The Prince’s maid

CHAPTER 3 : THE ROAD TO THE CAPITAL

They left before the last snow had finished melting.

Nara walked her to the crossroads and no further.

"This is where I stop," she said. "Maids don't arrive with a mother in tow. Not even a pretend one."

"You're not my mother."

"No." Nara's voice didn't waver. She reached up and brushed an imaginary speck of dust from Evelina’s shoulder, the same way she’d done when Evelina was too small to button her own dresses

“But I have spent ten years forgetting am not your mother”

Evelina didn't cry. She'd used up that particular skill a decade ago and never quite found where it went. She hugged Nara instead, hard, the iron button sewn into the lining of her sleeve pressing cold against her wrist, and then she turned and walked the rest of the road alone, the way the plan had always required.

The capital announced itself three days before she reached it.

First the roads widened. A shepherd drove his flock across the road apologizing to every traveler while Nono of his sheep seemed remotely sorry. Children chased each other through roadside wildflowers. A monk offered his blessings in exchange for a stake bread. An old woman sold roasted chestnuts from a smoking cart. Merchants trying to sell something to travelers , all of it thickening the closer she got, until by the second day she was one traveler among hundreds and no longer worth a second glance from anyone. That was its own kind of relief. Ten years of being watched for, and here she was finally invisible simply by being unremarkable in a large enough crowd.

She slept in a hay barn the first night. An inn common room the second, six girls to a floor, all of them headed the same direction for the same reason. In the shared room one girl can’t stop talking because she is nervous.

Another quietly mends her dress.Another keeps practicing curtsies in the corner.

"Selection girl?" the one beside her asked, snapping Evelina out of her thoughts

"Same as you.”

"Third time trying, myself. Failed the interview twice. Too much talking, they said." The girl laughed without much humor in it. "You?"

"First time."

"Don't talk unless they ask you something twice." The girl said it like advice she'd paid for in disappointment. "First time's the only time nerves get you a second chance. After that they just think you're slow."

—-

She saw the palace walls on the morning of the third day, white stone catching the early sun from a distance that still made them look smaller than they were. Something in her chest did a complicated thing she didn't have a clean word for — not quite fear, not quite grief, closer to the particular vertigo of standing at the edge of something you've spent ten years walking toward and discovering the ground doesn't disappear beneath you the way you half-expected it to.

*Third shelf, second panel, the one that sticks.*

She hadn't let herself think the sentence in weeks.

She reached the outer town by midafternoon — the sprawl of the city that had grown up around the palace like moss around a stone, inns and boarding houses that existed for exactly her purpose, housing girls the selection hadn't yet claimed or rejected. She found a room. Paid for one night, because one night was all her plan called for. Selection began at dawn.

She did not sleep.

The room was too small and too loud with other girls' breathing, and by midnight Evelina had given up pretending rest was coming for her. She lay staring at a ceiling beam and thought about the button in her sleeve, and her father's unfinished sentence, and the particular shape of Nara's face at the crossroads, and found that none of it was quiet enough to let her mind stop moving.

She needed air. She needed more specifically, to stop being a girl in a room and be for one hour, nothing at all

The innkeeper's boy had mentioned a lake, earlier, past the tree line behind the boarding houses. *Quiet this time of year,* he'd said. *Palace folk don't bother with it, too far from the walls to be worth the walk.*

She went anyway.

The water was colder than she expected and exactly what she needed the kind of cold that stops a mind from spiraling simply by demanding all of its attention. She'd left her clothes folded on a flat stone at the shore, the button-sleeve on top where she could see it, and waded out until the lakebed dropped away beneath her and she had nothing to stand on but her own effort to stay afloat.

For the first time in longer than she could name, she let herself stop being careful.

She turned onto her back. The stars were doing what stars did, indifferent and enormous, and somewhere on the other side of that tree line was a palace full of the people who had destroyed everything she'd once had, and tomorrow she would walk toward it wearing a stranger's name like a second skin, and tonight just for an hour, she was only a girl in cold water with nothing left to prove to anyone.

"I wasn't aware this lake was occupied."

The voice came from the shore. Male. Unhurried in a way.

She didn’t hear him arrive

“I…”

The voice stopped

“…..apologize.”

A pause “I thought I was going to be alone”

“ Has no one ever taught you to announce yourself before wandering into a lady’s bath?” She snaps

Evelina spun in the water

“Turn around”

Silence

“I said turn around” she blinked

“….what?”

“My back is to you”

She could hear the embarrassment in his voice

“ I am trying very hard to be a gentleman”

Against every instinct the corner of her mouth twitched Just once

“Keep trying then”