Nalia

Nalia was Zarina’s personal attendant from the time Zarina was eleven, and for the better part of a decade the member of the Supreme Ruler’s household who saw the most and said the least. She was a neat, compact woman some years past thirty, with a plain round face that people forgot while they were still looking at it and brown hair pinned flat under a linen cap. She never hurried. She had a habit of smoothing whatever cloth lay nearest her hand, as though the world would be in better order once its creases were seen to, and she sent most of her wages to her mother in the city.

She was the first to know that Zarina was leaving the palace at night, from a crescent of black grit on the hem of a white robe, and the last to say so. She brushed the city out of palace hems and drew blankets over a sleeping girl and said nothing. Then, as the nights grew longer and the mornings worse, she powdered over marks no fall had made, and covered bruises she did not ask about, and watched Zarina drink a whole vial on the floor of her bedchamber in a court gown, and helped her change anyway, not happily. When the Supreme Ruler asked her whether his daughter was sleeping, she told him yes. It was the first lie of her life, and she told it for Zarina.

“Then why are you sneaking?” she asked at the door, on the last night of Sera. It struck harder than she meant it to.

When Zarina stopped hiding, so did Nalia: she brushed Sera’s coat, hung it where anyone could see it, and patched its elbows. On the day of the renunciation she packed only what had gone down the service stair, added the contents of Zarina’s locked drawer without being asked, and went to the steward to ask leave to go with her. She was told there was no household to go with.

Whenever anyone asked what Her Highness did at night, she smoothed the nearest cloth and said that she did not know.