Redder than Blood

Praise for the short fiction of Tanith Lee:

"In Red as Blood, Tanith Lee rewrites a number of well-known folk and/or fairy tales. . . . These are not just rewritten stories, they are retold. And the retelling is good enough that many of them ring as ‘true’ as the originals."

—Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review

Lee’s ‘Tales from the Sisters Grimmer’ retell these classics with unique, insightful, often terrifying twists.

—Kliatt

Here is a book worthy of the real Grimm’s fairy tales. . . . Like those older tales, these stories pull no punches, and end up being thoroughly fascinating.

—The Intergalactic Reporter

Lee’s entrancing and vivid style makes what may seem a minor exercise into a collection of essentially new stories with some of the resonances of folklore.

—Publishers Weekly

She turns some familiar fairytales inside-out, investing them with an unearthly aura. . . . Very satisfying and highly recommended.

—Library Journal

Lee has conceived something unique and executed it superlatively well, displaying gifts as both a fantasy writer and a folklorist.

—Booklist

DAW Books presents

classic works of imaginative fiction

by multiple award-winning author

TANITH LEE

THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

THE BIRTHGRAVE

SHADOWFIRE

(originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

(originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

NIGHT’S MASTER

DEATH’S MASTER

DELUSION’S MASTER

DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

NIGHT’S SORCERIES

THE WARS OF VIS

THE STORM LORD

ANACKIRE

THE WHITE SERPENT

AND MORE:

COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

VOLKHAVAAR

ELECTRIC FOREST

SABELLA

KILL THE DEAD

DAY BY NIGHT

LYCANTHIA

DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

CYRION

SUNG IN SHADOW

TAMASTARA

THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

DAYS OF GRASS

A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

REDDER THAN BLOOD

DAW is proud to be reissuing these classic books in new editions beginning in 2015.

Copyright © 2017 by Tanith Lee.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme.

Cover design by G-Force Design.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1755.

Published by DAW Books, Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

Here acts as an extension of this copyright page.

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Ebook ISBN: 9780698404663

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Praise for Tanith Lee

Also by Tanith Lee

Title Page

Copyright

Redder Than Blood

Snow Drop

Magpied

She Sleeps in a Tower

Awake

Love in Waiting

The Reason for Not Going to the Ball

Midnight

Empire of Glass

Rapunzel

Open Your Window, Golden Hair

Kiss, Kiss

Into Gold

Bloodmantle

Wolfed

My Life as a Swan

The Beast

The Beast and Beauty

Below the Sun Beneath

Note

Acknowledgments

Redder Than Blood

1

HE FIRST HEARD of her when he was a child. Some called her the Red Queen, though she was not; others had titled her the Red or Scarlet Lily—or the Ruby That Sings. So many names, so much eccentric description hiding what it displayed. By the age of nineteen he was familiar with her history, and by twenty had read several esoteric books concerning her. Seventeen years after, he stood on a street, gazing at the Palace where she had lived.

He acknowledged he had been blindly if intermittently seeking her all that intervening time. And now he had arrived. But he was no longer a romantic of twenty. And she was almost four centuries dead.

•   •   •

My name is Edmund Sanger.

No doubt you will know my father’s name, William Joseph Sanger, the actor-architect, whose memorable performances (Hamlet, Cesare Borgia) left audiences fainting or abject with joy; whose small herd of elegant buildings still dominate certain little towns of the north and west of England.

I grew up in a crazy household. I don’t use the term lightly. William had long since driven my pretty, unclever mother mad. Their three daughters copied, or rose against her. I was the late son, appearing when everyone else was old enough to know better. I led a lonely, and perpetually astounded life, reliant on witch-like nurses, and drily erudite, if sometimes pederastic, tutors. At sixteen I escaped and took ship for France. The first book of my travels, which I then wrote, I was lucky enough to have made into a great success. Conqueror’s Road, was and is my only truly popular work. But still in print, even now, it set my sails for me, both financially and in the sense of preference. I could go where I wished, and travel so often very happily alone (yet frequently involved in brief if exotic adventures with other human things). I could live almost in any mode I desired, save that of richman. I could escape from whatever bored or horrified me. I was able to become—not my father’s son, or my family’s irrelevant annoyance, let alone any villain’s plaything—but Myself. God bless the written word, Amen.

