The Prince’s maid

CHAPTER 5 : THE SELECTION

By dawn there were forty of them lined up in the palace's outer courtyard, and Evelina had counted at least six who looked as though they hadn't slept either.

She had not slept for entirely different reasons than most of them.

The line moved slowly, girl by girl, through a set of doors flanked by two women in the palace's grey-and-silver — the Head of Household Staff, she'd gathered from whispered conversation ahead of her, and a sharp-eyed woman beside her who wrote things down and did not look up when she wrote them. Evelina watched the girls ahead of her go in nervous and come out either relieved or blank-faced

*Don't talk unless they ask you something twice.*

She held onto that the way she'd once held Nara's hand in the dark beneath a desk.

"Name?"

"Mira."

"Age?"

"Eighteen."

"Experience?"

"Ten years in service. Kitchens, mostly. Some laundry work." she had scrubbed pots and mended sleeves and bargained in markets, just never for the coin a household paid a hired girl. Close enough to hold under questioning. She'd tested it on innkeepers and merchants a dozen times over the winter, watching their faces for the flicker that meant they didn't believe her, and had stopped seeing it months ago.

The sharp-eyed woman Mistress Aldwyn, according to the girl two ahead of her in line looked up from her ledger for the first time.

"Ten years is too young to start so early."

"I started at eight." True, in its own way. Just not the way Mistress Aldwyn would assume.

Something in the woman's face eased "Well. You'll find the work isn't so different here. Harder hours, better roof." She made a mark in the ledger. "Posture."

Evelina straightened without being told twice, the months of Nara's books-on-the-head drilling arriving in her spine like muscle memory rather than performance, because by now it was.

"Good," Mistress Aldwyn said, and moved her pen to a different column. "Walk the line to the left. Trial's in an hour."

The trial was not what Evelina had braced for.

She'd expected questions, perhaps a test of etiquette, the kind of thing Nara had spent a winter preparing her for. Instead she was handed a full tray six cups, a heavy pitcher, a stack of folded linens balanced along one arm and told to cross the length of the receiving hall, up a short flight of stairs, and back again, without setting a single item down or letting so much as a linen slip.

Half the girls ahead of her didn't make it past the stairs.

She made it in eleven careful, silent steps, her shoulders level, her breath even, the tray steady enough that not one cup so much as rattled against its neighbor the exact skill Nara had drilled into her for a solid month of winter evenings, and she felt, for one strange unguarded second at the top of the stairs, something almost like gratitude toward the woman who'd made her do it a hundred times over until her arms ached.

"Name," said a new voice, at the top, marking something on a second ledger.

"Mira."

"You've done this before."

It wasn't a question, quite. Evelina kept her eyes down "I had a strict mistress," she said. "She didn't believe in second attempts."

The woman almost smiled at that. Almost. "Neither do we. Through the far door. You'll be told your placement by evening."

She waited with eleven other girls in a narrow antechamber that smelled of beeswax, polished wood, and nervous silence.

No one spoke above a whisper.

A few girls twisted the hems of their aprons. One silently mouthed a prayer. Another kept smoothing invisible wrinkles from her skirt, over and over, as though neatness alone might determine her future.

Everyone was doing the same quiet calculation.

The kitchens meant endless work but steady employment.

The laundry ruined hands within a season.

The stables were cold.

The gardens were kinder.

The upper household…

No one admitted they wanted the upper household.

Serving nobles meant better food, cleaner work, and the chance to be noticed for better or worse. Wanting it too openly only invited disappointment.

Evelina wanted it more than she had wanted almost anything in ten years.

She kept her face perfectly blank.

Waiting had become one of the few things she was genuinely good at.

At last, the door opened.

A tall steward stepped inside carrying a leather ledger tucked beneath one arm. He looked neither cruel nor kind, only tired.

He called the names one after another.

Girls hurried forward, curtsied, accepted their assignments, and disappeared through the opposite door.

“Mira.”

Her heartbeat stumbled once before settling.

She stepped forward.

The steward glanced down at his ledger.

“No permanent post yet.”

For the first time all morning, disappointment threatened to show on her face.

He continued before she could think too much about it.

“Mistress Aldwyn wishes to observe you for one week before making a final placement. You’ll perform general duties. Report to the under-housekeeper every morning for your assignments.”

He finally looked up.

“Don’t mistake it for a punishment. Many of our best servants began exactly where you are.”

She bowed.

“Thank you, sir.”

He had already moved on to the next name.

Evelina stepped aside, letting another girl take her place, while quietly turning the words over in her mind.

A week.

Not fixed to one corridor.

Not confined to one noble’s rooms.

Free to carry messages, polish galleries, fetch linens, clean stairwells, and move through parts of the palace that permanent servants rarely left.

It wasn’t the opportunity she’d hoped for.

It was better.

A week to learn the palace and discover which doors stayed locked, which passages servants preferred, and which nobles believed maids too insignificant to notice.

She almost smiled.

Nara would have called it luck disguised as disappointment.