"How long have you been here?"
Nova suppressed a frown and opened her eyes. The otherworld girl crouched by the kitchen fire, staring into the flames. A pile of servant's uniform sat untouched by her feet.
"You're not supposed to talk to me, you know."
There were kinder ways she could have put it, but Grace didn't seem to mind the bluntness. She shifted to sit down cross-legged, still staring.
"Why not?"
It was a simple question and Nova shouldn't have felt so angry about it, but her answer still came out sharper than she intended.
"I'm surprised you can't guess." She flicked her chains to make the point, but Grace wasn't looking this time, either. Her aura was flat, whereas it had been a riot of emotions when Nova had first seen her. The moment her brother had walked out the door was like watching water thrown over a fire; the change was alarming, even Nova had to admit that.
She sighed. "Ten years."
This time the girl glanced over. Her eyes were hazel, unlike the alarmingly vibrant blue of her brother's, and their look was sharp and intelligent. Even the numbness in her aura didn't hide that.
"That's a long time," Grace murmured, and Nova couldn't help but laugh. It had a bitter edge to it.
"You're telling me." She stretched as far as her chains would allow, reaching back to knuckle the gap between her shoulder blades. "I've lived that time. I know how long it is."
"Are you still not changed?"
Grace flinched at Jan's voice, hand falling to the pile of clothes and snatching them up. The housekeeper loomed over them, a hulking shadow with a wild spray of pale hair in the gloom of the kitchen.
"Sorry," she mumbled, "I'll do it now."
"You should have done it an hour ago," Jan said, as Grace staggered to her feet. "Come on, off with you."
Grace nodded and shuffled away, the pile of clothes clutched to her chest. Jan watched her go and then sighed, glancing at Nova.
"She's going to be trouble, isn't she?"
"My bet's on her brother," Nova said, staring at the place where Grace had been sitting. Plenty of servants had talked to her before realising that it was a bad idea and Grace would be the same. It hadn't ever been a particular source of bother for her, but for some reason it bothered her now. No one had ever asked her why they shouldn't talk to her. They usually simply stopped.
"You think so?" Jan said. "I heard he was a drip in the Assembly hall."
Nova said nothing. The flash of green in the boy's eyes had given it all away; even if he was a coward, life as one of the Gifted would beat that out of him sure enough. Unspoken tended to find trouble whether they meant to or not.
What Yddris thought it might achieve to keep that inevitability from even the boy himself, she wasn't sure, but he would have his reasons. He always did.
"Well," Jan said heavily. "We'll see, won't we? Come over here, girl, you've tied it wrong."
Grace emerged from behind the wall in the dark brown maid's dress, holding the strands of her apron in her hands. She looked smaller in it than she had in her otherworld clothes, which were strange and bulky and garishly coloured. She offered the halter to Jan, but the housekeeper simply turned her around in one brisk movement and untied the whole thing.
"Right over left, round the front, back again, tie," she muttered, and then grabbed the two strands left loose. "These go around your neck nice and tight." She tugged at the loose fabric left around Grace's waist. "Kiel's beard, you're thin, girl. This is going to need pinning."
Grace winced as Jan wrenched the halter neck tight, and stood in subdued silence as she rolled up her sleeves and started roughly combing her short hair into a bun, producing two bone pins from the pocket of her apron and stabbing them through. Nova could only see Grace's face in profile, but she could see enough that she was able to watch a tear roll down one cheek.
"Chin up, girl, you'll be fine," Jan muttered, rubbing the girl's shoulders and then clapping her on the back. "Let's get this dress fixed and then I'll show you where you'll be working."
They turned away, Jan throwing a look at Nova over her shoulder and rolling her eyes. Nova cocked her head and watched Grace's back until they vanished into the laundry room.
The kitchen was deserted other than the three of them. Most staff were in the guest rooms and the dining hall, preparing for the evening's banquet, but it wouldn't be long before the cooks arrived. Nova waited until she couldn't even hear voices anymore, and then reached under the skirt of her shift for the tiny pocket there. It wasn't really a pocket but a hole in the double-folded hem that she had made a long time ago in the days when she'd stolen clerks' keys and hidden them there for opening restricted library shelves. It had proved useful for more than just keys in the years that followed; not that she had much opportunity these days.
She smiled down at the two Flint in her hand. Flint were low value; the tiny discs of carved stone barely bought a meal in the city, but it was worth more than that to her. She glanced around the kitchen again to make sure no one had entered while she was distracted, and then shuffled backwards and lay down on the ground, peering into the dark corner behind the fireplace and feeling for the loose stone in the base. She pried it out, letting free a small puff of ash and soot, and tucked the coins inside, where they landed with a light rattle on the small pile already there. She laid her hand on the stash for a moment with her eyes closed, then opened them again and replaced the stone with a heavy sigh.
