Everless is a thicket of towers and palisades, picture windows with paned frosted glass, and balconies hung with flags of green and gold. An alley of carefully tended trees cuts everything in half, including the estate. At one end, the path is stoppered by the gate, where we enter; though it’s not visible from where we sit, I know at the other end is a lake, bounded by Everless’s walls and blackened with old ice and shadows.
In spite of myself, I devour the sight—the lawn blanketed in glittering snow, the trees bare and shivering. I loved Everless best in summer, when flowers spilled from their beds and the gardeners recruited servant children to pick the dandelions marring the emerald lawn. But the pale winter light makes the estate even more beautiful, like something carved of silver and crystal.
Once all of us have unloaded and stand, shivering, in the courtyard, an older footman with a drooping face shepherds us into the narrow servants’ corridor. I keep my head down, heart beating fast, convinced that at any moment someone will recognize me, but the servants barely glance at us.
We’re led through a sloping corridor I don’t recognize, and into the labyrinthine network of servants’ halls and quarters. A sudden memory hits me: Roan discovered that if you press your ears to these walls, you can sometimes hear nobles talk in the main corridor above. Most of what we heard was tiresome, lived-too-long aristocrats amusing themselves by gossiping about so-and-so’s affair or comparing their investments, though we were too young to understand what that meant—centuries bought and sold and traded the way Papa and I played jacks for sweets. But every so often Roan would speak to me through the wall, when he couldn’t be down in the servants’ corridors to play. Even then his voice, his laugh, made my heart race.
Now, though the halls stream with servants, we pass through in silence. I know everyone must be hard at work, preparing the castle for the Queen’s visit and Roan’s wedding—that, or Everless has changed, and there is even less tolerance for chatter and laughter.
Soon, we find ourselves in the kitchen, a cavernous space that would hold my entire cottage in Crofton three times over, filled with servants and ringing with shouted conversation, different accents coming together like music. Like Sempera itself, Everless plays host to people with roots in many different lands. After she ascended the throne, the Queen—finding herself leading a battered, vulnerable kingdom—offered a hundred years to every person from elsewhere who was willing to settle in Sempera permanently, but closed the borders to travelers and merchants. People could come in, but nobody could leave.
At one enormous basin, several fresh-faced young servants work to take apart a whole side of beef. I think of Amma and feel a pang. I’ve watched her strip and dry meat for years—compared to her expert hands, these servants are slow. At this rate, the meat will spoil before they’ve finished.
When I sidle closer to them, away from the group, thinking of offering to help, one boy practically snarls at me, “Find your own work.”
As I move away, I catch a glimpse of the thin white line drawn across his hand. It’s a scar from selling time. Are the blood-irons he earns for himself, I wonder, or someone else?
An entire wooden table is occupied by young servants standing in a line, cutting mountains of root vegetables, and at another table, white-coated in flour, servants knead, pound, and cut rolls into shape. Two massive stoves lick flame into the room, and dozens of pots simmer, stew, and spatter, filling the room with scented steam. The smells make my head spin. I haven’t eaten anything since the bread I took from the cupboard this morning.
A stunning, tall girl with a mass of curls and wearing Gerling colors enters the kitchen carrying a silver tray, which she sets down on a wooden counter. Immediately, brown-clad kitchen servants fill it with plates of sun-colored pastries, a small bronze kettle, and ornately carved utensils. Waiting, the girl plucks a length of twine from the table, languidly tying her hair back with it.
“Lord Gerling pulled me aside this morning,” she says, eyes bright. Her strong arms are crosshatched with freckles. “He wants me to wait on the Queen when she arrives. Lady Verissa agrees.”
Another girl snorts. “We all know why that is,” she says, not tearing her eyes from the onion she’s chopping.
A gray-haired woman in a beautifully embroidered apron cuts through the kitchen, and several servants trot after her, like ducklings after their mother. “Addie,” she says to the tall, curly haired one. “You still serve Lady Gerling, not the Queen,” she snaps. The girl—Addie—hurriedly picks up the tray. “Now, off with you.”
The older woman looks familiar: her face stirs feelings of warmth and safety, though I can’t remember her name. She greets each new Everless girl with a few brisk questions, then directs them to go to one station or another.
When she comes to me, she stops. For a moment, she frowns. Does she recognize me too? But then she blinks, once, twice, and the brief look of uncertainty passes.
“Your name?” she asks.
I consider giving a false name, but then remember Papa’s first rule for lying: tell the truth as much as you can. “Jules,” I say. It’s common enough. “From Crofton.”
“Jules,” she repeats after me. “Have you been in service before? I need someone who can deliver trays to lords’ and ladies’ chambers with no fuss. And for Sorceress’s sake, I need a girl who won’t get nervous and drop her tray.”
Behind her, one of the servants blushes all the way to her ears. She seems like the nervous type, definitely the kind to drop her tray.
