I looked about for someone to help me out in the situation I’d suddenly found myself in, but there was no one around but the queen and the three guards.
Shouldn’t there be a whole court of people? I remembered vaguely how I’d seen the grand hall of Queen Moragana filled with ladies and gentleman all dressed up in their ballgowns and fancy suits. They’d been dancing, celebrating something, perhaps, but did this queen not have an equal number of nobles in her court?
“Where are we?” I asked. “And why is no one else here?”
The queen didn’t laugh at that question. Her face grew stern, even desolate. “It is not my season. No one is here. They have gone away to their homes in the forests. Deserted me in my time of bleakness. Now there are only us five. Strange is it not how popularity wanes. Perhaps, it is as humans age, pretty in their youth, then wrinkled and decrepit in a mere breath of years.”
Well, that was a cheerful thought. Of course I didn’t say so. I thought about what else she’d said. “What do you mean that it is not your season? What season is it now?”
Her laughter was back. “You are an amusing child,” she said. “No wonder Moragana has adopted you. What a pity that is. I should like a fair young maiden to amuse me during the boring seasons while I await the return of frivolity.”
For some reason my mind centered in on the word maiden. Did that mean what it did in my world?
“I am not a maiden, you see,” I said. “I am well and thoroughly married.”
Then I felt my cheeks heat and figured I’d turned pink with embarrassment. I certainly didn’t need manacle Pete to blurt out, “She blushes, my Queen. I have not seen that done before, but I have read of it.”
The he-man reads? Of course, in saying that, I felt more than my cheeks burning with flames. My neck, my forehead, probably my arms and legs . . . Someone had lit a fire in the coldness of the hearth. At least it felt like that, although when I glanced over to see the fire, there was none. Behind the very elegant iron grate, the ashes lay still and seemingly dried as if neglected by months of dormancy.
In fact, as I took note of the huge chamber, it all felt like that. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Dust balls had gathered in the corners of the room, and a residue of abandonment seemed prevalent on chairs and tables all about the chamber.