She paused a minute, then summoning courage: “Lest another should first come to you, O King,” she answered. “Believe me, I know of preparations, and one that shall come to you in the morning praying this thing for another. What intelligence soever some hath, I am sure of that to be true that I have.”
“Another?” said the King.
Sriva answered, “Lord, I’ll say no names. But there be some, O King, be dangerous sweet suppliants, hanging their hopes belike on other strings than we may tune.”
She had bent her head above the polished table, looking curiously down into its depths. Her corsage and gown of scarlet silk brocade were like the chalice of a great flower; her white arms and shoulders like the petals of the flower above it. At length she looked up.
“Thou smilest, my Lady Sriva,” said the King.
“I smiled at mine own thought,” she said. “You’ll laugh to hear it, O my Lord the King, being so different from what we spoke on. But sure, of women’s thoughts is no more surety nor rest than is in a vane that turneth at all winds.”
“Let me hear it,” said the King, bending forward, his lean hairy hand flung idly across the table’s edge.
“Why thus it was, Lord,” said she. “There came me in mind of a sudden that saying of the Lady Prezmyra when first she was wed to Corund and dwelt here in Carcë. She said all the right part of her body was of Witchland but the left Pixy. Whereupon our people that were by rejoiced much that she had given the right part of her body to Witchland. Whereupon she said, but her heart was on the left side.”
“And where wearest thou thine?” asked the King. She durst not look at him, and so saw not the comic light go like summer lightning across his dark countenance as she spoke Prezmyra’s name.
His hand had dropped from the table edge; Sriva felt it touch her knee. She trembled like a full sail that suddenly for an instant the wind leaves. Very still she sat, saying in a low voice, “There’s a word, my Lord the King, if you’d but speak it, should beam a light to show you mine answer.”