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other times, of course, I thought to slap his face, for sailing into such an easy life and leaving me a hard one. Nonetheless, I found I had to believe his life was easy; to think otherwise was to give up all hope.
    So, in the house with the stone head, we convinced ourselves: Here was a triumph for the Bingens! A father with a commission for a splendid perspective glass, a daughter employed in the Queen’s own household! Father and Sabine kissed me soundly on both cheeks, gave me their blessings, and, I suspect, leaned on the door with a sigh of relief when I left.
    When I first stepped through the palace gates with my spare clothes bundled into a sack, I felt a sort of fizzy excitement, a hope that my life and heart were making themselves over. Now, I resolved, my tale would best end in becoming Mistress of the Needle myself, with a dozen women stitching my commands, the royal family developing a personal fondness for me; an independence that would not keep me bound to a man’s affections. I would be queen of my own life and take pride in my loneliness.
    So endings change. I fashioned a new fortune from the rags of the old, and I smiled at all within the gates, in a bubble of good intentions that led to the honor of needle waiting at the banquet tonight.
    And to prison after all.
    I smash beetle after beetle, wondering if I should enjoy my sugar cherry now or wait to bite down and let it be the last taste in my mortal life.
    The cell floor shakes with the force of the life beneath it . . . or, no, with a jailer’s footsteps. The bugs go scuttling deep down for cover. I drop the sugar cherry back into my bosom, to be some comfort as I’m sent off to execution.
    My prison master is a ruddy man in blue livery. His neck pouches like a hog seller’s purse on market day, for he has grown fat from swallowed terror. Keys tinkle cheerfully from his belt.
    “There you are, then,” he says, holding the door open.
    I feel foolish when I realize that he didn’t have to unlock it. Though of course I never needed to be locked up; if the Queen’s guard says to stay in a place, there is certain death for leaving it. Eleven months at the palace have taught me that much, and to spring to my feet when I’m summoned.
    Blood rushes back to my ankles, and I wobble, smoothing my apron by reflex.
I am,
I think,
as cold as a star in the sky.
I rub my hands together and adjust my cap.
    “God’s wounds,
fröken,
you look well enough for where you’re going,” says the guard.

First she were a baby, then a girl, then a sick girl, then come her throes.
    The first scream not so bad, just any woman’s scream; the ladies and the maids look down their laps and nod, to say we all have this pain before and that some time it lead to pleasure.
    For me, that pleasure came just recent, though I am in this cold land full seven years. The first man of this place who buy me from the boat take me in such a way as to savor me, though it not seem so nice at age eleven and tired from a long sail with many other men. He were the one who name me Black Midday, to make wit for his wife when he bring me home as her gift.
    We do n’t look to the men, though they sit here for listening too.
    The girl scream again, and this time her nurses know. We have hear every kind of scream from Lunedie babies, and this the terror kind, from a girl grown too old for screams but told just press the hands together like saints in church, and moan if you must but not too loud.
    We the nurses, we start to pull our skirts up ready to run inside that room, but the ladies do n’t say to go. Countess Elinor, that once was my lady, make a back ward sigh in her skinny nose, and she do n’t need to look around to make us keep our places. She push her bosom up.
    “Duke Magnus is the King of Sweden’s brother.”
    We wait.
    But Magnus him self throw open the door, so hard it hit old Duchess Margrethe in the shoulder where she sitting. “Help!” he shout, as a woman in a fire.