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She pulls her sleeves down over her hands.

“My family had a bakery. My mother, my father, and my brother. He was younger than me. There was a fire, in the night, while they were working and I was asleep upstairs. They didn’t get out. I did.”

She touches the right side of her face, then drops her hand.

“I lost them, and I lost my hearing. I was beautiful before, you know? That was half of what people came for, and I knew it. Now I’m a husk. No one wants what’s left. I’ll never sing the way I did, because I can’t hear an orchestra, and I can’t hear myself. I still do it sometimes, when there’s no one to hear, but I must sound terrible. I have no way of knowing.”

I hear the words prima donna, and I don’t hear much after them.

I write one word and hold it out to her.

Prima.

“Yes,” she says. “I used to be a prima donna.”

I nod, because there’s no way to tell her what that word means to me. I think that some almighty power heard me, that a century of talking to a woman who wasn’t there was heard somewhere and answered, and that she was sent down on the lift in a white dress because of it. I push the thought away. No one sent her to me. She’s a woman with a name of her own who was put in a cage, and I’m going to let her go.

I don’t know what else to write, so I write the only thing that’s true and simple.

I will bring food.

I go to the kitchen, and she watches me from the chair. I don’t keep much a human can eat, because I’ve never needed to. When the offerings come down, I take what I want from the platform and send the rest back up. That has always been enough. I open the cupboards one after another. There’s a jar of honey, there’s butter on a covered dish, a tin of biscuits, and a bottle of wine. I carry all of it to the table.

Aveline gets up, comes to the table, and sits down in Prima’s chair. Her chair now, for as long as she’ll be in my house. I set a plate in front of her, then a knife and a spoon. I move the honey, the butter, and the biscuits close enough that she can reach them without asking.

Chapter Eight

Aveline

I eat everything he puts in front of me. It’s a simple breakfast, but it’s delicious. He pours wine into a glass, and I take a few sips before I convince myself it’s too early to drink. He doesn’t join me, and I think that maybe he ate before I came out of my room.

Mordred takes the paper from beside my glass and writes on it, then turns it so I can read it.

Would you like me to show you the rest of the house?

“Yes,” I say. “Please. If it’s no trouble.”

He stands, and I stand with him. I keep the table between us so I can watch his hands. I can’t read anything from his face. The mask keeps his mouth from view, and his eyes never change, so his hands are the only part of him that tells me anything. They’re large, his claws are black, and he holds the pen lightly with the claw tips clear of the paper.

There are three doors off this room. The first is the one I came out of, and I know it already. He points to the second and writes on the paper, My room. He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t move toward it, and I understand without being told that I’m not to go in there. I wonder what’s on the other side. A bed, I suppose. I wonder if it’s as fine as mine, or if he keeps all the fine things for the room he gave me.

The third door opens onto a corridor, narrow and dim, with lamps set along the wall. He looks at it, then turns back toward my bedroom instead, and writes, The bathing chamber first.

We cross my room, past the canopy bed and the nightgown I never touched, and he opens the back door. The air inside is warm and damp. The chamber is tiled in old patterns, cracked in places and scrubbed clean, with folding screens set along the walls and mirrors fixed between them. Copper pipes run down to a deep stone bath sunk into the floor, where water moves and steam rises from the surface.

I catch my reflection in the nearest mirror. Pale hair, white lace, and the shine of the right side of my face. I turn my head away and look at the water instead.

“It’s warm,” I say. “Do you heat it?”

He writes, A spring. The water comes warm from the rock.

“You said you don’t need it.”

No. It’s yours.

The copper is polished and the tiles are clean, as if someone has looked after this room with great care. He’s just told me he doesn’t use it. I think of the gowns in the wardrobe and the combs in the drawers. I don’t ask him who bathed here. I don’t think he’d write the answer, and I’m not sure I want to read it.

We go back through the main room, and he leads me into the corridor. It’s narrow enough that I have to walk behind him, so I keep close, close enough to see his hands whenever he stops. Circles of lamplight lie on the floor with dark between them. He stops at the first door and writes one word before he opens it.