The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 8

The invitation arrived differently than the others, no royal seal, just a folded note left on my pillow sometime while I was at the history lesson.

Candidates are invited to the bathing hall this evening. Attendance is customary but not required. Her Majesty and Princess Amara will be present.

"Customary but not required" turned out to mean exactly what I suspected it meant. Eliza was already dressed and waiting outside my door before I'd finished reading it.

"Everyone's going," she said. "You should too."

"Why does the Queen need to watch us bathe?"

"She doesn't watch us bathe," Eliza rolled her eyes. "It's a bathing hall, not a spectacle. It's just, everyone's there together, and she comes to talk. It's supposed to be relaxed."

I doubted very much that anything involving the Queen was ever truly relaxed, but I went anyway, mostly because staying behind alone seemed like its own kind of statement, and I wasn't sure I wanted to make one yet.

⸻

The bathing hall was larger than any room I'd seen in the palace so far, tiled in pale stone, steam curling up from two wide pools set into the floor, one warmer than the other. There were no robes here, only a row of attendants near the entrance collecting clothes and offering nothing in return but folded linen towels for afterward.

I hesitated only a moment before undressing. Everyone else seemed entirely unbothered by it, which told me this was simply how it was done here, and standing at the entrance clutching my dress to my chest would have drawn far more attention than not.

Eliza nudged me forward before I could think too hard about it, and we found a place near the edge of the larger pool, where Isabelle and Clara were already sitting with their feet in the water, talking quietly.

I stepped in before I could talk myself out of it.

The water was warmer than anything I'd ever had at home, where bathing meant a basin and whatever the fire had managed to heat. I understood immediately why people who could afford this never went back to anything else.

It was only once I'd settled into it, once the initial relief of the heat faded into something more ordinary, that I became aware of how different my body looked next to everyone else's.

Eleanor was the first to catch my eye, further down the pool, laughing at something Isabelle had said. She was built differently than the others, all lean muscles in her shoulders and back, the kind of strength that came from actual training rather than posture lessons. I'd heard she sparred with the palace guard when nobody was watching closely enough to stop her. It showed. There was nothing soft about her, and she didn't seem to mind who noticed.

Rosalie, by contrast, was made for exactly this kind of room. Every line of her was deliberate, the kind of beauty that had clearly been managed since childhood. Her diet and posture and careful hours in the sun measured out like medicine. She moved through the water like she knew people were watching, because they were.

I caught my own reflection once, in the dark water near the pool's edge, before someone's movement broke it apart.

I hadn't looked at myself properly in weeks, not really, not beyond checking that my dress was fastened correctly or that my hair hadn't come loose. Now, with nothing to hide behind, I looked.

My shoulders were broader than any of theirs, built from years of drawing a bow further and further back than my arms had wanted to go. There was a leanness to me that had nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with never having quite enough to eat some winters, and I wasn't sure, looking at it now, whether that was something to be proud of or something to grieve.

There was a thin scar along my left forearm from a knife that had slipped years ago, another smaller one near my collarbone from a fall I barely remembered, a rougher patch of skin on my palm that had never quite softened no matter how much time had passed since I'd last drawn a bowstring every day.

I didn't look like a woman waiting to be chosen. I looked like a woman who had spent her whole life being needed, which was, I was slowly beginning to understand, a very different thing.

I wasn't ashamed of it, not exactly. But sitting in a pool full of women who had spent their whole lives being groomed for exactly this kind of comparison, I felt it anyway.

Just different, in a way that made me feel like I was wearing my whole life on my skin while they had been taught, carefully and deliberately, to erase theirs.

"You keep looking at your arm," Eliza said quietly, beside me.

"I wasn't."

"You were." She didn't say it unkindly. "It's just a scar, Aurelia."

"I know."

"Does it bother you?"

I considered the question honestly, for once, instead of giving the answer I usually gave.

"Sometimes. Not because of the scar itself. Because of what everyone else here doesn't have."

Eliza was quiet for a moment, watching the steam rise off the water.

"I think that's the thing they'll never understand about you. They were raised to be chosen. You were raised to survive. Those aren't the same kind of strength, but I don't think yours is the smaller one."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I simply let it sit, grateful and a little unsteady, the way I always felt when someone said something true that I hadn't been ready to hear.

⸻

The Queen arrived not long after, trailed by two attendants, and settled into a chair near the edge of the pool rather than joining the water herself. Amara came in behind her, already unpinning her hair, looking considerably more at ease than her mother.

The Queen didn't address the room the way she usually did. She simply moved along the edge, speaking quietly to each candidate in turn, the kind of conversation that felt almost ordinary despite everything it clearly wasn't.

When she reached me, her eyes moved briefly over the scar on my arm before returning to my face. She didn't comment on it. I wasn't sure whether that was kindness or simply restraint.

"You're quiet tonight, Miss Vale."

"I'm thinking, Your Majesty."

"About what?"

I considered lying, then didn't.

"About how different I look from everyone else here."

Something in her expression shifted, not quite a smile.

"You do look different."

She glanced, briefly, toward Celeste, toward Rosalie, toward the row of unmarked skin along the water's edge.

"Difference is not the same as disadvantage, though most people in this palace have spent their whole lives being taught otherwise."

She moved on before I could respond, and I sat there a while longer, turning her words over the way I'd turned over everything else she'd ever said to me, trying to decide whether I'd just been reassured or quietly warned.

Beside me, Eliza sighed and sank a little lower into the water.

"I don't know how you manage to have an entire private conversation with the Queen every single time she opens her mouth near you."

"Neither do I," I admitted.

Across the pool, Vivienne sat alone near the far edge, half in shadow, watching the Queen's slow progress around the room with the same unreadable stillness she always carried. When the Queen finally left, Vivienne's gaze drifted, briefly, toward me, and stayed there a moment longer than it needed to.

I looked away first. I always seemed to, with her.