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A foul look casts down over Terry’s face as she slides off the windowsill. “Lucky,” she calls me before she slumps out of the kitchens. She especially hates helping the backroom slaves.
Hilda pats me gently on the shoulder once before she leaves to supervise the girls.
For a while, I hang out in the kitchens, watching the others fuss about over the early preparations for dinner. When a frail looking girl, around the age of myself, starts to peel a layered fruit that stings my eyes, I haul ass out of there.
With Sira and Terry on duties, and the prince visiting his sister one castle over, I have little to do to occupy myself.
So I head to the room I share with Sira, my thoughts on whether or not she’ll warm to me in time once she gets used to my new position and understands that, like her, I’m still a slave.
I wash in the wooden tub, using the coarse brush to scrub every speck of dirt from my skin until my flesh has turned pink and raw. I leave my curls to dry naturally, falling down my back with the weight of the water, and dress myself in my only clean dress. I gather up my meagre belongings—the discarded skirt and bodice, the corset I never wear, and the small cloth bag of sweets I keep hidden under my cot—then venture through the slave corridors to the lover’s quarters.
When I find the bedroom being made for me, I dump the load on the floor at the entrance. Well, it’s less of a bedroom and more of a small bedchamber, really.
Not as grand as the prince’s of course, or even the guest rooms, it’s still more than I expected to have all to myself. The size of it beats all the back rooms at the farmhouse and then some.
The room is divided into two spaces. In the middle, there is a marble partition to separate them, and leaning against the short wall, there’s a golden-framed mirror.
Beyond parted sheer drapes, I can make out the outline of a feathery bed big enough for two people—three if you squeeze in—and a marble-looking washtub.
The seamstress appears before I get the chance to even appreciate the chamber. She barrels past me in the doorway, knocking me to the side.
I shoot her a death glare.
I haven’t bounced on the bed yet, or laid flat in the massive ivory-marble washtub, or perched myself on the cushioned windowsill. But I will definitely be doing those things later when the chamber is clear of chaos.
And it is chaos.
With the arrival of the seamstress, everything seems to move around me in a flurry. The dokkalf in the chamber dumps heavy netted bags in the middle of the room, in front of the grand mirror leaning against the partition wall.
She claps her slender hands together and looks around at each of us in distaste.
“Well,” she starts, impatient, then clicks her fingers. “Go fetch her.”
“No need,” I grumble, my face to match my sudden shift of mood. “I’m right here. The one you knocked out of the way.”
“Oh.” Her face falls and, after a blink, she looks me up and down. I’m still dressed in my ordinary house slave dress, so I can’t really blame her for not picking me out as his lover, but still, the sting of her shock isn't lessened by any means.
“Aren’t you a frumpy thing,” she says after a pause.
My jaw drops as I stare at her, like a stunned fish.
“Hardly frumpy,” I bite back at her.
I have curves. That’s what they are called. My breasts are full, my hipbones fight against hunger and instead keep their shape. I’m not narrow and shapeless like the fae women and the other slaves who are starved thin.
But I’m not chubby by any means. At least, I don’t think I am. Maybe to the fae I am.
That thoughts twists my insides.
Does the prince see me as frumpy?
Better not to know the answer to that.
With a huff, I stomp across the chamber to the mirror, then reach back to clutch onto my damp hair. I whip it in a line down my back, knowing full well that some droplets of water hit the seamstress on the face.
Her scowl is a dangerous one, caught in the mirror I smirk into.
She can’t touch me.