•   •   •

How did I first hear of Cremisia Ranaldi? No doubt from one of the better tutors. But rather than being some tidbit of intriguing history I was lessoned in, it seems more to me that her name fell like a pearl seed into my mind and heart, and there grew of itself into a glorious tree. She, unlike my at-one-time ever-present jailor family, was my verified connection to the world. Of course I fell in love with her, soon with all the raw sexual energy of my youth, and next with my even more voracious brain. She was desire incarnate, genius rising like Venus on the waters of imagination. If it ever entirely came clear to me, in my very earliest years, that she, as had I, had needed to elude enslaving family chains, I don’t think I was aware of it fully. Rather than the flag of rebellion, she was the sunrise that ends the dark.

And she was safe as sun and star, too, miles off in the past.

•   •   •

Ah, you are a lover of the Red Lily, he said to me, my sudden traveling companion on the long, hot, near-noon road to the old city of Corvenna.

All about were the round hills, with their groves of somber cypresses, and topiary poplars like rounded, curled-into-a-ball black-green cats. High up, rock and burned grass flared an extraordinary topaz. Sometimes colossal shadows, like sorcerous flying machines from some unthinkable future (hawks), swept over the slopes, and down, hunting across the wide, white, throat-of-dust road. They reminded me, such shadows, oddly of the decapitating passage of a guillotine’s blade, even to the airborne swish.

I glanced at my companion, who had attached himself to me in the day’s beginning. A fellow walker. They were not always suspect, or to be swiftly sloughed. And he looked so like a rogue, I mostly doubted he was one. It was his role, his act perhaps, to keep him secure (whereas my disguise was only, and often truthfully, to look very shabby and poor). Curled hair he had, black as oil, eyes the metallic ochre of old bronze. But young, rather less than my own age, I surmised. An Italian, native to the area? Why not. The earring in his right ear was a gold coin rubbed smooth of its identity. He wore the typical red scarf at his throat tight enough to strangle him, I thought—practice for others? His name, he had instantly told me, was Anceto.

I have met many, Anceto said, who were deeply enamored of the Lady Cremisia Ranaldi. Yet how can a woman keep such influence over our sex for so many years after she has left the mortal state? What can you hope for? She’s dust in a tomb. Nothing to embrace. Nor anything at all to see. Her voice, which they say was better than the voice of the harp, or the nightingale, no longer to be heard. Only her poetry remains, cold as soot-marks on the yellowed pages. What use, my young sir, what profit in such a desire, or in faithfulness to such a reclusive muse?

Her verses are superb, I answered quietly.

So they say, he murmured. "I have never read any—for I can read. Never dared. Where I have heard some ancient song composed by her begin to be played, I stop my ears. I’ve no leisure to be bewitched by the dead, Signore."

All this came about because he had asked me if I went to the city, and when I told him I did, he guessed why.

Fairly canny by now, generally I didn’t obscure such ordinary matters. Except, maybe, where I suspected some thieves’ ambush might be arranged.

We walked on in silence, but for the chorus of cavallettas, and presently an inn occurred at the roadside, as if conjured specially for our benefit.

We ate a lean meal, cheese, olives, herbal rice, and drank some wine. In turn he told me of his own interests, which included a farm he yearned to possess somewhere in the hills, an old priest he was fond of, his wife, who was ‘not unkind’ to him, and one or two other succulent women he now and then also enjoyed. On this issue he was flattering but decorous.

After the afternoon pause, during which the crickets sang on, he slept, and I wrote up some notes on my journey, we continued along the road, still together. The evening began to gather in the distance, while the sun blinded us as it westered, a smashed egg of liquid gold. The gates were in sight by then, and we believed we might make them before the city police closed up for the night.

He said, as we climbed the last stony incline, among some carts and donkeys also hurrying to arrive before the lock-up, Do you know where she lived?

Who? Oh, Cremisia Ranaldi. The Palazzo Ranaldi, am I correct? I’ve never been quite certain where it lies in the city.

"Lucky for you then, my friend. For not many now do know, but I do. It’s not, this house, where most might expect it, though always it was there."

Then we were in at the gates, the sky seemed to breath out blue and smoke itself to deepest darkness in a succession of moments. Stars burst in static fireworks, and an answering gust of lamps opened from the ancient alleys and towers of Corvenna. So close about us they drew then, the city buildings, like a crowd—less of men than smooth-furred beasts, silent on vast soft paws, their claws sheathed and invisible, their eyes pretending to be merely narrow windows.

