EMMALINE
The sound reaches me before the words do.
A low rumble moving through the walls of the palace — boots against stone, voices carrying down the hallways in that sharp, hurried register that doesn’t belong to ordinary evenings. I have been sitting near the window for the better part of an hour, watching the dark and thinking about nothing I want to be thinking about, and at first I tell myself it’s my mind again, filling the quiet with shapes that aren’t really there.
But then the air changes.
There is no other way to describe it. The quality of the silence shifts, the way it does before a storm, charged and unsteady, and I hear the unmistakable groan of the front gates opening wide.
I rise from the chair.
The maids rush past my door in a cluster, their skirts brushing the ston
