There is nothing he can say. The king looks from his wife, raised on one elbow, white as a ghost on her bed, to the duke standing beside her, and then he looks at me. He looks puzzled, like a hurt child. I reach out to him, as if he were one of my own children, cruelly struck. “Don’t look,” I say foolishly. “Don’t see.” He puts his head on one side, like a whipped dog, as if he is trying to hear me. “Don’t look,” I repeat. “Don’t see.”
