The Queen's handmaiden counted the bodies of the hanged every morning.

Hung
the previous day from the gibbets, they were carried off by the executioner's men in the
middle of the night while the city slept, and suspended to the balustrades so all the
people could behold them when they arose in the morning. When dawn broke on the
horizon, the bodies were silhouetted, stark as a woodcut against the rising light.
This morning was no different. The sky was cold and blue, streaked with long waves
of alternating paleness. From the merchants' stalls rose the various scents of their wares:
smoked meats, cured cheeses, spiced wines. Familiar odours, which never failed to fill
Elaria with a strange sense of closeness and perhaps even nostalgia no matter how many
times she smelled them. As she passed by a stand with several bins brimming with fresh
fruit, she heard a voice call out to her.
'Elle! Hey, Elle!' The handmaiden turned and beheld a smiling face. A young girl,
just seventeen or so, ran up to her, panting and wiping her blood-stained hands on a rag
already deeply saturated a dark scarlet. From her belt hung a cleaver on a leather thong,
its deceptively-sharp blade flecked with specks of gristle and sinew.
'Caterina!' Elaria smiled warmly, greeting her friend. Caterina was the butcher's
daughter, tall, strong and fetching. The handmaiden had known the girl since the latter
was eleven and just beginning to dabble in her father's profession a trade in which she,
just six years later, would become more skilled than even her mentor. It was both for this
and their long friendship that Elaria often frequented her shop, which was now renowned
across the entire kingdom for selling the finest meats, when her mistress required her to
purchase victuals for an upcoming banquet.
'Out buying groceries, love?' the girl asked, noting the woven basket which dangled
by her friend's side. 'Fairly early, don't you say?' She nudged the basket with her foot,
rocking it against the handmaiden's side.
'Hey! It isn't that early!' Elaria laughed.
'You can convince yourself that you haven't been out for long,' her friend smiled,
'but you're almost full,' pointing at the basket and laughing.
Looking down, Elaria noticed, to her slight dismay, that the basket was indeed
almost filled to the brim with assorted victuals and she had hardly even been out for
long. She sighed inwardly.
'So, how've you been?' she asked, stepping aside slightly to allow a man carrying a
sack of grain past.
'Oh, just the usual,' Caterina said, snatching a peach from her friend's basket and
taking a bite out of it. 'Father warns me that business might surge in a little, all this talk of

war and all going around and making people all crazy, but I don't buy much of it. Either
way, though, I put in extra orders of stock that should be coming in at the docks some
time this week, so we'll be ready, even if the rumours turn out to be true.' She shrugged,
took another bite, then continued. 'You hear anything about that, love?'
'Well,' Elaria began, then stopped. She wasn't supposed to talk about matters of
the court to anyone and especially not to a 'commoner'. But what would a little gossip
hurt? She would just keep it vague.
'Hm?' Caterina mumbled through her chewing, her large eyes wide and intent on
her friend.
'There's talk of armies amassing in the east,' she told her, recalling a short snippet
of conversation she heard while passing the commanders' quarters. 'But even supposing
that that is true,' she quickly added, noting her friend's look of concern, 'they're at least
several hundred miles away from what I can gather, and pose negligible threat. Besides,
the city's well-defended against virtually every form of attack, so, for all our concerns, all
this talk about war is, like you said, pretty crazy.'
The girl finished the peach and tossed the core into a nearby barrel, dipping her
fingers into a small waterfall pouring from a gutter above them.
positing what protasis suggesting what cause?

The first time they had met, the girl had been sitting on the stoop of her porch,
weeping into her hands and clutching a small stuffed animal. Elaria, then eighteen, had
been out on an errand fetching herbs from the apothecary, and was returning to the
castle when she had come across the young girl.

Years, the knight has wandered. Centuries, perhaps. The jagged roads contract and
expand like the entrails of a writhing beast. For each time they shift, a terrible roar
trembles the darkness. Centuries he has wandered yet the farther he walks the less
reason he finds in going on. Yet he persists anyways in his dogged pilgrimage. Why, he
does not know. It doesn't matter. the road is good enough. It gives him purpose, meaning.
Like all others, he has heard the legend of the Fair Lady. The princess in the tower,
longing for salvation. Children's stories, he tells himself. He doesn't believe it. And even if
he did, why him? Every one of his previous mistresses, he's failed. Always, he awakes
from the end of a chivalric dream, a sword in hand, staring down at the body of a woman
he was supposed to protect. A failed lover at times, a failed guardian, always. Even if the
Fair Lady were to exist, what would it matter? He'd just let her down.
And so he walks. At first he told himself he was looking for something beyond him. God,
perhaps. Truth. But whatever noble intentions he had within him at first have since
crumbled. He walks now just to run himself into the ground.
When he cannot walk any longer, he drinks. He wants to drown himself in an ocean of
drink. He wants to bury his head at the bottom of a smoky wine-bottle sea, an ocean
without a bottom, where the ten-thousand fishes rise up to sing to the pale blue sky and
the harvest moon shines without end on endless miles of wavering cornstalks.
Too long he's trekked the bottomless halls of the palace of the perpetually-setting sun and
roamed the corridors and spiral staircases of the last church in the universe. He longs for
purpose. Another mistress. Some days he dreams of the Fair Lady, in her tower high. He
wonders what she dreams of, how her heart beats. Whether her hair falls like the ones of
his former fell, whether he could ever be by her side.
But alas, he drinks it all away and laughs her off. He writes of her in the lonely nights yet
in the mornings he tears away the pages and folds them into imaginary castles to rival
those of the emperors bygone. One day, he swears, he shall hurl the notebook off the
face of existence, himself with it after. He's always longed to see the sea. Perhaps he
shall set sail in a paper armada. Load it up with all his paper memories of paper people in
paper masks. And when the ships become waterlogged and sink, he too shall sink with
them. For so the ship and thus the captain.
Then one night he hears a whisper on the wind. Someone calling. A beautiful voice. Why
him? He takes another drink. But as the days pass it grows on him. Could it be -? No, love
is a concept foreign and long forgotten to him. But, wait - how beautiful it is! He longs to
strive after it. He doesn't know what he wants. He wants her, the one behind her voice.

He loves her, yet he's never seen her. A voice on the wind. He doesn't care. He doesn't
care.
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