•   •   •

Cremisia’s mother, Flamia; she herself made some kind of magic, so the story had it, in the last months before her daughter was born.

Flamia’s maiden name, as with her married one, had been Ranaldi. They were a near-packed family, noble enough and rich enough to demand legitimacy in all its forms. She was, plainly to be seen from that alone, used to order and the rights of a dynastic will.

Since she must bear this child, she would have, Flamia Ranaldi stipulated, a daughter, both beautiful and gifted—not only with the female virtues, but the skills and inspirations more normally associated with males.

To this end the girl must have the assistance of perfect looks. Hair ebony-black as a night wood, eyes jet-black as a night river, lips as red as fire, skin white as new-fallen snow. Once delivered, the mother would know her other requests had also been granted, through the medium of these extreme china and stained glass pigments.

When the hour came—midnight, it was said, to match the wished-for color of black, and winter-snowing also for the white (and too in a sea of blood that might be compared, though wrongly, to the red of fire)—Flamia’s daughter was born. They carried her, washed and new, before her mother. Flamia was too weak, they say, to hold her. But, and again who can be sure, it seems the dying Flamia remarked: They have done all I asked. I had forgotten that the price could be so very high.

She died, evidently, within the next minute.

Motherless then, the child was left, flower of night and snow and flame, to flourish or to perish in that house of the God-ordained masters, the male Ranaldis.

•   •   •

The night’s shelter was suggested to me by Anceto, a kind of hostelry of sorts; I suppose I had been doubtful. But curiosity won out. It was in fact a decent house, so far as I could tell, nothing extravagant, but all clean enough and to hand. I had the impression the woman who provided the beds was one of those succulent women Anceto treasured. But the two of them were modest in front of me.

I slept well, and woke up as the cocks crowed in some of the little yards round about. In the low-beamed dining-room below, we ate sweet polenta.

If you are still set on it, Anceto said, I will take you today to see the true Palazzo of the Red Queen.

I said I was.

My famous father, I’m sure, would have mocked me for a gullible fool. This rogue would lead me to some half-way convincing sty, regale me further with his opinions. Perhaps pick my pocket as I stared at the crumbling walls. If Anceto had done the last, of course, he would have got very little reward.

We climbed up and down through the hilly city, through thin streets strung with banners of washing, down flute-skinny defiles with only blind yellowish stone either side; so into broad avenues and squares whose floors were paved green and pink and black as if for dancing, or gigantic games of chess. Tangles of architecture passed by. Now and then I asked him what this or that might be, that church, this tower. He told me, seeming to know—or inventing—everything. But at least the lies made sense—few writers do not value that.

You see, Edmondo, Anceto said at length, there are a great many old houses and other buildings men will tell you are the Palazzo Ranaldi. Even your English guide-books weaken to confusion on the subject.

I had noticed that, I said. Strange, when her reputation was so great.

Ah, but you must understand, my friend, she spun a kind of web about the place. Few after all did not believe her a sorceress, so mighty was her charm and bright her talent. Take her riddle, the riddle none can, either way, answer. You know of it, too? I nodded. No wonder she can veil her dwelling, if she has a wish to.

But you have uncovered the palace.

I, and others. You now shall do so. I looked aside at him, aware abruptly of a deep intensity in his gaze. His eyes had darkened, it seemed to me. He said, What you will make of this only you will know. I brought a man here once. He fell on his knees and wept. He told me he had lived before, an earlier life in the time of the Borgia Pope, and met with Cremisia then, and loved her. But she loved only one.

That was her second husband. The dwarf.

"Ah yes, Edmondo. The handsome dwarf, Loro, Loro Ranaldi, since he took her name on wedding her. She said of him he was a giant among men. Just as others said she had dwarfed all the powerful male tyrants in her own family, even her first husband."

I was giddy. His eyes seemed to have hypnotized me. I found I nearly stumbled, and caught at a wall. Habituated once more, I looked about, and was rather startled to find we seemed to have entered, unnoticed by me, an entirely different street. Ancient, as so much of Corvenna was, if not especially ruinous, it stretched itself out along the two high banks of a canal of dark jade water. Directly across from me, on the canal’s farther side, lifted the tall shapes of mansions, palaces, each separated and skirted about by walls and palings, steps and terraces.

There, Edmondo, said my guide.