She wasn't supposed to have money; she wasn't supposed to have any possessions to her name that Faellian had not given her. She couldn't remember the exact time that Yddris had started giving her coins, but she remembered stealing her first Cert from a visiting nobleman and stashing it. The Unspoken had found it, by some miracle, though she'd thought she had hidden it well and the demon catcher never told on her. Instead, he quietly started adding to her collection and had had her habitual kitchen spot changed to the corner by the fire, where there was somewhere for her to put her gains.
She never had asked him why, and suspected she would get little more than a grunt and a few cuss words by way of an answer if she did. She supposed he had his reasons, as always.
What she planned to do with it, she wasn't sure. It was a good enough feeling that she had anything she could call hers. Faellian wouldn't take it away because he didn't know about it. It gave her the smallest spark of something she had no name for which she had not felt in many years.
Grace returned at that moment carrying a basket of laundry. Nova repositioned herself where she sat before, and offered a bland, bemused look at the otherworld girl's quick smile. Grace blinked and began to fold linens. She didn't look at Nova again.
Nova almost had time to feel sorry for putting her off, but it was short-lived. The staff started filtering back in at that moment, indicating the arrival of at least one of the Lord's guests for the evening. Many ignored Nova, and some nodded short greetings which she returned equally shortly. All of them at least shot a look at Grace, who pretended she hadn't noticed even though the set of her shoulders and total absorption in smoothing the creases out of a pillow case gave her away. Other than that they left her alone, up until one of the chambermaids braved Jan's looming presence at Grace's shoulder to edge closer.
"Is it true you fell from Heaven?"
Nova stifled a smirk at the look on Grace's face.
"Excuse me?"
"Is it true?" the girl insisted. "Can you.... Can you bless this?"
She held something out. Grace looked at it and then her, face turning pink. "I'm not from Heaven, wherever that is. I don't know who told you I was but they were mistaken."
"But you're from another world. Perhaps it would still work."
"I'm not..."
"Maria," Jan said. "Leave her."
Maria looked sorely tempted to press it, but another look from Jan sent her away, pocketing the object. Grace watched her go with a troubled look on her face.
"I'm honestly not blessed," she said to Jan, as if hoping the housekeeper could help her. "I'm just normal. But normal in a...a different place."
"It'll blow over." Jan took a woven basket of dirty linen from a passing maid and began to sort through it. "Just weather it, girl."
A potboy entered carrying a slip of parchment. Jan glanced up and held out her hand, read it quickly, and sighed. She lumbered to the fire and threw it in, and then turned to Nova, who nodded and offered a hard smile even as her heart sank. She didn't need to see the note to know what it said.
"His Lordship's requested you help out at dinner service this evening," Jan called back to Grace, gaze lingering on Nova's with something akin to pity. "Your balance any good, girl?"
Grace had gone the colour of old milk. "It's alright."
"Try for better than alright," Jan muttered, "You drop something in a dilly's lap and your backside'll be screaming by noon tomorrow."
"What's a dilly?"
"A ponce," Jan said, pushing the end of her nose up with a finger. "The hoity-toity."
"Don't start filling her head with your demonshit already," the cook called from the other side of the room, laughter echoing in the cavern of the bread oven she had her head shoved into. "Give her a chance to settle in."
"You can pull your neck in, you old buzzard," Jan retorted. Laughter echoed around the kitchen. Nova forced a chuckle, which crawled up her throat and died on the flagstones in front of her. Her knuckles ached where she'd sat on her hands to stop them trembling. She tightened her core and closed her eyes, taking deep breaths in and out and trying to hold onto the fleeting pleasure she'd gleaned from Yddris's gift.
When Grace put the linen basket down next to her, she jumped, eyes flying open. It was hard not to scowl at her for interrupting. It had almost worked that time.
"Sorry," Grace said, peering at her around the side of the sheet she was pegging up on one of the laundry lines above the hearth. "Didn't mean to startle you."
"You didn't," Nova muttered, avoiding the look. "Much."
"Are you okay?"
"Eh?"
Grace pulled another peg from the pocket of her apron. "Are you okay?"
"I heard you," Nova said. She frowned. "Why?"
"Why am I asking if you're okay?" Grace blinked and offered a shy smile. "Because you don't look okay. No offence."
Nova opened her mouth and then shut it again. Then she said, "No."
She stiffened as Grace moved the basket closer to her, shoving it over with her foot and picking out another bedsheet. Her eyes were still puffy from crying, but her smile was genuine. "Are you going to be serving at dinner too?"
