remember that tomorrow was her wedding day. Her wounded mind flared up a little, and declared that it was no wedding that would occur on the morrow, but a murder; it was not that she feared her wedding, but that she grieved her execution. But her mind could not hold that thought long, either, any more than it could hold any other thought.
And perhaps the preparations were going on. Perhaps the last two days had been full of ladies talking and laughing, full of bolts of cloth so light that when unrolled too quickly they floated, waveringly, in the air, like streamers of sparkling mist; full of laces so fine as to be translucent, that they might shine with the maiden's own blushing beauty when laid over her innocent shoulders; full of ribbons so gossamer that they could not be sewn with ordinary needle but must be worked through the weave of the fabric itself. Perhaps even now her maiden's crown lay in the next room, in a shallow crystal bowl of scented water, to keep the flowers fresh till the morrow.
Perhaps this all had occurred, and she only forgot. Perhaps even now she was not standing alone in her round room with only her dog for company, drying herself from her awkward bath on three-day-old towels, but surrounded by seamstresses adding the last twinkling gem-stars and gay flounces. She could not feel her own body under her hands; her body did not feel the texture of the towel against it; she neither knew where she was, nor why, nor what was happening to her.
She woke, still wrapped in a towel, in a heap in front of the cold hearth. Ash had lain next to her and kept her warm; she sat up and shivered, for the parts of her not next to Ash were bitterly cold. It was almost full dark-she jumped to her feet in alarm, seized the key, and locked the inner door.
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.