There. It was as if I knew it, though for a fact I had never seen even a sketch of the Palazzo Ranaldi, let alone that modernly marvelous instant portrait known as The Photograph. But I might have walked here often, once, just like the crazy man, real or invented, who knelt down crying. It swelled up, wave-like, on a terrace above a stair, and a garden, this overgrown and wild, and spilling soberly over its high, yellow-amber walls. Trees had raised themselves to hugeness inside, reaching out for air and light, and they clouded round the palisades of stonework and windows. A pane, sun-struck, flashed golden, and with it some edges of masonry. In the water below, the reflection hung like a gilded mask.

Some three hundred and eighty-one years since she had been here. Since she had existed.

I did not quite believe in what I saw. The actual house was a mirage—less, itself, like a reflection in water than a mirror. Or else, some clever effect thrown by sudden light upon a blank void. But sun and shadow flickered, separated. A bird flew out from the trees into the church dome of the sky.

2

He led me to another tavern. I have no memory at all of getting—or of being got—there. In the vine-screened courtyard, he made me drink half a pitcher of water, and then some of the local rough and earthen wine.

I thought I must have taken too much sun—odd in itself, I had credited myself with being fairly used to the climate by now. Or, I wondered a little if he had lightly drugged me. (The lessons of my father: Trust none, love none, use all, had put me, early in life, in shackles. Scorn and hack them off though I had, to break that ever-reiterant hold was often hard.)

But Anceto said to me, Never fear, Edmondo. You are only under her spell. I have seen it before, now and then. No shame to you. Nor will she hurt you. And I am here.

So I see, I said. My voice was cooler than my head.

Both of us slept after, under the purple awning. When I woke in the sinking afternoon, some pretty insects—dragonflies I thought them, but he gave them another name and pedigree, were dancing to and fro. They seemed to weave a fine and glistening net over the court.

Be easy, said my companion. Nothing needs to be done till sunset comes. Not even then. When the moon stands high.

And then what? I muttered.

We return to the Palazzo Ranaldi. There you will bribe the old custodian—he’s amenable and not expensive. We’ll take him some wine, too.

Wine, money—what makes you think I’m so rich?

But you are, Edmondo, he murmured, gentle as a lover. If only alas, in the bounty of your elegant mind. You see, he added, as he poured for us a little more red delight, she haunts the Palazzo. Or so they say. At this time of every month, when the moon is almost full, almost a perfect round like the mirror of a lovely woman . . . Then.

Why? I said.

He smiled at me. He was my brother, my best and dearest companion. Had I been able, ever, erotically to love a man, I think. I should have yearned for Anceto. But that extra element has never been a part of me. And besides, I did not trust my brother and friend. Of course, he would mislead me, perhaps even with some spurious and vulgar show put on for my benefit by mountebanks in the secret rooms of the Palazzo . . .

I laid my head on my arms and fell once more asleep. He would rob me, if he hadn’t already, while I slept. Naturally.

Instead, it seemed, he himself paid for our late luncheon and woke me kindly at midnight. (Midnight—for I heard certain clocks and bells chiming in Corvenna, all out of pace with each other, so that the whole jangling farrago lasted well into six minutes.) And what anyway is Time? Save some fool’s notion of ongoing existence. As if always we must walk sternly forward, onward—While instead we drift in circles, or flow backward, as does the sea. Or else we stay entirely still as any stone. As they say in France, J’y suis. J’y reste. Here I am, here I remain. But there I did not remain. Anceto guided me once more into the city, and toward the green canal. And the moon, indeed almost full, stood high.

•   •   •

The way across the canal was over a lumpy little bridge. I did not remember to have seen it there before. Perhaps it had not been.

The night water below, no longer green, blacker than the sky. But the moon lay in it, white mirror reflecting into mirror.

Approaching the Palazzo it seemed now only a huge, gaunt, forlorn old house in darkness. Among the other mansions distantly grouped along the bank, here and there the faintest light was showing. If some of these, I noted as our footsteps rang on the cobbles of the near shore, were timorously put out.

Anceto let us through an arched gateway in a wall, leading into the garden, which had become, as it had already looked, a primeval forest. The talons of trees clawed at us, thigh-high grasses whipped and little things skittered away. Once a pair of glowing eyes—some nocturnal bird or beast—or a demon—beamed icily down on us, turning red before they were gone. However, here was a side-door, lean and shut, but with a lamp burning somewhere behind and within, so every crack and undone seam in the door’s wood gleamed. The moon by then too was beginning to fill up the garden, which seemed to me then suddenly like a drawing, or a woodcut, two-dimensional.

