The Rejected Princess

CHAPTERS4

Nobody had to tell Mirabella the punishment was coming. Ivy never forgave, and Hazel never forgot, and this time they had a reason. She had walked into a room she had been forbidden to enter, and a guest had made a spectacle of her in front of the whole family.

She had spent the day waiting for it, scrubbing corridors with her back stiff and her ears straining for footsteps. Since breakfast, Ivy had not looked at her once, and that frightened her more than any insult could have. When a servant finally found her after supper, the message was only four words, delivered with a flat face. *The dining hall. Now.*

Mirabella stopped just inside the doorway. The candles had been lit. Hazel stood in the middle of the room with a bucket in each hand, and Ivy stood beside her with her arms folded. Mirabella's fingers went cold. She smoothed her skirt, an old habit, as though neatness had ever bought her mercy, and stepped inside.

"Your penance," Hazel said, and the first bucket tipped.

Cold gray water rolled across the floor and soaked through Mirabella's skirt at the knees. The second bucket followed, and then the family's supper leftovers, scraped off the table plate by plate until the stone lay buried in grease and bread and bones.

"Clean it," Hazel said. "All of it. And when you're finished, we'll see if you missed a spot."

Mirabella knelt and picked up the brush. Her knees had gone numb within the hour, and no one brought her supper. The servants who came through to clear the last dishes stepped around her without a word, and one of them made a point of walking through the wet. A young maid lingered in the doorway with a look that might have been pity, and then hurried away.

"You missed a spot." Hazel ground a piece of bread under her heel.

"Yes," Mirabella said quietly, and bent lower. At seven she had learned that every sound only gave them more, and she had never forgotten it.

"I told you to stay in your room." Ivy's voice was low, and that was worse than shouting. "It wasn't complicated."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry." Ivy gave a short, unsteady laugh. "He left before dinner. Did you know that? He said he had a headache. A headache." Her voice cracked on the word, and she caught it and hardened it. "He wouldn't even look at me. Do you know why?"

Mirabella kept her eyes on the floor. She knew why. She wasn't foolish enough to say it.

"Because of you. Because you couldn't stay where you were put."

"Don't waste your breath," Hazel said, smiling. "She only understands things that hurt."

Her heel came down on Mirabella's fingers, hard, and ground. The pain shot up her wrist, and Mirabella's jaw locked. She breathed slowly through her nose and did not make a sound.

"Am I late?"

Jeffrey leaned in the doorway, and the look on his face said he had been looking forward to this all day. A leather strap hung coiled from his fist.

"You're late," Hazel said, delighted.

"I wouldn't miss it." He strolled in, and Ivy stepped aside to make room for him without being asked. The three of them stood together on the wet stone, and Mirabella's stomach dropped. This had been arranged before she ever walked through the door.

Jeffrey wound his fist into her hair and hauled her up off the floor. Her scalp burned, and the brush clattered from her hand. Hazel snatched a porcelain plate from the table and smashed it on the stone at her feet, kicking the pieces into a scatter of white shards.

"On your knees," Hazel said.

Mirabella knelt. The shards bit through her wet skirt into her skin, and she felt the warmth of her own blood before she felt the pain. A breath hissed through her teeth. She clamped her mouth shut on the rest.

"One," Jeffrey said. "For the scene at breakfast."

The strap cracked across her back. Her whole body jerked, and fire spread across her shoulders. She fixed her eyes on the crack in the stone and counted, the way she had counted through every cruelty since she was small.

"Two," Hazel sang. "For ruining Ivy's morning."

The second stroke landed below the first.

"Three." Ivy's voice was flat and cold. "For Oliver."

The room swam. Four came, and then five. Jeffrey did not hurry. He let each one land and settle before the next, and Hazel counted them out in a singsong while Mirabella's knees slid in her own blood. Six. Seven. The world narrowed to the crack in the stone and the sound of her own breath dragging through her nose. She stopped feeling the shards. She was no longer sure she could feel her back.

"Eight," Jeffrey said, and there was boredom in it. "Look at her. Still nothing."

"Make her scream," Hazel whined. "Harder."

"Nine."

Ivy said nothing. She only watched, arms folded, and Mirabella could feel the weight of her stare.

"Ten," Jeffrey said. "For existing."

The last stroke tore a sound from her throat, not quite a scream, only a broken breath. Hazel giggled. Jeffrey coiled the strap and gave her the kind of look a man gave to something he had stepped on.

"Same time tomorrow if it isn't spotless. Try harder."

They left. Hazel went first, humming, and Jeffrey followed. Ivy paused in the doorway and looked back at Mirabella's bent, bleeding shape. "Next time, you'll stay where you're put," she said, and was gone.

Mirabella knelt among the shards for a long time before she picked up the brush again. Every movement pulled at the wounds on her back, and her knees left small red smears on the stone. She could hear her own heartbeat, slow and strangely steady, and she wondered dimly why it wasn't racing. Her father had not come. She had known he wouldn't, and still some part of her had listened for his footsteps the whole time.

The pull in her chest was fainter than it had been that morning, stretched thin across some great distance. Oliver was gone, and her heart, the traitor, had noticed. She hated him for the way he had looked at her, and for the way he had looked away, and she hated herself most of all, because for one breath that morning she had believed.

And beneath the anger, a smaller voice whispered that Ivy was right. If she had stayed in her room, none of this would have happened. It was the oldest voice she owned, built by twenty years of being told she was the reason her mother was dead, and it was so much easier to believe than the alternative.

She scrubbed until the floor was clean, and it was as she sat back on her heels that a board creaked somewhere above her. Without knowing why, she lifted her head and looked up at the high latticed window above the hall. Nothing moved behind it. Only darkness, and the feeling on the back of her neck, the feeling of being watched.

From the darkened upper room, the Queen watched her children punish the girl.

She had been there for all of it, from the first bucket to the tenth stroke, standing at the latticed window that looked down on the dining hall. She had known since noon what they planned. She had not ordered it. She had never needed to. She had only looked the other way and let them think they were being clever, and now she watched Hazel's laughter and Jeffrey's strap and Ivy's cold, straight back with something very close to pride.

Good. They had learned.

When the girl sat back on her heels, Jasmine leaned forward to see her face, and an old board creaked beneath her. The girl could not possibly see her through the lattice, but Jasmine went very still, her hand flat against the wall. It would not do to be found watching. Below, the girl lifted her head and looked straight up into the dark. After a moment, she looked away.

Jasmine's pride cooled into something thinner.

It should have broken her. Twenty years of it, and tonight the strap on top of it, and she had not begged once. She simply knelt there and scrubbed. It was irritating.

Stubbornness, nothing more. A wolfless girl who had learned to bear what she could not escape. Jasmine had made certain of that long ago, and everything since had only proved her right. Yet she could not say why the sight of those steady hands unsettled her. It should have pleased her.

There were other ways to bend a person. Slower ways. Quieter ones. She had been patient for twenty years, and she could be patient a little longer, but not much longer.

Jasmine stepped back from the window, and smiled in the dark.