In the following days, Sorpiala seemed to harbor a special look of affection which she secretly displayed for Si'Wren's eyes only, whenever they chanced to meet. It gave Si'Wren the most deep-down, sisterly feeling for Sorpiala, and made her feel inexpressibly contented with life.
But with each passing day, Nelatha became if possible even more fearful, and finally, she would no longer so much as speak scarcely a word to Si'Wren or even acknowledge her presence with so much as a nod, causing Si'Wren much anguish when they worked together in the spice tent at their labors and causing her to long desperately for their former good times together.
Whenever Master Rababull would chance to pass by, he would nod and beam and smile at her, filling Si'Wren's day with consternation and no little dismay that she should feel so dumb about everything. Any simple slave girl might quite sensibly have experienced a right and proper bliss, even a contentment, at such attentions, but all Si'Wren felt was a terrible sense of foreboding.
Si'Wren occasionally saw Sorpiala standing in the shadows, frowning, but only once did Si'Wren chance to deliberately spy on Sorpiala, as she stood across the courtyard in the shadow of the House and stared down at an overripe fruit that had turned partly rotten. The fruit had already begun to dry up, and Si'Wren could see the shrunken, wrinkled, flattened side on which it had lain in the dirt, and the flies that scattered when Sorpiala shooed them away with a distracted frown.
It was uncharacteristic for Sorpiala to touch such filth with her hands, and Si'Wren could only wonder at what could have motivated one such as she to do such a thing. It fretted Si'Wren to see her elder sister in bondage grieving so over a mere rotting fruit. Were there not an hundred fresh ones, ripe for the taking, to replace the rotten one that seemed to concern Sorpiala so?
Si'Wren was fairly mystified at this.
Suddenly three of Sorpiala's female consorts approached, catching her off-guard with the offending fruit still held openly in her palm. Sorpiala seemed to give a sudden start at the appearance of the others, as if not expecting them and for some reason seemed uncharacteristically at a loss how to face them, although Si'Wren could not say why. There were many such slave girls under Sorpiala's personal power, who were virtually as answerable to Sorpiala as they were to Master Rababull himself.
Si'Wren watched in blank astonishment, secure behind her tent skirts, as the other three women made carefully orchestrated faces of sham sorrow over the fruit to Sorpiala's face, and then when they departed, delivered with equal skill and dispatch the most despicably reviling, hateful looks to Sorpiala behind her back.
Sorpiala's slave attendants were like flounders, fish that could not swim with a proper motion, that dwelt in the mire at the bottom of the sea, and looked strangely at one with the peculiar oddness of two eyes both wrongfully on one side only, but no eye on the other side. So that, wherever the flounder looked, it looked while concealing it's other side, all the while appearing to be as falsely over-sincere as only a flounder could seem.
The following morning, Si'Wren found herself working in the spice tent beside a disturbingly quiet Nelatha. It was early enough that the morning mists still drifted thickly over the glistening outer walls and swirled wetly through the compound and softening and obscuring all form and substance.