Of Whispers and Daggers ✓ [TLRQ #2]

Chapter 67.2 - Leavi

I wonder what the maid thinks as she lays the dress fit for a Lady on my narrow bed. From her pockets, she draws oils and plain hairpins. "I hope you haven't bathed yet, maedame."

I find it odd that she elevated me above my station—according to that etiquette book, you're not a maedame until you either manage your own house or get married. Not one person in Morineaux has called me that before. "I haven't."

She passes me the oils. "The prince recommended you use the infirmary bath, but I've permission to take you to the Ladies' bathing pool if you'd prefer."

"No, no." I'd much rather bathe here privately. The thought that someone might not unsettles me. "Here is fine."

"Will you require assistance, or should I wait for you up here?" The way she speaks, it's both polite and guiding, as though she wants to give honor to the station I don't have and knows I don't know how to fill that role. Who does she think I am, or am going to be, that the prince decided to dress me up and parade me as a Lady?

"I'll be fine on my own. Thank you."

I escape downstairs with the oils. Illesiarr raises an inquiring brow, but I just slip into the bathing room behind the stairs. With a prick of my finger on the statue, the room fills with roaring water. I lower myself into the pool and bathe, but water and oils can't change me into a Lady.

I float on the water. Why should it have to? These women are just like my mother, and I understand them much more intimately than they will ever understand me. I might have learned to serve these last few months, but I was not born a servant. I am worth no less than these women who wear glamour and gossip like a second skin.

Nervous birds still flutter in my stomach as I rise from the pool.

The warm air smells like roses and sugar, and I breathe it in. When was the last time I wore perfume? Memories of smoke and music fill my mind—the last party I went to in Erreliah. That night was supposed to be my final goodbye to all the Dock girls and to all the sneaking around Tavion Zahir caught me up in. For so long, I've marked the night I escaped Karsix as the night everything fell apart, but that wasn't where it started. A childhood best friend who wouldn't take no for an answer, my mother finding him drunk at our doorstep long after I'd come home, the truth coming out to her that I hadn't spent my every waking moment studying. That's what landed me in Karsix. That's what exiled me from Erreliah.

Clarity caves in over me, and I sink to the pool's edge. I don't want to go back to that. Erreliah has been a ghost in my mind for months, and I miss my home—but I don't miss my life there. I don't miss the mother I could never please. I don't miss the claustrophobic pressure to be the smartest, the brightest, the best. I don't miss the competition and the backbiting and the pointless self-centeredness. None of us were there to make Erreliah better; we were all there to make ourselves better and hope Erreliah noticed. I miss my father, and my bedroom, and my studies. But I don't miss him disappearing when Mother was angry; I don't miss feeling trapped; I don't miss science being all there was to life.