The Rejected Princess

CHAPTER2

Mirabella had learned to wake before the palace came alive, but she had never learned to rise early enough to escape Hazel. The corridor windows were still gray with dawn when the voice rang out behind her, and she was halfway to the laundry with a stack of folded linens in her arms.

"Mirabella."

She stopped at once and turned, keeping her eyes low. Hazel stood a few steps away with her arms folded. Ivy was just behind her, already dressed and polished, which was strange at that hour.

"I'm coming," Mirabella said quietly.

"Coming?" Hazel gave a short laugh. "I've called your name three times."

Hazel crossed the distance in three strides, and Mirabella had barely braced herself before the slap landed. It threw her sideways, and the linens scattered across the floor as she hit the stone on her hip. The crack echoed down the corridor.

"You i***t!" Hazel snapped, standing over her. "Are you deaf now, or are you just pretending?"

For a moment, Mirabella could hear nothing but a high ringing. Her cheek burned, but worse than the burn was the heat that climbed behind it, the same shame she had swallowed a thousand times without ever getting used to it. Under it, small and cold, something else flickered, and she smothered it before it could take shape. Anger was for people who could afford what came after. She pressed her palm to her face, kept her eyes on the floor, and said nothing.

Servants passing through the corridor slowed just enough to watch, and the murmuring started, never quite low enough.

"Serves her right, if you ask me."

"Don't stare. The Queen said nobody helps her."

"Some people are born unlucky. Some are born useless."

"Luna Monica deserved better than that, poor woman."

One of the older maids hissed at the others to keep moving. Not one of them came over.

"Hazel, stop." Ivy's voice was flatter than her sister's, and she was looking past Mirabella toward the far end of the corridor. "We can't afford to waste our time on her this morning. There will always be another time. Oliver will be here for breakfast, and I want everything perfect before he arrives."

Ivy touched her hair with quick, nervous fingers, checking it again, and Mirabella noticed. She noticed most things. No one ever paid attention to the person on the floor.

Ivy finally glanced down, her look cold. "Get up. I want the entire palace sparkling clean before he arrives, starting with the dining room. And when you're done, lock yourself in that godforsaken room of yours. I don't want to see you anywhere near him."

Mirabella knew the person referred to as "him” from passing talk, a young man from one of the old families whom Ivy had known since childhood. Nothing more.

"Yes," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. Her fingers had curled into a fist against the stone, and she made herself open them one at a time. Hazel laughed, satisfied, and the two of them walked away without looking back.

Mirabella gathered the linens and took them to the laundry, where the housekeeper was already waiting with a list.

"You're late." The housekeeper didn't look up. She never used the word " princess", and neither did anyone else in the palace. The Queen had made that clear years ago: Mirabella ate what was left after the kitchen staff finished, carried her own buckets, and was to be shown no more courtesy than a scullery girl. Most of the servants followed the order without complaint. A few seemed to enjoy it. "Dining hall, then the main stairs, then the east corridor. Breakfast is at eight. If anything's undone, that's your problem, not mine."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And don't dawdle. I won't have the Queen hearing I let you slack."

She worked without stopping. She scrubbed the stairs on her hands and knees while servants stepped around her, and carried water up from the well until her arms ached. She tried not to think of her mother while she worked. All she knew of Luna Monica was a name and a story: she had died the night Mirabella was born, and everyone in the palace agreed on whose fault that was. Her father hadn't looked at her in years, and she had stopped waiting for him to. After twenty years, she agreed with all of them.

By the time the servants started laying out breakfast, the dining hall gleamed, the long table was polished, and Mirabella's hands were raw. She was on her knees wiping the last window ledge when Hazel walked in.

Hazel took her time. She walked the length of the table, trailing one gloved finger along the edge, and at the far end she stopped and held it up.

"Dust."

"I wiped it twice," Mirabella said quietly.

"Then you wiped it badly." Hazel picked up the bucket beside the sideboard and tipped it across the polished wood. Gray water ran over the edge and splattered across the floor, and a maid setting out plates stepped back with a smirk. "Do it again. Ivy will check this room herself, and she has waited years for this morning. You are not going to ruin it."

Mirabella didn't argue. Her jaw tightened, and she reached for the cloth. "I'll fix it."

"You'd better. He's due any minute."

Hazel swept out, and Mirabella scrambled to sop up the water before it reached the rugs. She had barely finished the table when Ivy appeared in the doorway, breathless, in a pale gown Mirabella had never seen before. Ivy's eyes skipped over the room, the table, and the floor, and she didn't seem to see any of it.

"Is it done?" she asked, not really to anyone.

"It's done," Mirabella said.

Outside, hooves crunched over the gravel of the courtyard, and a bell rang once at the gate. Ivy's whole face changed. She smoothed her skirt with both hands and hurried toward the entrance hall, and over her shoulder she said sharply, "Back stairs, and go to your room. Now."

Mirabella didn't need to be told twice. She slipped out through the servants' passage with her head down, her heart beating faster than the hurry could explain, and made for the narrow corridor that led to her door. She had just put her hand on the latch when the smell reached her.

It was cedar smoke and cold rain, with something warm underneath that she had no name for. She froze. Her chest tightened, and something low in her stomach pulled, as though a thread had been tied there and someone at the far end had tugged it.

It made no sense. She had no wolf. The others could name a person by scent from three rooms away, but she had never been able to tell rain from stone, or a stranger from a servant. Scents had always been simply there, faint and flat, meaning nothing. Yet this one was so clear she could have followed it with her eyes closed, and it was moving toward her.

Her fingers tightened on the latch. Down in the entrance hall, a man's voice said something she couldn't make out, and the scent grew stronger. Where was it coming from? Why did her heart feel like it was answering? And how could a girl with no wolf smell something that no one else in the palace had noticed at all?