as if she lay in state upon a bed of jewels.
Lissar went on breathing as she looked, because she did not know how to stop; but as time passed she felt the cold upon her body, feeling it like a soft inquisitive touch, like the feet of tiny animals. She did not recognize pain as present experience, for such a distinction was too subtle for her now; rather it was that pain was what there was left of her, as screaming had been her existence some little time before.
The creeping cold was a change, or a further refinement, upon her existence. But the cold was not content to pat at her skin and then grasp her feet, her hands, her belly and thighs and face. It wormed its way inside her; but she could resist it no more than she had been able to resist her father. Nor, she found, did she now want to, for the cold brought oblivion, the cessation of pain.
And then she saw its face, and it was not an animal at all, but Death, and then she welcomed it. Almost she made her split lips work to give it greeting; but her voice had fled away some time before.
I am dying, she thought, in the guttering of consciousness, I am dying, she thought, in the encroaching cold stillness. I am dying, and I am glad, for Ash is already dead, and it will all be over soon.
PART TWO
TEN