girl, to see him alive and unharmed through his first five years.
Assassins targeted sons but left daughters in their cradles.
I bowed my head again. “My lord,” I protested, “if there is some fitting punishment for the offense…”
“Shall I make you scrub the floors all night?” my lord asked. There was a warmth in his voice I knew well; it meant there was a fond twinkle in his dark eyes. That he was, in some ways, laughing at me. If I would stop my obsequies and lift my head, then we might laugh together.
But things were different now, more serious. I could not laugh off what I had done as simply as I laughed off other, smaller transgressions. My lord Mamoru was lenient with me, but I had no cause to be lenient with myself.
“My lord knows that they have already been scrubbed twice over for the arrival of our guests,” I said, with as little humor as I could manage. It was still more of a jest than I should have allowed. Having known my lord since his birth, however, had instilled in me some traitorous familiarity that, try as I might, I found incredibly difficult to stamp out.
Mamoru laughed outright this time, the sound of it soft and welcoming. It filled the silence in this part of the palace, where all the servants were either asleep or busying themselves with their last duties before bed. The wing of the palace that had once housed the princes—and was now for Mamoru alone—was kept separate from the newly disruptive intrusion of the delegation from Volstov.
“I suppose there is no fitting punishment at all for what you’ve done then,” Mamoru mused. When I lifted my head, there was a faint smile upon his lips, his braids undone around his face.
When my lord had been much younger, that face had resembled a pale, round moon, or perhaps a mountain peach.
“My lord,” I said, bowing my head again, this time in thanks.
“You might call my servants in to ready me for bed,” Mamoru said. He did not often acknowledge my thanks for his actions, as though he felt that were the only way to behave and not something to be thanked for in the first place. “I’m certainly not going to be able to get out of all this by myself.”
I kept my smile hidden in the left corner of my mouth. My lord had never done very well with formal dress.
“I’ll alert them at once,” I said. “Do try not to create a situation, in my absence.”
It was an old joke between us, in the days when Mamoru had been much more my charge and mine alone, and the weight of the responsibility had made me reluctant to leave him for even a moment.
“I won’t become tangled in my sleeves,” he assured me, with the same faint hint of a smile.
The palace halls were empty and darkened, since the prince had already retired, and there was no one else in that wing who would have need of the servants to bear lanterns. I knew my way by memory, turning at first to the left, summoning Mamoru’s servants, then back up to the prince’s room, where my own quarters were stationed two doors away. It was close enough to hear any approaching dangers, but the distance still bothered me some nights.
On that night, with the taint of unease still shadowing my heart, I did not like the two doors’ distance between my lord and me. Yet, I grudgingly admitted to myself, he was a man grown now, and I could no longer sleep at the foot of his bed.
There was a soft, scuffling noise in the hall up ahead, the source of which I could not make out. I felt instinctively for my sword before privately cursing the laws of diplomacy that had disarmed us, along with the party from Volstov. There was no sword, only a short, ornamental fan stuck into the sash at my waist: a gesture of goodwill to our guests from the conquering nation.
I heard the noise again, closer then, like an unwelcome footfall. But all the servants here were trained explicitly well to serve the prince in a ready manner, swift and silent. Whoever it was approaching was no servant. I pressed myself back against the wall and waited for a shape to appear.
When it did, it became apparent that the approaching noise had been a man, and that it was a man who had drunk too much of