Dripping juices of sickeningly pulpy fruit oozed from out Sarah's trembling fingers. Glancing down at her hand, a short pang of remorse shot through her side, why did I destroy this? Perhaps it was a gift. Perhaps he had meant it to lead her to some new dream.
She shook her head to clear the thought from her mind.
Too late now.
Jareth waited, unflinching.
"So you say you wish to ask, to request an account of me now? Do I look like an Aboveground bank teller to you, dear Sarah?" he eyed her with lavish sarcasm.
Sarah's mind raced, trying to find the right words.
Always the right words...
"My secrets lie open to you, what more can you require?" Sarah retorted at last. She'd learned a few tricks from her Fae companion at this point to know strategically dodging questions might prove productive.
His face soured a moment, apparently irked at his own hesitation. In that instant, Sarah wondered if he did in fact entertain some sort of operating scruple. It seemed from her perspective as though he could not simply and flatly convince himself that her inner secrets meant nothing to him.
She smiled.
"Go on, try me." Her hand let the messy peach skin and pit fall and hit the earth with a plaintive thud.
He lunged and withdrew in a sinewing pace around her stationary figure.
"Come now, my king, you cannot honestly expect me to believe you aren't hopelessly wrought in the jouissance of your own dissimulating craft." Sarah bit her lower lip in a goad. "I may be an earthling, but at this point the game's gone beyond extravagant intuition to the plain field of common sense."
Yes, Sarah knew he treasured his own effect above all else. Indeed, she was counting on it. Slippery though the wager might be-as soon as he read a new wave of comprehension he was liable to shift once more, obsessively turning the ever-spinning wheel of confusion and desire. His twisting psyche spelled a shifting derivative plied onto the latest assumption of his passion's object, with the result that a thought-if held to in any manner-was liable to unwind itself as soon as his imperious ego should demand.
Anyway, it didn't matter. His particular cupidity was the unmistakable hallmark of his oeuvre...in other words, the man was so enraptured in the game he could not help but capture his own psyche in the end.
"Very well. A trial," he spat out.
"A trial?" Sarah mused, engaged at the new suggestion.
"You allow me and my goblins to try your little human heart, my Sarah. How about that?"
Deep down Sarah recognized the trial had begun long ago.
"And how shall you reward me for my compliance?"
"First you must manage a favorable verdict..." he scoffed with haughty interruption.
"And when I do?" Sarah trembled, but her confidence did not desert.
"So sure then, are you?" A gnarled sneer which Sarah promptly dismissed.
"What will you allow me to ask in recompense for the boon of self-sacrificial entertainment?" She took a step in his direction, her constitution hardening word by word.
"Ask." He stated with a slight shiver of dismissal mixed with distrustful anxiety.
"You will then allow me to put you on the stand. You and your entire Labyrinth."
"Very well. But mind you, you must undergo my and my goblins' examinations first..."
"Agreed."