How could I have slept so heavily? I awoke to a woman nudging me. She had pushed the toe of her sandalled foot under the barred door and was poking me with it. ‘Move away, please. I will slide your porridge in.’ Her voice was low and neutral. Sunlight washed lace patterns on the floor. Shells. Flowers.
I sat up and for a time nothing made sense. Then I remembered. Dwalia beaten bloody, and me in a cell. And in the night, a friend? I stood up and pressed my face against the bars, trying to see into the next cell. All I could see was slightly more of the corridor.
The woman who had wakened me had brown hair and eyes. She wore a simple garment of pale blue, sleeveless and sashed at the waist. It stopped at her knees, and on her feet she had simple leather sandals. She stooped and set her tray on the floor, took a bowl of porridge from it and slid the bowl under the barred door. Plain beige porridge in a white bowl. No cream, no honey, no berries. No Withywoods, no clatter of cooking and waiting for my father to come. Just plain porridge with a wooden spoon stuck in it. I tried to be grateful as I ate it. It tasted of nothing. When the woman came back to take the bowl, I asked her, ‘May I have water to wash myself?’
She looked puzzled at my request. ‘I wasn’t told to give you any.’
‘Can you ask permission to give me some?’
Her eyebrows rose almost to her hairline. ‘Of course not!’
The dark rich voice from the night before spoke. ‘She cannot do anything except what she is told to do.’
‘That isn’t true!’ the woman exclaimed, and then clapped both hands over her mouth. She stooped and hastily piled my bowl onto the waiting tray and hurried off so quickly that the dishes jounced noisily on the tray.
‘You scared her,’ I said.
‘She scares herself. They all do.’
I was distracted by the sound of the door opening at the end of the walkway. I pressed my cheek hard to the bars and saw the Four enter one at a time. They were not dressed as grandly today, but still they wore their colours. Four soldiers followed them. Symphe was in a loose red gown. It had no sleeves and fell from her shoulders to her feet in folds, interrupted only by a scarlet belt that cinched it at her waist. Fellowdy was in a long yellow tunic and trousers that barely reached his knees. Some of Coultrie’s cosmetics had flaked onto his green vest as if he had just come in from a snowfall. Capra’s attire surprised me. She wore what looked to me like a blue shirt with loose flowing sleeves. If she had trousers on at all, they were shorter than the shirt was long. Her bared legs were sturdy but as pale as a fish’s belly. She wore sandals of brown leather that slapped against her feet as she walked. I had never seen anyone so attired, and I stared at her when she stood outside my cage.