Nova laughed, and it came out hideously dark. "In a sense. You've got the better end of the stick, trust me."
Grace's smiled faded. "Why, what are you supposed to be doing?"
"You'll see."
Nova was horribly aware that Grace could see her that evening as she stepped along the table to avoid putting a foot in anyone's food. It was cold in the dinner hall despite the hundred or so candles and the roaring fire in the hearth at one end. Or perhaps it was because she was almost naked and almost every pair of eyes in the room was following her progress.
What she wore could at best be called a leotard, and at worst woefully inadequate. Diaphanous purple fabric moved with the contours of her body as she ducked and weaved, and span, and cartwheeled. The bandages over the stumps of her wings were tight and hot, and they ached more than ever around the thick cord which pinioned them together and crushed her spine between them.
What ached more was the spot on the back of her head that the lord was boring holes into with his eyes, and the occasional glimpse she saw of Grace watching her as she took plates around the table to the guests who asked for them. She moved too fast to see the expression on her face, and was too ashamed to slow down and check. This would be the point where Grace stopped talking to her, she was sure of it.
She couldn't work out why that hurt.
Her heel smarted as she caught the edge of a hot plate and she twisted into a pirouette, darting down the table before the guest in front of it worked out her foot had touched anything. Scars pulled tight all over her body, giving her skin the sensation of shrinking. Twisting and flexing had not been this hard ten years ago.
"Enough."
Her body stopped before her mind told it to, getting down from the table at the lord's barked command. He gestured, and she went to sit in her place by his chair. From the edge of the table hung a long chain with a clip on the end, which Faellian attached to the collar on her neck. Wherever she sat there was something like this. Even the dining room table wasn't exempt.
The one benefit of being on the floor was that she could eavesdrop without being obvious. As she stretched out sore muscles and massaged some flexibility back into her scarred skin, she tried to pick through the voices that hummed all around her for anything interesting. She wasn't surprised that Grace and her brother were a popular topic.
"You remember the last one Yddris took that much of an interest in," a woman said from a few seats away. "He apprenticed him and now the boy's been a practising Unspoken for eight years, I hear."
"The urchin?" another chimed in, "Oh, no, I didn't like him at all. Gave me awful chills."
"You don't like any of them, dear," a man put in.
Nova ground her teeth but managed to rein in her temper. She glowered at the pairs of feet lining the floor under the table, all in garish, ugly shoes, and envisioned stabbing each and every one in the heel with a pin.
If only she had the pin.
Faellian's finger curled around a lock of her hair and pulled hard. He leaned down and hissed, "Don't scowl like that, Anara."
"Yes, my Lord," she said, smoothing out her expression. He stared at her for a moment longer and then nodded. To her relief, he started to get up.
"I need to talk to someone," he said. "Don't you dare try anything."
"Yes, my Lord."
She sighed and slumped, face settling back into her scowl. She longed to reach back and take off the pinion around the stumps of her wings, just to ease the roaring pain in her shoulders, but left it. Someone would see her elbows over the top of the table and call Faellian back, and he'd probably whip her in front of the lot of them, as if dancing on the table half nude and on an empty stomach while they ate an ungodly amount of food wasn't humiliating and miserable enough.
Not all of Faellian's extravagant dinners were quite so crude. She could tolerate the dinners with the Orthanian Council, who paid her no more attention than a speck of dirt, and borderline enjoyed dinners with Kiel's Brethren, who at least insisted on allowing her to have food. But the aristocrats and the guild masters who lived out of Faellian's pocket were a whole different game; a nasty one, with lots of lecherous gawping and bad fashion. Nova had heard stories of games played in the taverns of the Reach that sounded similar, but she was willing to bet that whoever was stripping on the bar in those games didn't have the audience staring at them over the rim of gold-plated goblets. Nor would they be dodging around the half-picked carcass of a roasted mountain buck twice their own size.
"Anarabelle?" Grace appeared at her side as a roar of laughter went up around the table from some terrible joke. Nova winced, avoiding looking her in the eye so that she didn't see the disgust there.
"Nova," she said, "Call me Nova."
She risked a peek through her fringe, and found Grace holding out a bread roll off the plate she carried.
"Eat," she said.
"No, no," Nova said, too stunned to move. "No, he'll flog you. I'm fine."
"Nova..."
"No." Nova said firmly, searching for the disgust and finding only an unnerving amount of concern. The girl was dense, then. That was it. "It's not worth it." She paused, glancing over to find Faellian's shoes among the crowd. He was still at the other end of the room. A tiny smile crept onto her face and she turned to Grace, who returned it timidly. "But you could help me with something else."
"What?"
She peered down the end of the table again and then grinned, "Can I borrow a pin?"