Fallen: A Cinderella Story

Asha surveyed the scene of c*****e before her with frost-blue eyes. Mistress was among the very messiest eaters she had ever seen in her twenty years’ living. The slate floor of the dining hall was sticky with congealing blood. She had definitely knicked the gut with a fang. The stench, though familiar, never seemed to get easier to bear. . Asha let no emotion cross her face, nor a thought cross her mind other than how she would go about tidying up. She knew perfectly well that the Twins were in residence and that they could and did read mortal minds. It was the rare benefit of the Borne. Mistress was Made; despite being elder, she ranked lower. She and her mortal servants were protected only by the laws of hospitality. Even those laws could be broken with sufficient provocation. She seemed to feel the weight of their mental intrusions even now in the form of a prickle up the back of her neck…and yet…it didn’t have the same quality of the twins’ projections. This felt like something else. Asha shook her head, then tied back her long, silver-blonde hair and covered it with a kerchief. She passed the front hem of her floor-length skirts through her legs and tucked them into the back of the waistband of her overskirt. She rolled her sleeves and tied them in place. She would have to work quickly. She set two buckets of soapy water and two buckets of clear water on opposite ends of the hall and set to work gathering the bits of flesh and odd bones, and peeling tufts of silk-fine, brown hair up from the sticky blood. She had long ago learned to compartmentalize. Not all of them killed those from whom they fed. Mistress enjoyed the hunt and the cruelty. She liked the screams. Mercifully, she only needed to feed once a month. More mercifully still, she had a superstitious respect for her mortal servants. They were working animals, not food animals. Asha was grateful for this distinction, just as she was grateful to be working in one of the great Houses and not out in the streets. Mistress was tempermental and exacting and occasionally violent, but she let her mortals sleep by the fire and ensured they ate well and wanted for nothing vital to life, for Mistress could still recall the pangs of mortal existence and had modern ideas about how one should treat one’s daywalkers. Asha’s life could have been a great deal worse in one of the more traditional houses. Once the detritus of the corpse was collected and tossed on the fire, Asha began the long process of scrubbing down the slate floors. She scrubbed bodily fluids from between the slate tiles with a narrow, stiff brush of her own manufacture. Any hint of blood could set them off. It had to be thorough. She cleaned the heavy wooden table with mint-infused vinegar, then rubbed it until it shone with oil. She would need to infuse more vinegar when she was done. Mint drove out the scent of blood and was a fairly tolerable fragrance to Mistress, who had a rather sensitive nose. Mint was used upstairs, rose and lavender were used in the box room, as it was delicately phrased. Asha rose from the floor and turned a keen eye to the wainscotting, looking for any sign of splatter. No glistening drips caught the candlelight, but she decided to wipe it all down anyway. On the days following the dark of the moon, all she did was haul heavy buckets back and forth from the scullery. Once her work was complete, she would open the massive oak doors at either end of the hall and air out the room. Asha could not shake the sensation she was being watched. It was especially creepy in broad daylight. Mistress, and the twins, and their respective consorts, were presumably all fast asleep belowstairs. The other mortal servants were going about their business of cleaning and airing the rooms. A proclamation was expected soon; the winter solstice was a scant two months away. Now that a Borne sovereign had come of age, it was expected he would seek a consort. The Borne were rare enough that this would constitute a major series of events in the small world of the Nightfallen. It had the entire household in a flurry of cleaning and decorating. Asha was alone in the hall, or should have been. She shivered. A mortal was never entirely safe while serving the Nightfallen, but never before had Asha had the uncanny sensation of being observed. Mistress generally trusted the servants to do their work. There was no need to threaten or hover. Not when every mortal knew the price of disobedience. Asha selected another brush of her own design and manufacture and began the long process of cleaning the joins in the wainscotting. Whoever or whatever was watching her could enjoy the show. She had work to do while Mistress was sleeping. After two hours, the hall was ready for airing. She banked and screened the fire in the massive fireplace. She pulled open the heavy oaken doors at one end, and spread grave dirt and salt across the threshold. She heaved her pail and strode to the other end of the hall and pulled those doors open as well, repeating the process of grave soil and salt. Only the invited could cross a Nightfallen’s threshold treated thusly. The autumn air swirled through the hall, bringing with it memory and ache. Asha pushed all of that down and breathed in the fresh air. She rubbed at the delicate tattoo on the inside of her wrist: a slender moon with a pattern of stars around it. She had had it since before she could remember; it had simply always been there. It was only exposed when she rolled up her sleeves to work. There was no one to ask about it, and no one to see it. Not knowing its story or what it could mean to others, Asha chose to keep its existence hidden. She saw no benefit to pursuing excessive curiosity in her current station in life. She untied and rolled her sleeves back down, securing them at her wrists. There may come a day when Asha would be free to pursue the mysteries of her existence, but today was not that day. She made one, final circuit of the great hall before pulling the outside doors closed and laying the heavy iron bars across them. She pulled the thick draperies over the windows, allowing herself to be swallowed by the darkness in the hall. Finally, satisfied that Mistress would suffer no light burns, nor be roused to feed out of turn, Asha left the hall in search of the other mortal servants. The homes of the Nightfallen were opposite to the homes of the mortals, or daywalkers. The sleeping chambers were located below ground, with the public rooms on the ground floor and servants’ quarters on any upper floors. Three doors opened internally from the great hall. The lefthand door opened into a short hallway leading to the kitchens and butlery. The righthand door opened into a short hallway leading to the drawing room and library. The middle door communicated directly with the grand foyer of the main entrance. In the foyer, Asha found one of the older servant women supervising the work of the two newest and youngest servant girls, no more than seven years old. The girls swept the foyer in slow, careful strokes. No one here would hit them for mistakes made, but they had yet to unlearn the lessons of wherever it was Mistress had found them, so they cast wary glances at Nena’s stern face, made more angular by the tight bun in which she wore her voluminous, black hair. Nena was the chatelaine of this household. Like every other servant woman, her past was a mystery. Nena had been free to leave a number of years back. Mistress gave every woman the option to leave once she reached the approximate age of twenty-five. If the woman chose to leave, she was placed in some business in accordance with her skills or married off. Nena was one of a few who had chosen to remain with Mistress. She was prim and hawk-faced, with a piercing gaze which missed very little. It was not that she was unkind, but that she tolerated no nonsense. Though Mistress preferred the young and comely to serve her, she and Nena seemed to have an understanding. It was not lost on Mistress that even some of the Nightfallen were cowed by Nena’s mere presence. Asha knew their trepidation was not without merit— Nena was truly formidable with the sword and stake, and fought in several styles. All the servant women were well-schooled in violence, but Nena elevated it to an art. And thus, even a quiet word from her was enough to adequately motivate the other servants to their tasks. Asha caught her eye and curtseyed. Nena nodded in acknowledgement. “Is it done?” “It is.” “Look in on Elisabet.” Asha wondered briefly if she ought to say something about the feeling of being watched and decided against it as she had neither evidence nor additional observations beyond the sensation itself to report. Instead, she nodded and curtseyed again. “Nena ma’am, are the house wards intact? Do they need further upkeep ahead of the proclamation?” Nena tilted her head to the side and gave Asha a long, inscrutable look. She nodded to Asha and said, “see to Elisabet. Untuck those skirts; it looks common.” Asha knew when she was dismissed. She nodded once more and left, untucking her full skirts and smoothing them as she went. Still, Nena had given her an answer of sorts. Someone was watching, and she knew it too.