Served
1046 Words
The dining hall was the largest room she had seen on the estate so far.
Long tables, high ceilings, torches along the walls even though it was midday and the windows let in plenty of light. Thirty, maybe thirty-five people seated by the time her escort brought her in, conversations already running, the particular noise of a group that had eaten together long enough to have stopped being careful around each other.
Every single conversation stopped when she walked through the door.
She had prepared herself for that. She had stood in her room for ten minutes before the escort collected her and told herself: they will look. Let them look. It costs nothing to be looked at.
She had believed it while she was saying it.
Standing in the doorway now with thirty-five faces turned toward her she found it slightly harder to maintain as a position.
She kept her chin level. She walked in.
A hand landed on her shoulder before she made it three steps.
She turned. The escort was already moving away. The person whose hand it was stood blocking her path to the table, a broad man in his forties with the kind of face that had made a lot of decisions it did not regret. She recognized him from the arrival: he had been standing close to Kael on the steps, positioned like someone with authority and aware of it.
"You don't sit," he said. His voice carried. The room was very quiet. "You serve."
She looked at him.
She looked at the table. Thirty-five people. Plates that needed carrying. A kitchen door at the far end of the room.
She looked back at him.
"Understood," she said.
Something flickered in his expression. Disappointment, maybe, in the absence of resistance. He stepped aside.
She went to the kitchen.
The kitchen staff said nothing to her. They handed her plates and she carried them, and she learned the layout of the room in the first four trips: who sat where, who spoke to whom, which conversations dropped to nothing when she approached and which ones continued like she was not there.
Most of them continued like she was not there.
That was its own specific thing to absorb.
She had grown up with a name that made rooms shift. She had spent her entire life being noticed, assessed, calculated against. Walking through a room full of people who looked through her like she was furniture was a sensation she did not have a word for yet. She was still finding its edges.
She was on her sixth trip when the broad man, whose name she had heard twice now, Rogan, spoke loudly enough to address the table rather than any specific person.
"I heard the Voss heir used to have her own kitchen staff," he said. "Eight of them. Refused to eat anything she hadn't personally approved."
A few people laughed. Sera set a plate down at the far end of the table and moved to the next one.
"Must be an adjustment," someone else said.
More laughter.
"Then again," Rogan continued, conversationally, pleasantly, in the tone of someone who enjoyed this, "she had a lot of adjustments to make recently. Funny how quickly things change when you decide to murder your own father."
The laughter was louder this time.
Sera set the next plate down.
Her hands were completely steady.
She was distantly aware of that steadiness as a thing that required effort in a way it had not required effort yesterday, like a muscle being asked to hold a position it was not designed to hold indefinitely.
She went back to the kitchen for the next plate.
She allowed herself, in the privacy of the kitchen doorway with her back to the room, exactly three seconds to close her eyes and breathe.
Then she went back out.
She did not look at Kael directly.
She was aware of him the way she was aware of weather, a pressure in the room, a variable she was monitoring without making it obvious she was monitoring it. He was at the head of the table. He was eating. He appeared to be having a low conversation with the person to his right and giving the rest of the room approximately no attention.
When Rogan made the third comment, something about the Voss syndicate being better off without its inbred bloodline, Sera was standing two people away from Kael, reaching across to collect an empty glass.
She heard Kael set his fork down.
It was a short sound. Almost nothing.
He did not say anything. He picked the fork back up after a moment and continued eating.
She collected the glass and went back to the kitchen.
She was almost certain that meant nothing.
She filed it anyway.
The dark-eyed woman was seated near the middle of the table.
Sera had noticed her on the second trip and had spent the subsequent trips deciding what to do with that information. She was not an escort. She was not staff. She was seated with the ease of someone who had always belonged there, contributing to conversations, eating without looking up.
Except when Sera passed behind her.
Every time Sera passed behind her, the woman went slightly still. Not, obviously. Just a fraction of attention redirected. Like someone tracking a sound they were pretending not to hear.
On the eighth trip, as Sera passed directly behind her chair, she felt something pressed into her hand.
She did not stop walking.
She did not look down.
She carried the glass to the kitchen, set it on the counter, and turned away from the staff to look at what she was holding.
A piece of paper, folded twice.
She opened it.
Four words, in the same clean handwriting as the morning note on her door.
You have a visitor.
Sera stared at it.
Then she folded it back up and pressed it into her pocket and went back out for the next plate, and her face was so completely still that nobody in that room would have known that something had just shifted significantly in her chest.
She did not know if it was dread or hope.
She was not sure if there was a difference anymore.
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