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shining out like the fountain of wine at her wedding feast. The ladies scream and Countess Elinor breathe in again. Even the doctors pale now, and they can ’t but watch.
    After Sophia spray her bed with blood, she fall back to her pillow with eyes wide. Not screaming any more.
    There come howling, though, from rooms around, those where the other princesses and their brother sleep with some maids and grooms and nurses. The children heard they sister and know they have the same
Morbus
she do. They howl so loud, it seem seven going to die instead of just one.
    “See to them,” the Countess say, still more sharp, with bosoms at her chin, and some ladies leave for that.
    I do n’t. I hold a shiny bowl, though I do n’t know how I come to got it. The youngest doctor unpack little knifes and glass bubbles from a wooden box. His hands tremble and one glass thing break. A drop of mercury fall to the floor and divide in to a thousand little mirror-balls, they roll about and bounce off shoes and reflect what sit inside each lady’s skirt. No matter, he want theriac instead. It be what they think best against a poison, though it be made with poison it self. Vipers.
    I do n’t see Duke Magnus any more, but he is not so tall and there be many around the bed now. And I am one of them. The young doctor push me to it so I hold my bowl under Sophia’s elbow, where the blood flows now from a new cut.
    “It ’s black,” say Candenzius, but then old Venslov bring his candle close and the blood look like ordinary blood.
    “Ah,” say Candenzius. He make another cut below the first, then tug my basin to make sure it catch Sophia’s stream. I all most laugh again, though the moment be most awful. The bed so soaked in blood now I taste it in my throat, like a child that linger round a market on butcher day and lick the blocks. But he want to be sure none of it from
his
cutting go to waste.
    “Something’s wrong with that Negresse,” say one lady, but every body ignore me be cause no body want to look away from Sophia. I bite my lip hard so no laughing come out. And true, no thing funny for Princess Sophia, but what nurse can watch doctors with out a laugh?
    Now come the sound of leaves that fall in autumn. This be silk and gold, rubbing it self as the ladies and men go to they knees.
    The Queen and the King walk in. Their gray hair down they half-dressed backs, their feet in velvet shoes.
    King Christian stand like a bullock stunned, that girl were his treasure.
    Queen Isabel rush to the bed. She lose one shoe. “My baby!” she shout, and then she hold her breath. There be no more sound than the
drip-drip-driiiip
of Sophia in the basin, slowing down be cause the Princess all most gone.

The thick-necked guard leads the way. We pass through a series of rooms like my cell, rectangles empty but for drifts of whitewash that have flaked to their floors. White dust clings to my shoes, my skirts, my nostrils; I cough. Filtered through that dust, the air smells sour, and I think these must be the palace grain bins, depleted for the celebration that perhaps only now is quieting in the great hall and courtyards. I imagine lords and ladies tottering drunkenly off to bed, Swedish knights sleeping where they fall, hordes of the poor outside the gates gone ecstatic over the scraps and sauce-sloppy bread saved as what the nobles call their charity.
    The guard pulls open a heavy door and lifts a tapestry flap behind it. I think,
Here is my fate.
I step inside, feeling each little jostle of movement in my bones.
    Fate wears a handsome face, being a dark man with light eyes and white teeth, a neat beard, black curls, black velvet clothes, an elaborate sword hilt, and an enormous red ruby on his first finger. I know him. I have gazed after him before, across courtyards and corridors; all the palace girls have. He is the finest fellow at court, murky and brooding and as unapproachable as a prince. Handsome, that is, in his own way; on another man, his