“Your hand is true,” a brown-eyed girl named Lise tells me, setting a spool by my elbow. “Teach me the hem you use on fur.” I do. She laughs when her first try wobbles.
We become a small circle within the larger room, trading tricks in whispers while the overseer’s back is turned. I share my father’s methods—how to anchor thread against a heavy lining, how to make a seam vanish—and in return they teach me palace ways: which door sticks, which corridor drafts, which steward forgets to count pins if you look him in the eye.
“Eat,” says little Brina at noon, pressing half her loaf into my hand. “You chew like a squirrel. Squirrels faint.” I bite and pretend the bread is more than dry. She grins. “Better.”
Exhaustion still gnaws at me, but friendship blunts its teeth.
On a clear afternoon, we are sent to the east galleries to take measures of the draperies—long cascades of silk that fall like frozen rain. We carry chalk, pins, and lengths of twine. The gallery’s floor gleams, our shoes making soft sounds upon it. Sunlight pours through tall windows and pools in squares upon the stone.
I almost forget to be wary—until a voice slices the light.
“This is outrageous and utterly disgusting.”
Lady Seraphine stands at the corridor’s mouth like a shadow given jewels. Her gaze is ice. At her feet, an old maiden kneels beside a spilled bucket. The water spreads in a shallow lake, catching pale bits of cloud in its skin. The maiden’s hands tremble, red with soap. Her face is wet—but whether from the splash or from tears, I cannot tell.
“Have you seen the state of this water?” Seraphine points with two fingers, each tipped with a gleam like a fang. “This is what you are cleaning my palace with? Oh, please.” Her laughter is quiet and without warmth. “You either get better, or you are dismissed.”
“Please, my lady,” whispers the old maiden. Her voice is thin as thread strained to breaking. “I have nowhere to go. I have served the palace my whole life.”
“Is it any of my concern?” Seraphine sighs, turning away as though bored by someone else’s dying. “Do better.”
She moves on, heels clicking to a cold measure, her perfume a metallic sweetness that makes the air feel sharp in my throat. We seamstresses stand pressed to the wall, spools clutched like talismans, silent because silence feels safer than breath.
The old maiden sags where she kneels, fingers slipping in the water. The bucket rolls, knocks against the base of a pillar, and settles there like a punished thing.
Lise glances at me. “Lara,” she breathes. I step out before I can talk myself into cowardice.
“Let us set this right.” I crouch, take the maiden’s hands, and turn them palm-up to check the skin. The knuckles are raw, the nails cracked. “You are cut.”
“I am Bella,” she whispers, ashamed of the name. “The bucket slipped.”
“No, my lady’s foot knocked it,” Brina mutters near my shoulder, mouth hot with anger. “We all saw.”
“Hush,” Lise warns, eyes on the watchman down the hall.
“Bella,” I say, and put the softness in my voice I save for Mira. “Will you let us help you? We have cloth. And more buckets than this palace knows what to do with.”
“I will be thrown out,” Bella trembles. “I am too slow. Too old.”
“You are what keeps floors from swallowing us when winter comes,” I answer. “That is not nothing.” I squeeze her hands and stand. “Lise—fetch fresh water. Brina—cloths. I will wring the rags.”
They move at once. The others, seeing motion is not punished, follow our lead. In moments the corridor hums with quiet work: fabric sopping, hands wringing, skirts held high. Bella wipes her face with a corner of her apron and looks at me as if I had pulled her from a river.
“Why?” she whispers.
“Because I would want someone to pick me up if I fell,” I say simply. I think of Mira, small and burning, and the way a stranger once offered me his hand on a night when rules said I should be left outside. “…because decency must start somewhere.”
***
Night folds the palace into slower shapes. I climb the stair to our room with legs that feel full of sand. Ysabet has left a cup of tea cooling on the table; its surface wears a skin like old glass. Mira sleeps, as she always does, small under quilts, one hand curled around a rag doll Lise stitched for her from scrap dyed sky-blue. I sit on the edge of the bed and stroke her hair.
“My brave one,” I murmur. “You look like morning even when you are night.”
Her eyelids flutter as if she hears me from a soft distance. The ring upon my cord lies warm where it rests against my collarbone. I press it once, like a prayer.
A knock. Lady Seraphine stands upon the threshold—her smile is gone; her eyes are knives sheathed in shadow. The lamplight turns the jewels at her throat to small, cold stars.
“I see,” she says, voice slow and smooth, “my dear prince has offered you a grand room.” Her gaze flicks to the bed, to Mira, then back to me. “I wonder why that is.”
I keep my head bowed. If I look at her, the memory of fangs will rise in me like bile. “Prince Aldric is very kind,” I answer carefully. “I am forever grateful to him for—”
“Enough,” she cuts in, lifting her hand. The gesture stills the air. “Better tell me why you are meddling with my staff.”
“I do not understand, my lady.”
“The old maiden,” she says, impatience tightening each word. “Why help her?”
I take a breath and find my voice sitting small inside it. “Because she is old and fragile. Because a palace is not only gold and marble. It is the hands that scrub it.”
“And that is any of your concern?” She tilts her head as if I am a puzzle that might amuse or bore her. “Listen to me, little seamstress. I—”
She stops, as if a string were cut. Her eyes slide aside, not fearful exactly, but annoyed at the interruption and conscious of it all the same. I turn. Prince Aldric stands in the corridor, the lamp behind him threading light along his shoulders, outlining him like a carved thing.
“Leave, Seraphine,” he says.
Silence. The word falls into it like a stone into deep water.
Lady Seraphine’s gaze narrows; for a heartbeat I see teeth behind her lips. But she inclines her head, a parody of obedience. “As my prince wishes.” She steps past him, perfume scraping the air, and goes without looking back.
“How may I help Your Majesty?” I ask, schooling my voice back into its smallness.
He does not answer at once. His eyes move to Mira, to the quilts, to the small rag doll in her hand. Something almost like thought softens his face.
“Your child,” he says at last, and the words come slowly, as if he weighs each before he lets it live. “Is she improving?”
“Unfortunately, no progress,” I say, stepping aside so he may enter if he wills. “Her curse is deep.”
His gaze returns to me, sharp. “Curse?”
“I…” My throat tightens around the story that is too large for a single breath. “It is a long matter, Your Majesty.”
He crosses the threshold, the door clicking softly behind him, and he comes to the bed as if the floor itself instructed him how to walk without waking the sleeping. He sits where I sat, hands loose upon his knees, and leans forward just enough to see Mira’s face.
“I will send my guards for a healer of standing,” he says. The tone is simple command, but something bends underneath it, as if the command were for himself. “And—”
A small sound interrupts him. Mira blinks. She lifts her head, rubs her eyes with the heel of one hand, and sits up with the solemn care of very small queens.
“Mira?” I breathe, stepping forward. I cup her face; the skin is still warm, but the heat does not burn. “My love?”
“Mm?” Her gaze shifts, finds the stranger in black.
“Who is this?” she asks, not fearful, only curious—as if the world has given her a puzzle to unwrap.