Meanwhile the plot of her unforgivingness against Aswarak ripened:  and the Vizier beholding the bride he had lost Queen of Mashalleed his master, it was as she conceived, that his heart was eaten with jealousy and fierce rage.  Bhanavar as she came across him spake mildly, and gave him gentle looks, sad glances, suffering not his fires to abate, the torment of his love to cool.  Each night he awoke with a serpent in his bed; the beam of her beauty was as the constant bite of a serpent, poisoning his blood, and he deluded his soul with the belief that Bhanavar loved him notwithstanding, and that she was seized forcibly from him by the King.  ‘Otherwise,’ thought he, ’why loosed she not a serpent from the host to strangle me even as yonder black slaves?’ Bhanavar knew the mind of Aswarak, and considered, ’The King is cunning and weak, a slave to his desires, and in the bondage of the jewel, my beauty.  The Vizier is unscrupulous, a hatcher of intrigues; but that he dreads me and hopes a favour of me, he would have wrought against me ere now.  ’Tis then a combat ’twixt him and me.  O my soul, art thou dreaming of a fair youth that was the bliss of thy bosom night and day, night and day?  The Vizier shall die!’

One morning, and it was a year from the day she had become Queen of Mashalleed, Bhanavar sprang up quickly from the side of the King; and he was gazing on her in amazement and loathing.  She flew to her chamber, chasing forth her women, and ran to a mirror.  Therein she saw three lines that were on her brow, lines of age, and at the corners of her mouth and about her throat a slackness of skin, the skin no longer its soft rosy white, but withered brown as leaves of the forest.  She shrieked, and fell back in a swoon of horror.  When she recovered, she ran to the mirror again, and it was the same sight.  And she rose from swooning a third time, and still she beheld the visage of a hag; nothing of beauty there save the hair and the brilliant eyes.  Then summoned she the serpents in a circle, and the number of them was that of the days in the year:  and she bared her wrist and seized one, a gray-silver with sapphire spots, and hissed at him till he hissed, and foam whitened the lips of each.  Thereupon she cried: 

        Treble-tongue and throat of hell,
        What is come upon me, tell!

And the Serpent replied,

        Jewel Queen! beauty’s price! 
        ’Tis the time for sacrifice!

She grasped another, one of leaden colour, with yellow bars and silver crescents, and cried: 

        Treble-tongue and throat of fire,
        Name the creature ye require!

And the Serpent replied: 

        Ruby lip! poison tooth! 
        We are hungry for a youth.

She grasped another that writhed in her fingers like liquid emerald, and cried: 

        Treble-tongue and throat of glue! 
        How to know the one that’s due?