I was doomed. I feared that not eating some of the scone would make the queen irate, but to even nibble at it might cause me to become a permanent citizen of Faeryland. Glancing up into the queen’s face, I saw the muscles in her cheeks clench as if she were already taking note of my rejection of her food. Her eyes turned hard. Yes, a strange expression, I agree, but if you’d been standing where I was, seeing her eyes narrow into two big balls of glaring green fire, you’d have said the same thing. Her eyes grew into twin golf balls of suppressed rage that . . .
I brought the biscuit towards my mouth and started to take a bite. One little bite. Surely that wouldn’t hurt, would it?
What was that noise? I stopped and turned to face the door that I presumed led out into the gardens. One of the windows, blurry with dead flies, dust, smoke, and who knows what else gave a hint that there was an outside that once upon a time could be viewed through its glass pane.
Behind me, the queen started yelling: “Are those the soldiers I sent for? Has my court come back? Have my servants, nobles, and other riffraff folk returned?”
The three guards exchanged a look with each other. Not one of them seemed to want to respond to the queen’s query. It wasn’t until the favored one was called by his name to answer her, that words came, words that turned the queen’s complexion into stroke territory: blotchy red with patches of pale.
“What do you mean no one sent notice that I needed my troops? Of course I need my army. The girl’s owner will soon be knocking at my door with her rallied forces. Do I not deserve a fair fleet of my own? Get them here, at once!”
“There are no troops, Your Majesty. You dismissed them. Remember?” the favored one said.
The queen was no longer sitting in her fancy chair of velvet, cranberry red. Well, it once must have been cranberry red. It now looked stained and dust-riddled from a lack of cleaning, and spider webs dangled down from the legs. I saw that the spiders had weaved a whitish nest underneath the chair; future spiders who would no doubt drape and decorate the rest of the palace.
Meanwhile, the noise from the outside sounded like at least fifty men were clamoring about, knocking on doors and windows and issuing threats with voluminous bellows and grunts.
The queen had forgotten about me and whether I should be eating her pomegranate scones or not, so I carefully put my untasted biscuit back on the tray and took two steps away from the table. Neither the queen nor the guards took note. I thought about running to the window and yelling for help, but I remembered the spear-weapons the guards were carrying and decided that invisibility would be smarter than flight.
Thus, I sidled sideways very, very slowly and then, as quickly as possible, I slipped under the food-laden table. It was awkward walking-crawling toward the underneath middle section since the food was making the table sag lower to the ground than it should be, but I continued forward, cutting a path through a spider-web forest as my gown did its best to trip me in its cascades of heavy fabric.