Notes Retrieved from Palace Scribe*:

Morning supplicants: None.

Entertainers brought before the court: IIII

Lutenist—I

Buffoons—III

Acrobat—I

*On same parchment but rubbed away with pumice so that only a faint imprint remains:

Supplicants who should have seen the king had they not been turned away: IIII IIII IIII IIII III

IIII III: hunger/thirst (ruined crops, drought)

I: disease (pox)

IIII IIII IIII: clemency (all seeking return of their children taken by the king’s guards)**

None: Entertainers who caused delight in the king. Though he eats nothing but figcake and honeycomb, his mouth is bitter and full of choler.

**On same parchment but scratched away even more vigorously so that the original, impossibly small lettering would be lost to time:

Were I made of stronger stuff, I should straightaway unburden myself of my duties as the palace scribe and depart for the sea where, fortune willing, I would find my father still catching crabs, and I would join him and my brothers in a simple, honest life of crabmongering. And were I stronger still, I would find and open all the chambers where children have been kept and return them to their parents’ arms—whether I lose my head for it or no. Alas, I am fierce attached to my head and much ashamed to learn I lack all such moral fortitude.

XXXV

A FAT, FLABBY RAT IN ITS MOUTH

Alba didn’t foresee the rough way he’d drag her. She didn’t foresee the bruises he’d mark on her skin. She didn’t envisage the way he’d muzzle her, brutish fingers clamped over her nose and mouth. She didn’t know that she would struggle to breathe. That she would kick, trying to find her own footing. That she would feel darkness sinking over her, and she’d gasp, thrashing against that darkness. She didn’t know how—despite choosing, even hoping for the guard to take her instead of the girl—she’d feel sudden terror. What had she done?

She felt her own smallness, the vulnerable essence of herself. Pip. She was still small as a pip. All of her smallness against all the size of the guard.

Against all the size of the king.

She bit the guard’s hand and tasted mud and salt. She kicked his shin. “I am the oracle-apprentice!” she tried to shout as he dragged her away, but he tightened his grip on her mouth.

“You’re a peasant. A farm girl! It’s blasphemous to say such things,” he hissed. He threw her into the back of a wagon.

In darkness, hay-bedded, dusty, Alba felt bodies under her hands—limbs, feet, legs—and she scrabbled, desperate to see through the shadows. The cart was moving, bumping over the field. She swayed, losing her balance, finding a bony knee under one hand, then the soft down of a shin. The legs recoiled as she touched them. Over the noise of the rattling wheels, her blood pulsed in her ears. Who was with her? She could not see under the gloom of the canvas covering the wagon.