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Guess she feels safer with me around, because she doesn’t complain.
On her knees, Sira scrubs the grassy floor in the pond room with a soft handbrush in gentle circular motions.
My idea of helping is being perched on the windowsill that overlooks the twilight gardens down the side of the castle and beyond them, the stables. I pick at a small cloth bag of boiled sweets that I looted from the kitchen.
“Hilda will hit you with the stick if she catches you with those,” Sira chides me.
Her split attention is focused mostly on a sole blade of glittering blue grass that clutches onto a strangled-looking brown weed. She draws the weed out of the soil gently.
Sira throws a dark look up at me from beneath her lashes. “Even if you are her favourite.”
I shrug. “She won’t find out. Besides, they help with my coughs,” I add, and it’s the truth.
There’s something fresh about the sweets that reminds me of the mint leaves we would chew on back in the village that soothes the aches in my chest. The sweets don’t rid the coughs from me entirely, but they ease them enough that I can go about my duties in the castle without hacking up blood all over the place.
Sira shakes her head and loosens a sigh. The weed is fully out of the soil now, and she tosses it into the wooden bucket.
“That Terry is a bad influence,” she tells me. “I warned you about her.”
Terry is another house slave. And fine, she was the one to teach me how to steal from the kitchen—and when the best time is to pull off the heist.
But when will I ever get anything sweet to taste that isn’t the leftover jam in the kitchen?
Besides, as long as I just keep the sweets in my skirt pocket or under my pillow, then I shouldn’t be found out. And I didn’t take that many anyway.
“It’ll be fine,” I respond half-heartedly.
Sira shifts her attention to another weed, forgetting all about me and my sweets.
Falling silent, I run my gaze over the golden-framed artworks on the walls.
From what I know about the dokkalves, I would have expected more blood and gore in their art than what I see around me. I mean, there aresomepaintings with slaughtered peoples drawn beneath victorious fae warriors carrying billowing black flags. But mostly, the golden frames surround burning red hills, whose grass looks ablaze, and a pearlescent meadow, and the dreaded pink lake I’m in no hurry to forget about, and—most beautifully—ashore.
I’ve never seen a shore. Not the way it’s painted on the art between the long windows, at least. Sure, I’ve once visited a seaside village with my father to get the right soil for our crops, but that was all in darkness fractured only by sparse candlelight. No,thisshore—it’s alive with light. The beige sand glitters like coloured, crushed glass, and the ocean water is a crystal-blue shade that reminds me of the prince’s sharp eyes.
Popping another sweet into my mouth, I lean back against the windowsill wall and tuck the cloth bag into my deep pocket. My dress is thicker with the underskirt beneath it, so the bulge isn’t noticeable.
If Sira were to hide a cloth bag full of sweets in her apron, any dark fae around would spot it easily. I’m a tad grateful for the better dresses of the house slaves.
As I suck on the sweet and admire the shore painting, I start to hum a lazy sound that mother sings in a mumble when she’s kneading dough.
But my hum is cut short when a pair of murmurs snake up the main corridor to the pond room.
Pausing, Sira and I don’t move an inch. I strain hard to listen to the murmurs. Passing guards or dark fae come to this room?
Then we hear the thuds and clacks of expensive boots on the corridor’s marble floor.
I move fast.
Jumping off the windowsill, I scramble and rush over to the wall, pressing my back to it. My head drops, curls falling over my face, just as the door opens wide and the bootsteps enter the pond room.
Sira is a tad slower than me.
She’s hooked her arm around the handle of the wooden bucket, spilling some water on the way over to me, then joins me at the wall a breath’s moment before the fae enter the room.
I clench my jaw, tight.
The sweet is still in my mouth. It’s too large to swallow, so I do the only thing I can think of and that’s flipping it under my tongue.
