When Mordechai learned of all that had been done, Mordechai rent his clothes, and dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the city, crying out a loud and bitter cry. He came as far as the king's gate, although none might enter the king's gate clothed in sackcloth. In every province, wherever the king's command and his law reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting and crying and wailing, many of them lying in sackcloth and ashes.

Esther's maids and her chamberlains came and told her, and the queen was exceedingly distressed, and she sent garments to clothe Mordechai so that he might remove his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. Esther summoned Hatach, from among the king's chamberlains, whom he had placed in her service, and charged him to go out to Mordechai to learn what this was and why it was.

Hatach went out to Mordechai, to the city square, which was in front of the king's gate. Mordechai told him of all that had happened to him, and of the money that Haman had offered to pay into the royal treasuries for the Jews, to have them destroyed. And he gave him a copy of the law that had been circulated in Susa sanctioning the annihilation of the Jews, so that he might show it to Esther and speak to her, charging her to go to the king, to plead with him and to entreat him for her people. Hatach came to Esther and told her what Mordechai had said.

Esther said to Hatach, instructing him to tell Mordechai: “All the king's servants and the people of the king's provinces know that there is but one law for any man or woman who comes to the king in the inner court without having been summoned: that he be put to death, except if the king extends to him the gold scepter that he may live – and I have not been summoned to the king for thirty days now.”

They told Mordechai what Esther had said.