She tried her mother once more, that week. She was not sure afterwards why. She had tried her mother perhaps nine times in eleven years, and it had gone the same way nine times, and she was old enough now to know what that meant and young enough still to want it to mean something else.
The Queen was in the small solar with her women, doing the thing she did in the evenings, which was to sit very upright with work in her hands and not do any of it.
"Leave us," Isabelle said, and they went.
Her mother's needle went on going in and out of the cloth.
"I've had it again," Isabelle said. "Four nights running."
In and out. In and out.
"It's the same. It's always the same. It stands at the end of the bed and it doesn't move and I can't wake up until it lets me, and when I do wake up I'm — "
"You are eighteen years old," her mother said, "and you are marrying in six weeks, and you are talking about bad dreams."
"I'm talking about the same dream. Every night. Since I was seven."
The needle stopped.
It was a very small thing. It stopped for the space of one breath, and then it went on, and if Isabelle had not been watching her mother's hands for eleven years she would not have seen it at all.
"Children have fevers," the Queen said. "They dream. It leaves a mark on them, sometimes, like a scar leaves a mark, and they carry it about for years and call it a haunting because it is more interesting than calling it a scar."
"I never said fever."
"What?"
"I said since I was seven. You said fever."
Her mother put the work down in her lap and looked into the fire, and for a moment she looked so old that Isabelle was frightened by it in a way she had not been frightened by anything in the dark.
"You nearly died," the Queen said. "That is not a secret. Ask anyone in this house. You were seven and you burned for nine days and the physicians gave you up on the sixth, and I sat with you, and then you did not die." She smoothed the cloth on her knee, once, flat. "That is all. That is the whole of it."
"Mother — "
"I have said all I intend to say about the year you were seven."
"You've said nothing about the year I was seven."
"Yes," her mother said. "That is what I intend to go on saying."
Isabelle stood outside the door for a while, in the cold part of the passage where the draught came up the stair, and thought about a woman who could not be made to look at her, and about how there was a person in this castle who knew what the thing in her room was, and it was not going to be her mother, and it was not going to be her father, and it was certainly not going to be a priest.
There was one other person.
Everybody in Ardwyn knew where she lived. Nobody would say the name out loud in the hall.