Nobody told me that palaces were loud.
I had imagined Valdris Palace the way most people from Mira Village imagined it — cold and silent and grand, all marble floors and golden ceilings and the kind of quiet that only exists where no one is allowed to speak. I had imagined walking through its halls like walking through a painting. Still. Perfect. Untouchable.
What I found instead was organized chaos wearing expensive clothes.
By the time the morning bell rang through the servant quarters, the palace was already awake and moving. Fires needed lighting. Floors needed sweeping. Breakfast trays needed carrying through corridors so long they seemed to swallow you whole. Madam Corvel appeared at our door before the last echo of the bell faded, her face already arranged into its permanent expression of controlled disappointment.
"New girls follow Hesta," she said, gesturing to a tall woman behind her with silver streaked hair and ink stained fingers. "Learn the routes. Don't get lost. Don't touch anything that isn't your assignment. And don't" — her eyes swept over us with the efficiency of someone who had given this speech a hundred times — "speak to anyone above your station unless spoken to first."
Her gaze landed on me for exactly one second.
Then she was gone.
Hesta was nothing like Madam Corvel. Where the head housekeeper moved through the palace like a cold wind, Hesta moved like someone who had made peace with every stone in the floor. She had been here twenty three years, she told us as she led us through the first corridor, and in twenty three years she had learned one important thing.
"The palace is alive," she said, without looking back at us. "It breathes. It watches. It remembers. You would do well to remember that too."
Senna, walking beside me, leaned close and whispered, "Is she always like this?"
"Probably," I whispered back.
But I was listening. Really listening. Because what Hesta was saying wasn't philosophy. It was instruction. And I needed every piece of it.
She showed us the routes first — the servant corridors that ran parallel to the main halls like a shadow version of the palace, narrow and lamplit and smelling of candle wax and old stone. These were our roads, she explained. We used them always. The main corridors were for the court, for the nobility, for the royal family. A servant caught walking the main halls without specific instruction could be reported. A servant reported three times could be dismissed. A servant who caused any kind of disruption to the royal household —
"Dealt with accordingly," Hesta said simply. "Whatever that means on a given day."
I filed every word away like a map.
The kitchens were in the eastern wing, connected to the main dining hall by a corridor with a red painted door that I was to never open from the outside during mealtimes. The laundry rooms were below ground, warm and steaming, where a group of older women worked in permanent silence that felt more like ritual than rule. The guest quarters occupied the entire northern wing and were currently half full with visiting nobility from the western provinces for some reason nobody explained to us.
And the royal family's private quarters — the western wing — were marked by a single thing.
White cloaked guards at every entrance.
Purification Guard.
I recognized the cloaks immediately. I had seen ones just like them eleven years ago, standing in the rain with clean hands and empty eyes while my mother —
"Elara."
Senna's hand on my arm. I realized I had stopped walking.
Hesta was looking back at me with those calm, measuring eyes.
"Sorry," I said. Perfectly even. Perfectly calm. "I thought I heard something."
Hesta studied me for a moment that lasted slightly too long. Then she turned and continued walking.
I followed. I kept my hands loose at my sides. I kept my breathing steady. I kept the darkness flat and still and quiet inside me, the way I always did, the way I had been doing since I was seven years old standing in the rain.
Be still. Be small. Be nothing.
My assignment, as it turned out, was the library.
Not the Crown Prince's chambers — not yet, Hesta explained, new girls always started somewhere lower risk while they learned the palace rhythms. The library was considered simple duty. Dusting the shelves. Replacing candles. Keeping the reading tables clear after the scholars left for the day.
I had never been so grateful for anything in my life.
The library occupied the entire second floor of the southern wing, a vast room with ceilings so high the upper shelves disappeared into shadow and ladders on rolling tracks that stretched the length of each wall. Thousands of books. Tens of thousands. More words collected in one room than existed in all of Mira Village combined.
I was supposed to be dusting.
I kept getting distracted.
There was a section near the back, half hidden behind a pillar, where the older texts were kept. History. Kingdom records. Genealogy of the noble houses. And tucked between two genealogy volumes so thick they could double as weapons, a slim dark book with no title on the spine.
I should have left it alone.
I pulled it out.
The pages were old, soft at the edges, written in a hand so small I had to lean close to read. It was a record — dates and names and locations. And next to each name, a single word written in red.
Executed.
Page after page after page.
Shadow magic users. Catalogued like inventory. Some with notes beside their names — fled north, recaptured. Denied charges, proof provided. Died before sentencing. Some with no notes at all. Just a name and a date and that single red word.
I found Mira Village on the forty third page.
I found my mother's name four lines from the bottom.
Sera of Mira. Shadow class unknown. Executed Year 312. One child, unaccounted for.
My hands were shaking.
I realized it too late.
The darkness rose before I could stop it — not much, barely a whisper, just a thin curl of shadow sliding from my fingertips and wrapping around the edge of the page like it recognized the name too.
I yanked it back. Slammed it down. Pressed my palms flat against my thighs and stood very still in the half dark behind the pillar, breathing through my nose, counting the way my mother taught me.
One. Two. Three. Four.
When I finally looked up, the library was empty.
No one had seen.
I put the book back exactly where I found it. I picked up my dusting cloth. I walked back to the shelves and I worked until the evening bell rang and my hands stopped shaking and the darkness went quiet again.
But her name stayed with me all the way back to the servant quarters.
One child, unaccounted for.
Eleven years they had been looking.
And I was standing in their house.