II. Overture and Incidental Music
The Lady's palace was so dark and cold. Jareth shivered as he stood before her. Seven songs in seven nights, or to be lost forever. It wasn't the best bargain he ever remembered making, but then, his memory wasn't what it had been.
"You tremble," she breathed, from her throne of black ice. "Are you afraid?"
He laughed at her. His laughter died an early death as he saw how unmoved she was by his defiance.
"I'm shivering because I'm cold," he said, making it a statement of fact, though incomplete. He was afraid, and he covered it with courtly flirtation. "I think you must be cold, too, Lady. Your throne seems made of ice." She lounged back against that throne, and her lips made motions toward a smile that never quite reached her eyes. Lamp-stands in the shape of torturous gargoyles bent under their weight of bowls of green fire which, like her green eyes, gave out light yet illuminated nothing.
"Yes," she whispered in the vast echoing darkness of her throne-room. "Yes, I am very cold. But you're here to warm me, Jareth."
Invisible hands caught him up, and raised him up on a plinth. From her throne on her dais, they were at eye level with one another.
"Let me warm you," she said with a sibilant hiss.
He felt the invisible hands again on him, and saw that these servants of hers had the shadows of horned imps, but no visible substance. At first he struggled against their intrusive, insolent handling, but he saw the pleasure it gave the Lady to see him fight back, and calmed himself. He left his hands at his sides and stared hard at her, keeping himself still even when the gentle assault on him became invasive. These hands stole his torn vest from him, and then his silk shirt, and finally even his pants. He gritted his teeth when they came to pull off his stockings and private garments, but kept his eyes fixed upon the woman on her icy throne, neither helping nor hindering the thieves. His flesh quilled as he stood there naked before her, and then he trembled again—from cold, from cold.
"You have interesting ideas of how to warm me, Lady," he said, scowling. "By denuding me, you've made me even colder than I was before."
"And yet I'm warmer," she said. "Soon you will be, too." Her smile became predatory. He felt himself touched by those eyes, shaped and measured and held and stroked. And the invisible hands of her minions touched him as well, leaving nothing of his own flesh to himself. He was warmer, Jareth realized with a small shock of horror. Her invasive and cruel appraisal of his naked body was arousing, and the stroking caresses of the shadows made his blood heat in his veins. This shame was not unique in his experience, but he remembered it better from the position of doling it out, and not receiving it.
"Are you planning to keep me naked? Perhaps have me mount you? Here I thought all you wanted were my songs." He put his hands on his hips and struck a defiant pose.
"Oh, Jareth," she said, laughing like a little girl. "I don't let wild creatures into my bed. You might bring fleas. You will need taming first." Her eyes glowed like hellish lamps in the dark and he trembled, and this time not from cold. "I will collar you, I think." Her voice held hints of desire and cruelty in equal measure, as it crooned out a prediction. "A collar all made of gold and bronze, a collar I'll hang around that slender white neck."
He gave her an impudent grin; his inmost self did not feel the least bit cheerful. "When can I expect this lavish gift from my lady?"
She rested her face against her gloved hand. "Soon," she murmured. The air reeked with the perfume of dead ashes and sex. "One night soon. When you beg me for it."
"You'll wait a pretty while, Lady, to see me beg," he snapped. The invisible hands came against his naked body again, and he flinched from them. But this time, they came not to arouse but to clothe him, in leather pants, a loose black shirt, and a coat made of the overlapped carapaces of giant scarab beetles, lined with black down. The new boots reached to his knees, and gleamed with the same iridescent oil-sheen as the enameling of the jacket. He smiled, admiring himself.
"You enjoy my gifts?"
"Your kingdom, Lady, seems mostly horrid from what I can see," he replied, catching a length of a black tattered cloak up over his arm. "But your taste in clothing is impeccable."
"Your vision is quite narrow," the Lady murmured, drawing herself up off her icy throne like a ripple of water. "In truth, you are blind, so let me begin there. When I ask it of you, your first song will be one of sight and blindness."
"I'll need an instrument," he objected.
"No," she said, with a note of anger roughening her voice and making the air around her shimmer. "You only need yourself. The music is inside you, and so are the words." She raised her hands above her head and clapped them sharply, and seemed to dissolve into a roiling ball of fabric and fur which became a shadow-owl, disappearing into the shadow-hall.
"Tonight," her voice echoed in the horizontal darkness. "You will sing."