Anceto tapped delicate as a mouse on the thin door. Which after a moment was undone. Is it you, Anc’o, my dear? A tiny creature, the caretaker. Perhaps it had even been he, eyes ablaze, up the tall tree in the garden . . .

Anceto spoke softly in the accent of the city. And the way was made wide for us.

I found I did not want to go in.

Despite William Joseph’s threatful warnings, it was not I feared a den of thieves. In fact—I feared nothing specific. Not even the ghosts it seemed I had been promised a sight of.

But it was too late for retreat. Will-less, I had already entered. Coins were changing hands, soft as bread. (Anceto’s again, not mine.) The caretaker picked up the lamp, and led us through into some kind of anteroom. It was his bivouac in the huge wilderness of the house, not uncozy in its cramped and impoverished manner.

I had forgotten all my Italian. I could no longer tell what Anceto and the little weasel-man said to each other. Instead I seemed to hear a sort of murmuring, like far-off music—a mandolin, perhaps, a pipe—through the low-lit wall a flush of other brightness bloomed somewhere. Not cool and pale like the waxing moon; richer, yellow, hot gold. Only for a second. An aberration of the eyes?

Come, Edmondo.

Anceto led me out again by another slight door. Stairs, probably a hundred of them. About halfway up the flight, a side window abruptly flaring, a searing line of light.

Follow her, he said, or I believed he did. The moon will lead you. No, I shall not attend you. Not for me, this. I’ve said, I do not dare. But for you, no choice. I envy you, my friend. And fear for you. Go now. Waste no more of your night.

•   •   •

Cremisia’s father had been a prince. He ruled the house, as he did his estates about the landscape beyond Corvenna, and was the recipient also of endless wealth from other properties and concerns scattered elsewhere on the globe.

A large man, too, this Raollo Ranaldi, well over six feet in an age when five feet seven was the average height of a fit and well-nourished man. He was besides raven-haired, with small slippery frost-gray eyes that—certain scribes reported—seemed able to cut men who offended him, like knives.

Raollo’s brother (the uncle of Cremisia) was broad-built and almost as tall. He had—reportedly—the dark cunning eyes of a rat. Although rats, of course, are intelligent animals, self-serving only through the laws of survival. Uncle Marcaro was a drunken lack-wit, vicious because he might be, and so greedy that, by the age of twenty, they said, he must needs be carried in a chair by six poor menials, his own bulk by then being already too much for him.

To this pleasant guardianship Fate had given Cremisia.

She had two brothers also, half-siblings to her, borne to Raollo’s previous wife, a poor blonde lady who, according to further gossip, Raollo had murdered one night, out of inebriated peevishness, since she had accidentally spoken well of an enemy of his.

The twin brothers, Giuseppe and Giacobbe, had flaxen hair like their mother, and her large blue eyes. Otherwise they were all from their father’s stable, big and tall, crass, cruel, and crazed. They fought duels and won them by strategies—such as having several of their own men run out and stab an opponent through.

When Cremisia was born, these lads were just seven years of age. But within four or five further years they had already attained much of their undainty reputation. They would pay their small half-sister scant attention until she, at the age of twelve, began herself to flower into adulthood. Then, at some eighteen or nineteen years, the princely youths mused on their ‘quaint sisterling.’ Such talks were neither brotherly nor choice.

The fifth male figure of note, whose shadow so far only hung upon the horizon of Cremisia’s life, was her cousin, also a Ranaldi, Thesaio. And he was unlike all the rest, being in his nature fastidiously priestly and cold, lacking appetite for anything, and very conscious of the sins of Humanity, himself possibly excluded. For the sake of the precious Ranaldi dynasty, it had long been determined that any female child of Raello’s must be wed to Thesaio. When she was three years of age and he nine, Thesaio and Cremisia were therefore duly betrothed, in the chapel of the White-Hooded Virgin at Corvenna.

•   •   •

Believe this or not, once more I was, and remain, unsure how I reached the next stage of my evening. I recall the stairs, and the moon’s rim at the window, which silver-coated the steps’ dulled marble treads. Then a space of vague shadow. And then there was a picture.

For a minute I thought it hung on a wall before me.

