This room had once served as a small chapel, and it still had one or two of the old wooden pews left to show it. Those pews were now covered with sequinned cushions. The empty space overhead under the vaulted ceilings was filled with colorful streamers. Heavy, colorful curtains hid darkened stained glass windows depicting bleeding saints and leering demons. A small child’s bed sat to one side against the wall, and a vast, circular carpet took up the rest of the room. On the carpet sat a table, and on the table sat abandoned teacups and cake crumbs. A long push cart was next to the table; a stained tablecloth hung down to its wheels. The chairs around the table hosted a number of stuffed animals and one living man. Sitting in a child’s chair, the man’s knees almost touched his chin. That chin wagged as he ate scraps of cake, but his eyes were focused, in a dazed way, on the young woman standing before the chapel’s massive door.
Her clothes were once fine and luxurious, but stains and cake crumbs had colonized her dress. Rats’ nests had taken over her short auburn hair. The door was heavy oak. Knots and swirls in the grain gave life to animals, to mythical creatures, to anything a child might find in the shape of clouds. In the center of the door, where the girl stood, the knots and lines in the grain seemed to make a face.
“Lyons is very put out that Marina attacked him,” said that face. Embossed in the oak, it seemed androgynous—perhaps it belonged to a beautiful man, or a handsome woman. Its voice was no less ambiguous. “We need everyone to watch out for her,” it said. “Be aware that she has gone rogue. There are guards outside of this door, and within the halls, but beyond that our forces outside are limited. We cannot rouse suspicion in the commoners. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Arcas,” she mumbled. The face looked over the filthy child, and then the room around her. Seeing nothing but dirty carpet, grubby toys, and one quiet man, the face seemed to nod and then was no more. The space where it had been was strangely bereft of the swirls and grain that dotted the rest of the door.
The young woman watched the space where the face had been for a few moments. When the embossed face truly seemed to be gone, the urchin in her ruined finery turned back to the room behind her.
“Okay,” she said. The man at the tea table looked at her, but all else was still and silent. “Okay!” she said more loudly. The man rose and went to her side. The girl put her hand on the man’s arm, but her gaze was still focused outward. She did not jump when the bed off to one side bucked and scraped the floor, but the man beside her did. The bed slid and shook a few more times before a shadowy head peered out from beneath it. The shape seemed to look around before issuing further out from under the bed. Tamora rose to her feet. She bent and reached into her own shadow; when she drew her hand, it was clasped in another that glowed. She hauled Gallerian out of her shadow. Freed from those darkened depths, he dropped to his knees and wheezed. The young woman approached him. She wrung her hands.
“Are you okay?” The inky silhouette laughed.
“He’s fine. Or, at least, he’ll thaw. Now,” Tamora said, “Where is this prophecy you needed, Gallerian? This doesn’t look like a library.” All Gallerian could do was shake his head as he got his breath back. He got it knocked out of him again when the girl threw herself into him and hugged him more strongly than her build might suggest. She refused to let go, and hung off of his arm after he managed to get to his feet. Gallerian would not quite meet Tamora’s eyes.
“I never said we were looking for a prophecy,” he said, after the silence had become too accusatory. He got the sense that Tamora looked at Gallerian, at the young woman hanging off of him, and back to him, but it was impossible to see her eyes move. There were no whites of her eyes.
“It’s time to leave?” the woman-child asked. Her surprise was great enough that she let go of Gallerian’s arm and dropped to sit on her knees on the carpet. “You promise?” Gallerian looked down at the girl’s earnest face, bordered by auburn tangles.
“I—promise,” he said. The glowing man hunched his shoulders at Tamora’s crow-like laughter. The girl turned her puzzled eyes on Tamora. The laughter stopped. No explanation was forthcoming; Tamora’s counsel was her own.
“Do you have anything you need to collect, Dame?” Gallerian asked of the messy urchin. She scrambled to her feet and began leading the middle-aged man back to his seat. While the girl talked to him in a quiet voice, Tamora stared at Gallerian.
“That girl has been knighted?” Gallerian looked at his opposite for a few long moments before comprehension dawned on his sunny face.
“No, no. The case, please.” As Tamora dredged a small valise from her shadows of holding, Gallerian chuckled. “Dame is a nickname, not a title. Her full name is ‘Damsel.’” This knowledge caused Tamora to pause with the suitcase halfway out of her shadow.
“Her mother must have had a terrible sense of humor,” she said. Tamora stared at the girl, at Damsel, as Dame spoke to the middle-aged man she had patiently coaxed into sitting down at the table. Tamora studied the shade of Dame's hair, the shape of her face, and the gleam of her earnest brown eyes. Tamora's own eyes narrowed. “Wait…” Gallerian’s gleaming personage happened to interrupt her view as he worked the last of the iciness inflicted by Tamora’s aura out of his limbs. He arched his eyebrows at Tamora, and she shook her head. “I forget,” she muttered.
“Dame,” Gallerian called as he helped Tamora set out the valise, “Are you ready?”
“No!” Dame said. She turned back to the man with whom she’d been speaking. Seated as he was in a child’s chair, Dame stood only a little taller. She squeezed his hands in hers.
“I gotta go, Papa,” she told him. “You be good, okay? Be good. Somebody will take care of you. They promised.” She leaned in to kiss his forehead, and a smile lit his face. Dame smoothed the man’s thinning hair and pulled her other hand free of his grasp.
“Dame,” Gallerian said, “Where are your things? You won’t be coming back here. Where is your cloak? Where are your shoes?”
“I haven’t got none,” she said. “Why?” Presumably Gallerian frowned, though it was difficult to see his expression with the glare from his skin. He turned toward Tamora in unison with the woman’s sharp intake of breath. Whatever expression he used to try and communicate wordlessly with her went unheeded, or perhaps unseen entirely.
“Dame,” Tamora said slowly, “Do you live here?”
“Yeah,” was the girl’s muffled response, having burrowed halfway under her small bed. She now tossed out one ragged slipper behind her. Dame disappeared further, presumably looking for the slipper’s mate.
“Damsel,” Tamora said. "Have you always lived here?” Though her gaze was fixed on Gallerian, he would not meet her opal eyes in turn.
“Yeah,” the girl grunted again. Finally, it seemed she had to give up the search, and she emerged from underneath her bed looking further ruffled. “My slipper’s in your shadow, Tamora,” she said, ignorant of the expressions on the others’ faces. Tamora stared at her uncertainly; after a few moments, the dark woman bent to slip her hand into the shadows at her feet. Her hand emerged with Dame’s slipper, and she tossed it to the girl as though it burned her. Dame put on both, crossed the room to stand before them, beamed, and said:
“If we don’t leave now, we never are.” In one swift movement, Gallerian shoved Dame against Tamora. The girl dropped through the woman’s shadow.
“Tamora—” Gallerian started. Before he could continue, Tamora sprang at the wall and began climbing toward the stained glass windows with all the skill of a great, inky spider. Gallerian headed for the giant wooden door. He set his palm against one of the door’s hinges. Intense light streamed from between his glowing fingers, but he did not look away. The man pulled his hand away from solid slag that might have once been moving parts. Gallerian quickly moved to do likewise to the hinge on the other door as footsteps sounded on the other side.
“Let my daughter go, you auric brutes!” A crash of glass behind him was Tamora becoming intimate with the knowledge that—
“They bricked up the windows!” Gallerian rested his hand on the door handle as someone on the other side futilely tried to enter. He stared at the keyhole beside his hand.
“Tamora, come here.”
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