In the Palace
510 Words
One leaned toward the other and whispered something Lydia almost missed.
“…to him?”
The second maid hissed back, “Quiet. If he hears”
They stopped when they noticed Lydia looking.
The servant leading her picked up speed.
Lydia’s skin prickled. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The servant did not answer.
At the next corner, two guards stood posted outside a narrow set of black doors. Neither moved when Lydia approached, but both looked at her with the same strained expression she had begun seeing on every face since arriving.
Fear.
Not of her.
Of where she was being taken.
Lydia stopped walking.
The servant halted too, then turned reluctantly.
“I was told I would be prepared for court,” Lydia said.
The girl swallowed. “You were told wrong.”
A bad feeling opened in Lydia’s chest.
“For whom, then?” she asked. “If not the king?”
The servant’s lips parted, then closed again. For a second she looked like she might refuse to answer at all.
Then, quietly, as though saying the name too loudly might summon something dangerous, she said, “You are not being taken to His Majesty.”
Lydia’s fingers curled at her sides.
“Then who?”
The servant lowered her eyes.
“To Logan.”
The servant did not wait to see Lydia’s reaction.
She turned at once and pushed open the black doors, and Lydia was forced to follow or be left standing between two guards who looked as if they would rather be anywhere else. The corridor beyond was narrower than the ones they had passed through before, the stone darker, the lamps fewer. Whatever part of the palace this was, it had not been designed to impress.
It had been designed to contain.
The thought came uninvited, and once it did, Lydia could not get rid of it.
The servant’s shoes clicked sharply over the floor. She walked faster now, clutching the folds of her skirt in one hand. Lydia kept pace, though unease had already started to gather under her skin.
“This isn’t the royal wing,” she said.
“No, my lady.”
The answer came too quickly, as if the girl had expected the question and prepared the shortest possible response.
“Then what is it?”
The servant hesitated for half a step. “It is… quieter here.”
That was not an answer either, but it was the closest thing Lydia had been given all night.
The corridor bent left, then right, then opened into another passage lined with tall windows blacked out by the dark beyond. The air felt colder here. Not naturally cold, but untouched, as if fireplaces were lit in the rest of the palace and neglected in this part on purpose.
A pair of servants emerged from a side doorway carrying folded sheets. They slowed when they saw Lydia. One of them stared openly before lowering her gaze so quickly it looked painful.
The other muttered, “They brought her tonight?”
- Writer
