It did not appear that the girl so much as felt the claws. Her eyes had a look of strained listening as they gazed past the sentinel and across the ante-room to the great curtained doorway. “He will succeed better in seeing you through a dim light than through a stone wall,” she returned.
Biting her lips, the fair Tyrant of Northampton measured the man through her lashes. He might have been of the same material as his spear for all the sign he showed of yielding. She could not understand such defiance, and, like mysteries in general, it awed even while it angered her. Affecting to draw herself up in disdain, she really gave back a step. “Perhaps it would be wise to put off our visit until a day that there is a man at the door instead of a blockhead—”
Randalin’s arm was an iron barrier behind her. “Now I do not know where you think the power to do that will come from!” she hissed in her ear. “Do you not see that if you go back to your grooms and let them know that you have not got enough honor with the King to gain an entrance, they will never dare do your bidding again? Do you not see that you must do one of two things, or now win, or now lose?”
Apparently Elfgiva saw. After a moment’s bridling, she whirled back with an angry flounce of her draperies. “The gallery, then, dog! I shall reach my lord’s ear from that, which will be an unlucky thing for you.”
Saluting in silence, the guard drew back to let her pass, at the same time signing to a row of men-at-arms standing motionless as pillars against the stone wall of the ante-room. With a rattle and clank they came to life, and the little band of five kirtles, surrounded and led, was marched to a low side-door which gave in upon a short flight of stone steps, white-frosted now with the dampness and their distance from the fire. At the head of the flight, another door gave entrance to a narrow passage that probably reached the length of the hall below, though it seemed to the shivering women to extend the length of the Palace itself. A third door, ending this corridor, admitted them to the gallery that ran across the upper end of the hall.
As she passed the threshold Elfgiva exclaimed in vexation, for the light of the log fire, whose rudely carved chimney-piece broke the long side-wall, succumbed at the balcony’s lower edge to the shadows of the raftered ceiling, and all above was wrapped in soft twilight. “He cannot tell me from a monster,” she fumed, letting herself sink into a faded tapestry chair, standing forgotten amid a pile of mouldering cushions.