The head cook in the embroidered apron—Lora—speaks in a rapid-fire mix of introduction and instruction. She walks as if she’s rolling up and down on invisible ocean waves. Her left leg is severed at the knee—she wears a carved wooden leg and foot, delicately whittled and neatly painted with a red shoe, which is now darkened with vegetable stains. Born in a village to the south, she came to Everless as a girl to save enough time to live longer than her mother’s and father’s thirty years. Although I can tell she has no great love for the Gerlings, she has done well by serving them.
She’s going over the rules surrounding the Queen for the third time—don’t speak to her unless spoken to, keep your eyes down, and never touch her for any reason—when she stops suddenly and makes a clucking sound with her tongue.
“You look about to fall over,” she says. She plucks a small hard roll, studded with fat bits, and a large apple from a pile on the table. “Go on and eat,” she says kindly. “Then take the rest down to the lads in the stables. You can find your way there?”
I nod, trying to resist the pull of memory: the smell of the horses, the wet hay, Roan laughing as he darted between stalls, daring me to catch him, knowing full well I could scarcely catch the end of his velvet cloak as it whipped around corners.
“Good.” She pats my cheek.
I wolf down the bread there at the table without bothering to sit. Still, newcomers are being sorted, an endless stream of them, taken off to be seamstresses, washerwomen, and parlor maids in anticipation of the hundreds of guests who will begin arriving for the wedding. Addie has returned to the kitchen to set them to task. The prettiest girls are chosen to be ladies-in-waiting to the nobles.
When I’ve polished off the apple, I take up the tray and wind my way out of the kitchen. Everything looks both smaller and stranger than I remember it, as if I’m not really walking through Everless but a strange warped dream of it. There. Where I hid behind a reliquary and rolled olive pits into the hall to try and trip up the ancient butler, Girold. There. Where I scratched my initials into the stone with Roan when we were crouched here one afternoon, hiding from Liam after he called me names. Someone has subsequently sanded it down, but I can still make out, very faintly, the ghostly letters.
I touch a hand to them and smile, then quickly jerk away. Fantasy. Those years, those happy memories, have been planed down like the stone has. Now, that’s all they are: impressions.
Still, I press my ear to the wall in the servants’ corridor for the briefest moment, listening for Roan Gerling’s voice.
Rounding a corner, I come across a young boy—nine, maybe—carrying another tray, this one silver instead of tin, and laden with meat, pastries, and a porcelain teapot. He’s sitting on the steps in the mouth of a staircase off to the left, looking like he’s about to cry.
“Are you lost?” I ask without thinking.
The boy jumps, almost upsetting the tray, and then relaxes when he sees who I am. “Lady Sida won’t let anyone up to see her but Harlowe,” he says breathily. “But Harlowe’s now home and pushing for her baby, so I’m to bring this up. But she don’t take to boys. Thom says she’ll bite my ears off.” He shudders, looks down at the floor.
Harlowe, I assume, is Lady Sida’s maid. I let my eyes travel up the dark, narrow staircase behind the boy, realizing where it must lead. The nobles have a tradition: the oldest among them lives in the highest place in the castle. Lady Sida has held that position since before I was born. No one knows her exact age, but the children, Gerling and servant alike, whisper that she is over three hundred years old. The thought of her sends my skin rippling into gooseflesh. She’s approaching the upper limit of how long blood-iron can sustain a human heart—except for the Queen, whose extraordinarily long life, it’s said, was a gift from the Sorceress before she vanished. When blood-iron spread through the land some five centuries ago, invaders came from all over the world to try to seize what must have seemed, then, like an incredible gift. The Queen, then just a gifted young general, led the Semperan army to victory.
What has Lady Sida seen, in her three centuries? A morbid curiosity seizes me. I crouch in front of the boy. “This one is going to the stables,” I say, setting my tray down on the steps. “Trade?”
He blinks. “Aren’t you scared?”
Whenever I was sad or afraid as a child, Papa would distract me with a joke or a story until I’d forgotten the fear. I’ve never had that talent, but I offer the boy my hand. “I’m Jules. What’s your name?”
“Hinton.” He shakes my hand, looking doubtful.
“Don’t be afraid of the old ones; they’re harmless,” I say, though I am afraid of them, always have been. Few of the Gerling elders appear to be over forty, but many of them are closer to a hundred and forty. You’d never know it by looking—not until you get close enough to see the blue veins pulsing beneath their skin, or the way their thoughts flee them midsentence. And when someone lives for centuries like Lady Sida, it’s said they become not quite human. It’s a convenient rumor, since none of us will ever know for sure. “But I’ll still take the tray up for you, if you’d like.”
“Thank you.” Relief floods the boy’s face. By the time I pick up the tray, he’s already disappeared.
I climb the stairs into darkness, willing my hands not to tremble. Lady Sida was a Gerling not by blood, but by marriage—the older servants claimed her mother was a hedge witch and that her husband brought her to Everless to study the secrets of time. As a child, I only ever saw her at a great distance, when she’d come down from her tower on feast days. Lady Sida always demanded strange, intricate, old-fashioned foods: honey wine, candied rose petals, roasted songbirds. And if you displeased her, the rumors went, she could steal a year from your blood with a glance and swallow it whole.
At the top of the stairs is a wooden door carved with an ornate four-pointed star—the symbol for a century, as the moon is for a month and the sun for a year. I lift the brass knocker and drop it against the center of the star.
For a moment, there is silence.
“Enter,” calls a voice, so softly I can hardly hear it. I shoulder the door open and step inside, holding the tray before me like a shield.
The room is large and shadowy, lit only by a low fire in the hearth and watery daylight from the window. It’s cluttered with velvet armchairs and silk cushions, bookshelves sagging with leather tomes, and a vanity littered with strands of jewels and silver combs. But much of it is covered with a thick layer of dust, as if she hasn’t let her servants touch anything for years.
“Bring the tray.”
The old woman sits framed by the light of the window, looking out over Everless’s snow-covered lawn—she’s tall, elegant, but bloodless somehow. Her skin is dull and thin with age, and her hair long, once black and now white as bone. Her eyes are the color of weak and watery tea. She wears a straight-skirt gown of the sort that no one has worn for a hundred years, lace frothing at her wrists and throat, and I wonder if she doesn’t know the fashion or has simply stopped caring to follow it.
“You’re not Harlowe,” she says. Her voice is scratchy, like old wool. But sharp. “What happened to Harlowe?”