It’s as if a conjuror has made another world appear. Inside the ruined Domus Conversorum are the Queen’s musicians, the strangers I heard play at the emissary’s arrival. They wear her badge. Six or seven of them. All sitting atop stools in a circle, playing lutes, flutes, and viols. As I step in, the wiry, dark-haired man I saw before brings his bow up to his giant viol and suddenly its sound is rumbling again through my chest.

Behind them, against the walls, are rugs and blankets and other bedding. Sacks and trunks are strewn about as if the musicians came from afar. A window lets in feeble light and tallow candles burn from ledges and tables.

An old body with hair on his ears, but not his crown, stands. The music stops awkward-like. The musicians get still. ‘This is our place, if it please you,’ Hairy Ears says. His accent is like the strangers that come in summer by wagon to perform comedies in the town square.

I wait for them to notice my S and skitter-scatter with alarum. I’m sorry for it. I would like to hear more of their sweet and sad music.

But they don’t scatter. ‘Please leave us,’ Hairy Ears says again, not angry or scared, more like a child who has a piece of cake and hopes to hold on to it.

I bring my hand to my collar to show him who I am, but he keeps speaking. ‘This is our place. The Queen, she give us the invitation to come bring our music. But no inn will take us. No folk lets us the rooms. So we come to here, where our kin before us come for to be safe.’ The whole while he speaks, Hairy Ears looks me dead in the eyes. So do the other musicians. There’s a dripping feeling on the back of my neck. Something’s deeply wrong.

I assay whether the tallow candlelight passes through the musicians’ bodies. It doesn’t. At least they aren’t spirits. They’re real, solid folk.

I grab the S on my collar and hold it up for them all to see. I am a curse.

Hairy Ears takes a step back and speaks to the wiry man playing the chest rumbler in a stranger tongue.

I stamp my foot hard against the floor. The musicians murmur at one another, but they don’t take their eyes from me. I feel naked and weak. Why don’t they fear me? Choler heats my heart. I huff like a bull. And then, without thought, I run through the room knocking the candles from their holders, spraying burning tallow everywhere. Stools scrape hard against the floor as the shrieking musicians scramble into the corners of the room.

At last, I tell the Domus walls. This is how a sin eater should be greeted.