I shake my head. When her brow creases, I add, “But I’m a fast learner. I don’t fluster easily.”
I brace myself for more questions. Instead, the woman gives me a final look-over and then nods. “Let’s try you out, then, Jules from Crofton.” And with an arch of her eyebrows, she turns and sweeps away.
As a child at Everless, I lived with Papa in three rooms off the blacksmith’s hut. Like the ladies-in-waiting, the butler, and the underbutlers, we had rooms to ourselves. They were small, but ours to fill with little bits of metal and the smell of smoke.
Now, I realize, we were lucky. The servant women’s dormitory is a long hall containing a honeycomb of stacked beds, at least two hundred to my eye. They are pushed so close together that if we lie down in them, we could easily reach out and link hands.
I’m pleased that I was right—no one seems to recognize me, even servants who I remember from the old days. Ten years of hunger and cold have stretched me out, chipped away at any softness in me, so that I doubt anyone would recognize me as the blacksmith’s daughter unless Papa were by my side, ten years younger and in his apron. No one has time to study me, and I’m happy to blend into the crop of new servants who have descended on Everless for the wedding. After laying claim to one of the narrow beds and being outfitted with a simple brown kitchen uniform, I hurry back downstairs.
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?”
“Harlowe’s home to give birth, my lady,” I say. Cautiously, I approach her, stepping around cushions.
She scrutinizes me without speaking, her hands folded in her lap. Maybe she’s spent the entire day just staring out the window. Anger pricks at me. She’s lived more years than half of Crofton put together—years paid for by land taxes like the collector bled from my father yesterday—and this is how she spends them? Staring out a window at the frozen lawns of Everless?
“Is that chamomile?” She’s eyeing the carafe of tea on the tray. “Harlowe knows I don’t drink it. Chamomile is bad luck, you know.”
I’ve no idea. “No, ma’am,” I say. “We’ve brewed it for you especially.”
Her jaw moves, as if she’s chewing, before she speaks. “What news do you bring?”
“N-news, my lady?”
“Useless girl,” she spits, waving her hand as if to bat away a fly. “How long until the Queen arrives?”
“Two days, my lady,” I answer, having heard the frantic staff below flutter about the date. One month so the Queen and Lady Gold can make preparations for the wedding, and then Roan will be married on the eve of our spring. I remind myself that I have no claim on Roan, none at all.
“And the girl? Roan’s girl?”
“She’ll arrive with the Queen, my lady.” Roan’s girl. My chest tightens at her words. I feel my face heat, and hope Lady Sida won’t notice it.
“None of the other children Her Majesty has adopted have lived long enough to take the throne, have they? What makes Roan think this girl will be different?” she mutters, returning her gaze to the window.
I hesitate, unsure if I should ignore her mutterings or respond. It’s true that the Queen’s adopted before. By historical accounts, one child died of the plague that swept through decades ago. Another in a raid in the palace. Another by drowning. All before I was born. I don’t care much for royal lineage, or for anything to do with the palace—Papa always said that history and stories can’t buy bread—but I am interested in the hint of accusation behind the elder Gerling’s words: that the Queen will never die and never pass on her throne. Feeling brave, I tell her, “But the Queen named Ina Gold her heir, my lady.”
Lady Sida narrows her eyes at me, a smile spreading like oil over her features. “I say she eats their hearts to stay young.”
Her words hang in the air. I’ve no real love for the Queen, but the wild accusation still makes my skin itch, like it’s anticipating a blow. It smacks of madness, though Lady Sida does not seem mad—she’s old, but her voice is firm, her mind intact. She’s taunting me. Hinton was right to be afraid. As swiftly as possible, I set the tray down on the stand next to her and wait to be dismissed.
But then she does something that chills me even more.
She produces something glittering from her breast pocket. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s a year-coin, almost as wide as my palm and shining gold. A year of life. It takes everything in me to stop myself from seizing it from her withered hand and running back to the cottage. To Papa.
I wonder how far I would get before Ivan caught up.
“Stir this in,” she says impatiently. “Hurry, before the tea gets cold.”
Hesitantly, I reach out. My hand trembles as I take the coin—the pulse in my own fingers feels as if it’s coming from within the coin, all the life this little thing could give me. Give Papa.
All the life it’s already cost someone else.
But the coin, so heavy and permanent in my hand, dissolves like honey when I slip it into the cup of tea. Lady Sida purses her weathered lips to the cup and takes a long, leisurely sip. I don’t think I imagine the color that flows back into her cheeks.
Not waiting to be dismissed, I curtsy before hurrying from the room, rattled by the image of the old woman’s throat moving as the year entered her blood. Now, more than ever, the quickening of my heart at the mention of Roan’s name feels like a betrayal—of myself, of Crofton, of Papa. How can I still hold feelings for Roan, who comes from a family who treats a year of life like a cube of sugar? Whose family has destroyed mine, and so many others?