Life Within The Walls

I found Petra in the lining room past midnight, folding sheets that didn't need folding, the way people do when their hands need somewhere to put the things their mouth won't say.

"You should be asleep," I said.

"So should you." She didn't look up, but her shoulders eased slightly, like she'd been hoping for company without wanting to ask for it. "I heard the shouting from the east corridor. Half the house probably did."

"Then you know it wasn't my finest hour."

"I know your sister's been carrying something heavy long before tonight." She set down a sheet, finally meeting my eyes. "That's not really my place to say."

"Say it anyway. I could use someone who isn't managing me for once."

That got a small, surprised laugh out of her, and she sank onto the bench beside the linen shelves, patting the space next to her until I sat too. It felt strange, sitting there as an equal instead of someone being dressed or tendered to, and stranger how much I'd missed it without knowing I did.

"Can I ask you something," I said. "What's it actually like? Working here. I don't think I've ever asked you that in my life."

Pera blinked, caught off guard. "Nobody asks that."

"I'm asking now."

She considered it a long moment, turning a fold of linen over in her hands. "It's steady. Predictable, mostly. My mother worked in this house before me, and her mother before her. There's a kind of comfort in that, knowing exactly where you belong even if you didn't choose it." A pause. "There's also a kind of tiredness in it. You're always someone's, Selene. Your time isn't fully your own, even when no one is asking anything of you. You learn to want small things instead of big ones. It's easier that way."

"That sounds lonely."

"Sometimes." She shrugged, though it didn't quite land as careless as she wanted it to. "Less lonely lately, if I'm honest."

"Lately how?"

A flush crept up her neck, and she busied her hands with linen again, suddenly very interested in a crease that wasn't there. "There's someone. In the stables. Garrick. He's been year for two years, came up from the southern holdings when his own family's land failed."

"And?"

"And nothing. He's kind. He remembers which tea I like without being told twice, which is a smaller thing to notice about a person than it sounds." She laughed at herself, soft, and a little embarrassed. "I haven't told anyone that. You're the first."

"Why haven't you told him?"

"Because wanting things is complicated, when you're someone like me." She finally looked at me directly, something older than her years in her expression. "If I tell him and it goes badly, I still have to see him everyday, in the stables, on the same grounds, with nowhere to go to get away from the awkwardness of it. It isn't like your world, where a bad match just mean a different alliance next season. My whole life is this house. I don't get to simply leave if something doesn't work."

I hadn't thought about it that way before, not once in either of my lives. I had spent five years as Kai's wife surrounded by people like Petra, dressing me, feeding me, managing every visible corner of my existence, and I had never once asked what it cost them to disappear so completely into someone else's life in order to have one at all.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That I never asked before now."

"You don't have to apologize. It's not really anyone's fault. It's just how it is." But something in her softened at the words anyway, like they'd mattered more than she expected them to. "Can I tell you something else? You'll think it's silly."

"I won't."

"I used to think, when we were girls, that you had the easier life. All the gowns, all the attention, never once having to wonder whether you'd have a place to sleep or food on the table." She smoothed the linen flat, not quite looking at me. "I don't think that anymore. I don't know what's changed in you these past months, Selene, truly I don't, but you don't carry yourself like someone who thinks her life is easy. You carry yourself like someone bracing for something that rest of us can't see."

I felt my throat tighten, unprepared for how close that landed to everything I couldn't say to her.

"Maybe we're both carrying more than either of us lets on," I said instead.

"Maybe." She bumped her shoulder gently against mine, the same easy affection I remembered from when we were children, before either of us understood the shape of the lives we'd been born into. "For what it's worth, whatever it is you're bracing for, I hope it's worth less than you think it costs."

We sat together for a while longer, not saying much else, just the quiet, ordinary comfort of two people who'd known each other their whole lives finally seeing one another clearly for the first time. I told her, before I left, that she should tell Garrick the truth, that a life spent wanting small things quietly wasn't the only life available to her, even inside these walls. She didn't promise she would. But she didn't argue either, and that felt like enough for one night.

I was nearly to my room when one of the night staff caught me in the corridor, breathless, a folded message in hand.

"Word from Nightfang territory, my lady. Alpha Thorn's Beta rides for Voss tomorrow, to assess the pack's standing are the border incursions." The girl hesitated, reading something in my face she didn't understand. "Should I wake your father to tell him?"

I thought of Lira's parting words still unresolved in my chest, of a father who'd promised not to ask gently a second time, and now, on top of it all, a stranger from Nightfang arriving to study Voss territory with a soldier's eye.

"Let him sleep," I said. "I'll tell him myself in the morning."

I didn't sleep that much either, turning over everything Petra had said, and everything I still hadn't told her, until the sky outside my window went from black to grey and I understood there was no putting the morning off any longer.