I tense—but it’s just Bea. Far from being the trembling girl who spilled wine on the nobleman’s doublet now. Instead, her whole body seems to smile, her confidence renewed by comforting the other girls. She plops onto the bed next to me.
“Nothing interesting,” I say quietly, slipping the drawing underneath my pillow. A question occurs to me. Why would my father have brought his drawing of my mother with him—for luck, the same reason I carried the statue of the Sorceress with me?
“Are you going out for Addie’s position?” Bea says. Her cheer is welcome to the others but grating to me. I shake my head, but she continues. “Lady Verissa’s distraught. First Addie, then the Queen’s sent away every girl Verissa’s tried to put in her place. Put them through some kind of test.”
An idea begins to take shape. “What kind of test?”
Bea rolls her eyes. “I’ve no idea—she doesn’t want provincial serving girls, I suppose. Verissa sent lots of girls to interview, but they were all rejected flat out after they answered her questions wrong. I think they did it on purpose.”
“Why?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“What happened to Addie, of course. Who wants to be banished? Or killed?” Bea says with a shiver. She turns her head to the side, considering me. “I bet the Queen would like you though, if you wanted it—you’re pretty. And not timid. Besides, soon there won’t be anyone else left.”
She hops up and strides to her own mattress across the room without saying good-bye. Before I can lie down, Ingrid’s limp blond hair and prideful face come into view, hanging upside down from the bunk above me. Since our shared carriage ride on the way to Everless, she’s taken to offering me unsolicited advice. “That one’s too bold,” she says.
Bea’s suggestion lodges itself into my thoughts. I’ll never get close to the Queen in the kitchen; I’d be lucky to get even a whisper of her conversation between glasses of wine.
If I’m to find out anything about what my father wanted in the vault, and what it might have to do with his warnings about the Queen, it would help to be closer to her. A small voice inside me warns that I’m going in the exact opposite direction of Papa’s wishes, but can I put aside the questions that have begun to gnaw at my heart? And besides—what do I have to lose, if I’ve already lost everything?
Turning over this realization, I slip between my blanket and the mattress soundlessly, like a knife into its sheath.
11
After offering me her room after Papa died, Lora gives me no concessions. It seems that she, like Hinton, believes in hard work as an antidote to grief. I try to lose myself—every time the Queen’s retinue requests something from the kitchen, I volunteer to deliver it myself, only to find a closed door and the buttress of a steel-faced guard—but no matter how I run myself ragged during the day, trying to please Lora and brooding over the Queen, sleep eludes me for hours at night. The days are a blur, melting one into the next. I can’t say what day of the week it is when Lora approaches me in the kitchen, her face tight with concern.
“I’ve arranged for you to have the afternoon off,” she says quietly. When Ingrid, beside me, looks up curiously from her chopping, Lora snaps, “Back to work!”
She pulls me out into the hallway and leans close. “You’ll take a cart and horse back to Crofton and—and—collect your father’s things from the time lender,” she finishes, patting me with a flour-caked hand.
As I make my way down to the stables, I wonder what awaits me at the time lender’s—my father had nothing but debts. Will they make me watch them strip the cottage down, tile by tile, plank by plank? Will Duade—if he’s recovered from having his own time taken—bleed me in the shop, to account for what my father might have owed? The thought dissolves in my grief like a blood-iron into tea. It takes all the strength I have to put one foot in front of the other.
As Lora promised, the horse and cart are waiting for me in the stables, my old friend Tam at the reins. He gives me a brief, tight hug; maybe he’s heard what happened. He grasps my shoulder, steadying me as we climb into the cart, and I lean against his rough wool coat in return, wishing I could absorb some of his strength.
The day is unseasonably warm. The snow has turned to mud around us, and a few birds chirp bravely into the wind—the weak sun glitters against the slush of white and brown. It’s almost beautiful.
It’s been about a week since I left Crofton, but it seems like years. When we finally go through the broken gate, the low stone wall on either side strikes me as pathetic. It couldn’t keep out a cow. In the streets, the town seems shrunken, small and quiet and gray. Distantly, I wonder what our lives would be like, Papa’s and mine, if we had never come to this village after fleeing Everless. If we lived in a different world where the Queen had never cut Sempera off from other kingdoms to protect the secrets of blood-iron. Where we could simply walk until we reached the sea, then get on a ship and go—elsewhere. I know there must be an elsewhere, somewhere without bleeders or Gerlings or the Queen. But the fantasy, reaching the limits of my knowledge, dissolves into fog.
When we get into town, Tam ties the horse to a post close to the butcher’s shop. I consider running to Amma—but I don’t have the strength to tell her. Does she already know too?
I wave to Tam, who brushes down the mare. I’m grateful that he’s understood, without my having to explain, that I need privacy.
I arrive at the time lender’s store and freeze, my hand on the doorknob. The neck button on Lora’s black hand-me-down dress suddenly feels too tight. After wages, even after my gift to Hinton, I have more money in my purse than I’ve had in years, but I’d trade away Everless and everyone in it for the chance to return to the last time I stood in this square. I’d never have left for the marketplace, the waiting cart. I’d let Papa sell a few months, or I’d convince him to let me do it. We would have survived. Just as we had always done.
I steel myself and enter the store—this store I’ve passed a thousand times, peered into a thousand times, but never been in. It’s tight inside, drowning in the smell of copper, the packed-dirt floor spattered with old blood.
Shivering in spite of the heat from the hearth, I walk to the counter with my head high. An older couple, two women with backs curved with too much work and too few years, hunches over a small table in the corner, taking turns cutting each other’s palms and letting the blood flow into empty vials. I wonder if they’re putting time away for their children. They watch me as I approach—with curiosity and pity. I suppose I still look too young for a place like this.
“My father died four days ago,” I tell Edwin Duade, hoping my voice doesn’t crack. “I’m here for his things.”
His eyes flick up to mine, then back to his ledger. “His full name an’ yours.”
No words of comfort, no nonsense. I notice the red line drawn across Duade’s palm. Another reminder that only a week ago, everything was different, when Liam ordering Duade bled was enough to shake me.