He threw open the door so quickly that her wide eyes seared with pain as the light fell upon her—candlelight, dancing and flickering. The girl squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her body clenching instinctively as she gave up struggling. She became completely limp, but it did no good. The grip on her wrists neither slacked nor tightened. Quite the opposite—the man hardly seemed to notice. The girl had never felt so afraid in her life. It wasn’t even the kidnapping that scared her as much as the reason behind it. What would anybody want with a peasant who had to steal bread from a poor baker to keep herself alive? Nothing good, was her immediate thought. Suddenly her thoughts were cut short and they had stopped moving. Her heels burned from dragging against the dirty, stone floor, and her stomach ached something frightful from hunger. The girl was thrown into a chair rather abruptly, her position slumped and haphazard. Shielding her eyes with quivering, splayed fingers, she slowly peeled them apart.

From between her ten fingers she saw sliver of a grand room—marble walls and towering pillars. Heartbreakingly beautiful sculptures and tapestries of the richest colors decorated the spacey area. The ceiling was high and vaulted with intricate paintings stretching the vast majority of it. Her chair was wooden but cushioned with plush crimson fabric, and as she reached a hand out, away from her face, her fingers found the edges of a smooth table. The candelabras were fashioned of pure gold, giving the impression that the room was actually receiving more light than it really was.

She had never in her life seen such grandeur. Her house had been an alleyway, her ceiling had been the perpetually dark sky, and her tapestries had been passing people. Even towards the outskirts of her town she had never even seen a house so large as this room, unless one were to count the castle… but that hardly made sense. What would the council want with her? The girl probably could have come up with some sort of reasoning if the King had not died some three years ago with no successor, but the council that had taken over had always been so isolated and distant that many thought it just a myth. The girl shifted in her chair, dropping her other hand to the side and searching the room for the owner of the silvery voice.

She saw nobody at first, but when she found him she realized how she had missed him that night by the bakery—he seemed to melt into the shadows of the room, his cloak and clothing as black as pitch as he stood crouched like an animal in the corner far from her. His hair was darker than a raven’s feathers, too, though his skin was a shade of pale she had never seen before. His eyes narrowed as he noticed her scrutiny, though he didn’t look away. He seemed almost monochrome, a grey scale painting. Everything about him, down to his grey eyes, was devoid of color, she thought, until she noticed the tiny red pendant pinned to the collar of his shirt. He saw her eying it and his fingers covered it quickly. He leaned against the wall, then, the hostile expression she had been expecting fading into one of distant interest. And then his eyes moved from her and to a door she hadn’t noticed before. Another man had entered.

He was short and rather stout with brows that angled inwards tightly and a crooked nose, giving him the impression of a uni-brow though he had none. His hair was dark, though graying, and he had a distinctly weary air about him as he circled the table once, ignoring the girl completely and fixing his gaze on the man in the corner.

“This is her?” Asked the pudgy man, as if he didn’t quite believe it. The girl was too terrified of the consequences to move, and so simply watched, feeling detached—it was all a dream. She would wake up soon and her mother would tell her a story, chase away her fears with pretty words. This was not happening. The man in the corner shot her a shifty gaze and then broke into a wide smile that sent a shiver up her spine it looked so oddly feral.

“Can you not tell?” Murmured the man in the corner, his voice as shatteringly lovely as always, though there was a definite note of impatience in it as he spoke, a definite air of superiority as he looked over the aging man standing by the table. The girl didn’t understand what they were talking about, but whatever the shadowy man had said caused the other to look down uncomfortably, his face twisting in such a way that the girl almost felt sorry he seemed so embarrassed.

“I did not know her as you did,” he said after a brief pause, his eyes flicking upwards once to rest on the small ruby pinned to the other for a moment. The other man simply smiled. “Er… may I?” The stout man finally asked, gesturing to the girl vaguely. Her heart was again thumping loudly, her eyes wide and fearful as she looked to the man in the shadows as if she expected some answers, but all she received was a distantly bemused glower and a slight nod of his head. She swallowed.

“Be my guest, Achille.” Another nod, this one directed at the older man.

With a slightly flustered half-smile, the porky stranger finally looked at the girl, his gaze cautious and appraising—somehow, though, she didn’t feel threatened, though her heart would not cease its frantic beating. He reached out a plump finger the color of old parchment and lifted her chin. The girl tried to pull away, but he simply redirected her head the way he wanted it with his other hand. In the background, she thought she could hear the shadowy man chuckling softly at her mild struggle. Achille guided her face this way and that, getting a better view of her face by lifting it to the candlelight. She felt self-conscious and still terrified as his eyes raked across her every feature with the precision of an artist, though in a sudden sense of bravado she fixed her eyes on his, challenging him—to what, she wasn’t sure. Something in her writhed at the thought of being as weak as she felt. Finally, after what seemed like eons, Achille dropped her chin and flashed the man in the shadows another half-smile, though this one more confident.

“She’s the spitting image,” he said brightly, clapping his hands together as the other man walked silently towards the girl, his hands hidden beneath the voluminous folds of his dark cloak. There was something bitter and dark on his face as he looked at her, something that made her skin prickle unpleasantly and that familiar stifling fear boil in her stomach. “It was easy, though? Catching her?”

“Like a cat to a bird.”

“Good, good! Well done, Renatus.”