It was standing at the foot of her bed again.
Isabelle of Ardwyn had learned, over eleven years, that there was no use in screaming, because screaming brought her women in with candles and by the time the candles arrived there was nothing in the room but her, sitting up, wet through with her own sweat, being looked at.
So she did not scream. She lay still, with her eyes open, and looked at it.
It was a man in black armour. It was always a man in black armour. He stood at the end of the bed with his hands at his sides and his visor down, and he was tall enough that the top of his head was very close to the beam, and he did not move.
He never moved.
That was the part nobody understood when she tried to explain it, in the years when she had still tried. They wanted to know what it did to her. It did not do anything to her. It stood at the foot of the bed with rain running off its shoulders — rain, indoors, in a dry room, in a dry summer — and the water came down the black plate of it and gathered and dripped and made no sound at all when it landed.
"You are not there," Isabelle said.
It did not answer. It never answered.
She counted. She had a number she got to, most nights, before her nerve went; on a good night it was two hundred, and on the bad nights it was eleven or twelve and then she shut her eyes like a child and lay in the dark hating herself.
Tonight she got to sixty-four.
In the morning her maid drew the curtains and said the weather had turned, and Isabelle lay with her arm across her eyes and said nothing about the dark patch on the floorboards at the end of the bed, because there was never a dark patch on the floorboards. She had looked. For eleven years she had looked, every morning, and the floor had always been dry.
"Six weeks," said the maid, briskly, plumping something.
"Six weeks," Isabelle said.
"They'll want you fitted again today. You've gone thin."
"I know."
"Brides go thin. It's nerves." The maid said it kindly. "He'll be handsome. They always say they're handsome and half the time they're not, but he's young, at least. He's twenty-four."
"Mm."
"You'll want to eat something before they put the pins in you."
Isabelle took her arm off her eyes and looked at the ceiling of the room she had slept in her whole life, and thought about the fact that in six weeks she would be married to a man she had never seen, in a country she had never been to, whose army had killed her uncle and both of her cousins and about nine thousand other people, and that this was supposed to be the frightening thing.
It was not the frightening thing.
The frightening thing had been standing at the foot of her bed since she was seven years old.