A wide and heavily gilded frame contained a grandiose canvas, in dimension some seven feet (upright) by twelve feet in length. Yet this must be like the night garden, which I had interpreted as a wood-cut. The framed painting was no less than a living, moving scene, the frame itself the surround that was like that of a window. Light and color, sound and motion, these were in the picture. (In recent times, I have watched moving pictures on a screen. When first I saw such things I asked myself if my memory of the framed living painting were the same. But it was not.) There was music too I could hear, the very melody I had caught the essence of before, mandolins and pipes, the chirruping of small drums, and then the clear-water genderless voice of a singer. The words were not Italian, but Latin. I understood them immediately.

Come, bite the apple, my beloved,

Pierce through the crimson skin into the sweet

and firm green heart.

How can it harm you? The Snake recommended it!

It will make us strong and wise, and valiant in love.

The scene, as I began to be able to focus on it, floating there in a thick broth of candlelight, was of a banquet. On the sumptuously caparisoned chairs and couches nobles sat, or part lay, decadently, in the antique classical Roman pose. Their costly garments (beyond the Sumptuary Laws), the coverings of furniture, the swathed drapes, seemed generally of a garnet red, or vermilion, or that red-magenta still often called ‘purple’. The long tables were a clutter of fine wood, gold metal and silver, of gemmed knives for eating, and large peculiar long forks—reminiscent of the killing tridents once used in gladiatorial arenas—here presumably facile in the skewering of meat or pastry. From metal ewers flowed fountains of scarlet wine to tall goblets, all those of a sheer greenish glass. Little boys—pages—scurried to and fro carrying delicacies to this or that lord. Few women, I noted, were present. And the ones that were had a slightly unruly look, however glamorously got up. They wore makeup too, the ladies, a sign in such days, when used so overtly, of the whore. (Please don’t think I speak in criticism of such women. It is one of the four oldest professions on earth, the generous selling of one’s own body for sex. The other three professions being, of course, war, robbery, and murder. Of these four, prostitution is the only one that should be respected, and that fully. Those who preach otherwise are blind arrogant fools or shysters. These women are more than worthy of honor, protection, and wealth. They save minds. Perhaps even souls.)

Nevertheless, one was conscious this particular feast had a spurious air, a dubious component. For at the high place Raollo the Tyrant sprawled, and nearby his gormandizing brother Marcaro, deep in dishes. Elsewhere, glancing about, I failed to find the twin brothers, but they would at this date have been thought too young perhaps to attend. How did I know this? Because exactly then into the aureate soup of hall stole a little slender girl, some seven years of age, clad in a white dress, with her long black hair streaming down her back, much as did the locks of the lady guests, if hers more prettily, not being interrupted by combs and flowers and so on.

You could not help but see the child’s skin was peerlessly pale. It glowed to rival the candles’ gold. Her eyes were dark as darkness, and partly lowered with a modesty that nearly shocked, when seen in that cacophony of loudness and gluttony. Her mouth was soft red as a poppy. On a small gold dish she held carefully and steadily, this child, a single deep-red apple—redder than her lips. Let alone the painted lips of the ladies, the smoldering hangings, cushions and clothes. From the apple a soft steam lifted. I found I could smell its perfume, as—perhaps luckily—I could nothing else there. Cinnamon and ginger, a touch of sugar so brown and intense it too was like a spice. And through this the aroma of the fruit itself, both fresh-cut and baked.

The song came then again. Come, bite the apple, my beloved—

Raollo was sitting upright, pushing off, with typical boorishness, his female companion. He was laughing though, and not unpleased.

I had by now identified the scene. Any who had ever attempted to research the history of Cremisia Ranaldi has probably read of it. A poor book that left it out. She was indeed seven years of age. But, as I once was, it seemed, she had been given over to the care of witch-like nurses. And one of these, it transpired, was not unkind, and also an actual mageia, gifted in the arts of her calling; able also to effect the odd and genuine spell. She loved Cremisia like a mother, a step-mother, maybe, with a good heart. And her magic it was too that made her direct the child to tonight’s act. ‘One day,’ the nurse-witch said, ‘this step will render up a flower. Even if none remember or know why. So such rituals may work.’

Cremisia carried the unfaltering apple up to the dais, and her father. The nurse, soberly clad, a crone old and narrow as a hundred-year sapling, remained modestly below in waiting.

Raollo spoke to his daughter. I could not catch the words even to try to grasp them. But he grinned,