“Do you feel better?” he asks her after a long silence. “After yelling at me?”
She does not answer.
“I have given you no reason to distrust me, Petra. Everything I told you would happen, has.”
Again, she does not speak.
Before he interrogates her a third time, there is a sharp knock on the door. He mutters to himself.
“Let us see, bath or dinner…the bath will probably tomorrow, if I had to guess. It's a lot for those girls to haul down that basin.”

When he answers the door, he uses his height to prevent whoever is there from seeing inside. It is a servant woman from the castle carrying a large plate of food. She is around Siegfried’s age. Her face is angular with high arched eyebrows. Blonde hairs peek out from where her wimple meets her forehead. She stands on her toes to try and see over his shoulder. He rises in turn to block her view.

“Your presence was sorely missed at dinner, Siegfried,” she says, with a playful tone of familiarity.
“My, surely,” he hums.
“Your guest must be mightily entertaining for you to be eating at home like Faramund.”
“My guests always are.”
The woman picks up on his innuendo and wrinkles her nose.

“Enough of that,” says Siegfried softly, his eyes bright.
Still, her tone hardens a bit when she tells him, “My lord sends his regards.”
“Good. Send him mine as well. Now, is that all?”

When she does not respond as appropriate, he knows that something is wrong.
“What? What is it?”
“Is it true you are taking a servant, Siegfried?”
“My, word travels too fast in this town.”
“Yet you did not choose from among us --”
“Ishild,” he hisses, sensing her rising voice. “It was not a choice.”
But Ishild is the opposite of placated.

“So it is true! After all these years. What would your mother think? Or was that just a nice story you told us to make us behave?”
Siegfried’s lips twitch into a grin. “If she knew how I chose to spare this girl despite all the trouble she’s caused me, indeed my mother would be very proud.”
“Trouble? What trouble?”
“An attempt at arson, for one,” says Siegfried, amused by his own exaggeration.
“Arson!”
“It is a joke, Ishild. She made a mess of my house. That is all. I even cleaned it up myself.”
“Walther says she is not German, Siegfried.”

“My, you are being quite silly, you know,” Siegfried tells her, agitated now. “The news is not even an afternoon old and you are already spreading mean rumors. It is not becoming of a woman your age. One cannot help but notice that it seems as though you have also very much forgotten to whom you speak.”

“Forgive me, lord steward,” concedes Ishild, bowing her head. But her voice is terse. So is Siegfried’s.
“I am serving a sentence dealt by Frederick himself. I take no pleasure in it, nor in the girl. When it is over, she will join the rest of you in the castle and I will return to my solitude. The only reason she isn’t there already is because, as you suspected, you little gossip, she speaks no German. Now, may I please have my dinner? It has been a very long day.”

Ishild hands him the plate, refusing to look him in the eye.
“Surely that girl shan’t eat from the lord’s food?”
“All food in Pettau is the lord’s food,” says Siegfried, closing the door.