I do not know who told the servants to prepare the hall, only that it was prepared before he ever came through the gate. Crystal set out by dusk — rose preserves, grapes that have no business ripening this late in the year, the sweets we keep for feast days. He touched none of it. No knock that I heard, no herald, and by morning every vessel was gone and no one would say who cleared it. I sat in that hall longer than I should have, only because I could not stop breathing it in — fruit going soft and dark like rose left shut in a room too long, and under that, wood, old wood, the kind you smell in a chapel that hasn't been aired in years. It stayed three days. I have nothing else to write about him, because there was nothing else. Someone came after me and added a line in the margin. It is not my hand. I don't know whose it is.
