Chapter 2 Below Stairs
POV: Lauren
A bell rang somewhere above the rafters, and forty women rolled out of bed at once like a single creature waking.
Lauren hadn't slept. She'd lain on the thin straw mattress counting the shapes of sleeping girls around her, still turning over the image of her contract vanishing into a stranger's coat pocket. By the time gray light crept through the shutters, she'd decided on exactly nothing except that she couldn't afford to look like a girl who noticed things.
"You're new." The voice came from the bunk beside hers ,a girl with chapped knuckles and eyes that moved fast, cataloguing Lauren head to foot before she'd even sat up. "Byrne, was it?"
"Laurie." Lauren swung her legs down, testing the word in her own mouth like a shoe that didn't quite fit yet. "And you are?"
"Nessa. Six years in this wing, which makes me practically royalty down here." She said it dry, without a trace of a smile, already pulling on a gray work dress with the efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand mornings running. "First rule ,don't call it royalty where anyone upstairs can hear. Second rule ,don't speak to a courtier unless spoken to, and even then, keep it short. Third rule—"
"How many rules are there?"
"More than you'll learn before you break one." Nessa tossed her a folded uniform, gray wool scratchy even through the wrapping. "Kitchen staff outrank laundry. Laundry outranks the stable girls. Everyone outranks whoever's newest, which today is you, so don't expect kindness from anyone until somebody younger walks through that gate."
Lauren pulled the dress over her head, grateful for the excuse to keep her face hidden a moment while she arranged her expression into something suitably chastened. "Sounds like its own little kingdom."
"It is. Smaller crown, same rot." Nessa's mouth twisted at that, something bitter passing behind her eyes before she smoothed it away. "You'll learn who to avoid quick enough. Steer clear of the head laundress when her joints ache ,which is most days. Never let a courtier catch you looking at them too long, especially not the pretty ones. And whatever you do, don't get noticed."
"Noticed how?"
Nessa glanced sideways, and for the first time her voice dropped low enough that Lauren had to lean in to catch it. "You want to last more than a season here, you stay exactly as interesting as a floor tile. Palace doesn't like interesting girls."
The words landed harder than Nessa likely intended. Lauren kept her face still and busy with the laces of her boots, though her pulse had picked up its familiar, unwelcome rhythm.
"What happens to interesting girls?"
For a moment she thought Nessa wouldn't answer ,the older girl's jaw tightened, eyes flicking toward the doorway as though checking who might be listening. But the corridor beyond stood empty, and something in Lauren's question must have sounded like simple new-girl curiosity, because Nessa's shoulders eased a fraction.
"Depends who they get interesting to." She dropped onto the edge of her bunk, lowering her voice further still. "There was a seamstress, before my time ,Odile, they called her. Caught the old King's eye, or so the story goes. One week she's mending Luna robes in the east wing, next week she's 'reassigned to the coastal estates,' and nobody in this palace ever hears her name again. No letters. No visits home. Just gone."
Lauren kept her hands busy with the boot laces, though her fingers had gone stiff. "Maybe she was happy there. Coastal estates don't sound so terrible."
"Maybe." Nessa didn't sound like she believed it. "Except there was another one, years after ,a healer's apprentice this time, worked close with the young lord before he was king. Same story. 'Reassigned' overnight, no goodbye, no note. And a third, not so long past ,a governess who tutored one of the royal cousins. Palace said she'd gone home to care for a sick mother. Except her mother had been dead six years already. One of the kitchen girls knew the family."
Lauren's whole body had gone very still, the boot lace forgotten between her fingers.
Three women. Three sudden, unexplained departures, each one dressed up in a different polite excuse ,coastal estates, family illness, reassignment ,and each one swallowed by the palace without a trace left behind.
She knew a fourth.
Her mother's name rose in her throat, sharp and sudden as a blade, and she had to press her tongue against the back of her teeth to keep it from slipping out. Elena Whitmore. Restoration work in the archive tower. Sent home to recover her health, they told us, and never came home at all. The story Nessa had just told, with different words wrapped around the same bones.
"That's ," Lauren made herself finish the sentence, made her voice come out curious rather than shaking. "That's an unsettling way to lose staff."
"Palace doesn't lose staff." Nessa's eyes had gone flat, careful, the look of someone who'd said more than she meant to and was already regretting it. "Palace reassigns staff. There's a difference, or so they'd have us believe." She stood abruptly, smoothing her skirts, closing the subject like a door pulled shut. "Anyway. None of it's our business. Best you forget I said anything ,that kind of talk doesn't do a new girl any favors if it reaches the wrong ears."
"Whose ears would that be?"
Nessa didn't answer directly. She nodded once, toward the corridor, toward the vague upward direction of the palace's grander halls, as though the answer lived somewhere she'd rather not name aloud.
"Come on. Head laundress docks pay for late risers, and I'd rather not explain why I was gossiping instead of working on your very first morning."
Lauren followed her out into the gray corridor, boots damp against cold stone, her mind racing three steps ahead of her feet.
Three names. Three women, swallowed whole by careful, plausible lies ,each excuse different enough to seem unrelated, each one collapsing the instant you set them side by side and noticed the shape they made together. A pattern spanning decades. A pattern nobody below stairs dared examine too closely, for fear of becoming its next entry.
And somewhere in a private ledger ,or a guard's coat pocket, or a filing cabinet in the archive tower she hadn't yet found a way inside ,there might be a fourth name matching that same tidy, dangerous shape.
Elena Whitmore. Reassigned.
Lauren pressed her hand flat against her side, feeling for the shape of the washboard she'd left hidden beneath her bunk, the real papers tucked inside it, the only proof left in the world that her mother's disappearance wasn't the tragic accident everyone had told a grieving twelve-year-old to accept.
Whoever curated that pattern was still here. Still working. Still, if the guard at the gate last night meant anything at all, keeping a very careful eye on which new faces walked through Wolveroot's doors.
She had exactly one advantage nobody in this palace knew she possessed.
She already knew where to start looking.
