Nalia

Nalia was Zarina’s personal attendant from the time Zarina was eleven, and the person who knew first, longest, and at the greatest cost to herself that the Supreme Ruler’s daughter was leaving the palace at night.

She came from the lower east range with the rest of the household staff. Her mother was in the city and her brother’s family were in Harrow, and she saw them at the winter holiday and sometimes in summer if the schedule allowed. Most of her wages went to her mother. Asked by Zarina, once, what those wages were — an ordinary question that revealed, halfway through itself, exactly how little Zarina understood about anything — she gave the figure, and watched a young woman who had that morning read a submission concerning sums four thousand times larger discover that she could not tell whether it was a good one. She said only that it was a good post, and then, when Zarina apologised for never having bought anything in her life, that she did not suppose she had.

She laid out clothes, and could not always get Zarina out of bed, and did not say why. She was told once, sharply, to leave the morning’s clothes where they were, and stopped, and asked whether Zarina was sure, and went. She saw a streak of blue stage paint on Zarina’s wrist while fastening a sleeve and rubbed at it with a damp cloth, and when it would not come off she pulled the sleeve a little lower and said nothing to anybody for the rest of the day, and Zarina sat through the southern delegation beside her father with it hidden under embroidered silk.

What she never did was answer the question. When Balif finally asked her outright whether Her Highness left her rooms at night, her face tightened before she spoke and she looked down the corridor first, and then said she did not know, and did not know how often, and had never seen her go. Pressed, she gave him the one thing that was not quite a denial: that sometimes the bed had not been slept in. For months, perhaps. Asked why she had told nobody, she said Her Highness had asked her not to. Asked whether Zarina had actually said so, she said not directly.

She was never thanked for it and never rewarded for it, and when Zarina counted over the people at the palace who loved her, she put Nalia last and hedged it: Nalia, in her quiet way, probably did too.

She had a mother in the city, a brother’s family in Harrow, and a good post, and every single time she was asked she said that she did not know.