The Girl Called Sera
Zarina went back four nights later.
She told herself she had waited deliberately.
Going back the next evening would have felt too eager. Two nights seemed little better. By the fourth, the reasoning had become thin enough that she stopped pretending it mattered.
Leaving the palace was still the harder part. The eastern yard was no good that night, so she went out behind a crate with the kitchen crews instead, and did not breathe properly until the wall was behind her.
The route to the city was easier this time. She knew where to turn, which alley opened onto the narrow street, and which building to look for.
The curtain was still there.
For a moment she wondered whether the room beyond it would feel different now that she knew what to expect.
It did not.
The music was different. The crowd was smaller. Someone had moved half the tables. Tessa was nowhere in sight.
Zarina stood near the entrance longer than she wanted to admit.
Then Oren noticed her.
“Sera.”
He lifted a hand from across the room.
That was enough.
She went over.
Tessa arrived perhaps twenty minutes later carrying a bundle of fabric under one arm. She dropped it onto a chair and sat down without removing her coat.
“You came back.”
Zarina nodded.
“I said I might.”
“I know.”
Tessa reached for a cup someone had left on the table, smelled it, and decided against drinking it.
“Good.”
There was no great welcome.
No one seemed particularly impressed that she had returned.
Zarina found she preferred that.
After that, going back became easier.
Going back to the city, at least.
Getting out of the palace did not.
There were nights when Zarina dressed as Sera and never made it beyond the service corridors. A guard changed shifts unexpectedly. A steward remained in the yard too long. Once, outgoing carts were searched after food went missing from the kitchens.
On those nights she went back upstairs angry and disappointed.
She was learning that escaping the palace was not a trick she had mastered. It was a system she had learned to read.
Some nights the system gave her an opening.
Some nights it did not.
When she did make it out, she began returning once a week.
Sometimes twice.
She did not always find the same people there.
Some nights Oren came directly from work and still had dust in his hair. Sometimes Tessa appeared late because a performance had run longer than expected. Leni rarely stayed past midnight because she had to be at the bakery before sunrise.
There were others.
A musician named Rike who spoke very little unless someone asked about instruments.
A seamstress called Marra who always seemed to be repairing somebody else’s clothes.
Davin, who claimed to study law but complained about studying often enough that Zarina suspected very little law was involved.
There was no formal introduction to any of them.
People simply appeared at the table often enough that eventually Zarina knew their names.
And eventually they knew hers.
Sera.
Only Sera.
At first, Zarina remained careful whenever conversation turned toward family or work.
She had prepared a vague story.
Her father dealt in trade.
Her household travelled.
She had spent much of her childhood outside the city.
None of it was elaborate enough to invite questions.
Most of the time, nobody asked many.
That surprised her.
At court, knowing who someone belonged to was one of the first things people wanted to establish.
Family.
Guild.
Title.
Marriage prospects.
Alliances.
Here, people were more interested in whether she wanted another drink.
She also learned that the room with the curtain was only one place among many.
Sometimes everyone left together.
There was a food stall several streets away that stayed open until dawn. Tessa liked it because the owner gave away whatever had not sold by the end of the night.
There was a cellar beneath a print shop where musicians gathered on certain evenings.
There was a courtyard behind an old boarding house where actors rehearsed in summer because the owner tolerated the noise.
Zarina followed them.
The city expanded again.
There were doors she had walked past without noticing. Courtyards hidden behind ordinary walls. Rooms above shops where ten people somehow became thirty by midnight.
Nothing about it seemed organized.
That was part of what made it appealing.
Plans changed constantly.
People arrived late.
Someone would say they were going one place and half an hour later everybody would end up somewhere else.
Zarina, who had spent most of her life with every day planned around lessons, audiences, meals, ceremonies and appearances, found the disorder refreshing.
The first time Tessa asked what she wanted to do, Zarina did not know how to answer.
They were standing outside a closed theatre.
The performance they had intended to see had been cancelled.
Oren wanted to find somewhere to drink.
Leni wanted food.
Tessa looked at Zarina.
“What do you want?”
Zarina thought she had misheard.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
She looked between them.
“I don’t mind.”
Tessa waited.
Zarina felt oddly exposed.
Nobody asked her that without already having prepared acceptable choices.
“Food,” she said eventually.
Leni nodded.
“Good.”
And they went for food.
The decision was so small that Zarina thought about it for the rest of the night.
She began learning ordinary things she should probably have known already.
How much a bowl of stew should cost.
Which merchants doubled their prices when they saw expensive clothes.
How to recognize when a tavern owner wanted customers to leave without actually saying so.
How to eat standing up without dropping half of it down the front of her dress.
That last one took longer.
Tessa saw her spill sauce down her sleeve and handed her a cloth.
“You’ve done that before.”
“No.”
“Really?”
“No.”
Tessa looked surprised, then shrugged.
“You’ll learn.”
There was no amusement in it beyond the obvious.
Zarina wiped her sleeve.
Another time she bought a pair of shoes from a market stall because she liked them.
She paid the first price the merchant asked.
Leni stared at her afterward.
“You didn’t bargain.”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
“You aren’t supposed to. You just should.”
“What’s the difference?”
Leni thought about it.
“I don’t know.”
She took the shoes from Zarina, turned one over, and examined the sole.
“You paid too much.”
“How much too much?”
“A lot.”
Zarina sighed.
Leni handed them back.
“At least they’re decent.”
They were not.
The sole separated from one of them within two weeks.
Zarina kept them anyway.
Not everything happened at the table.
There was a woman who sold fried dough from a stall beside the river bridge, and Zarina bought some on her way back one night because the smell reached her before the stall did.
The third time, the woman looked at her.
“You again.”
Zarina stopped.
“Again?”
“You were here last week.”
She had been.
The woman spooned honey across the dough without being asked.
“Less this time?”
Zarina looked at her.
“Yes. Please.”
There was somebody waiting behind her, so the woman handed it over and turned away, and that was the whole of it.
Zarina moved aside and ate standing up and did not drop any of it.
It was a small thing to be remembered for. Not her face from a coin. Not her father. Not a procession that had closed a road.
Honey.
She thought about it the entire way back to the palace wall.
There were things she disliked too.
She discovered very quickly that she hated smoke-filled rooms.
She disliked drinking enough to lose control of her balance.
She did not enjoy being pressed into crowds where she could barely move.
Once, Davin took them to a small gathering in an upstairs room where half the people seemed to be taking something from a little glass vial.
Tessa tried it.
Oren did not.
Someone offered it to Zarina.
She shook her head.
“No.”
The person offering it shrugged and passed it to somebody else.
Nobody insisted.
That stayed with her.
At the palace, refusal was rarely simple.
If she declined food, someone worried.
If she refused an invitation, someone took offence.
If she changed her mind, servants rearranged entire rooms.
Here she could say no.
And then nothing happened.
She began to understand that freedom was not only doing things she had been forbidden to do.
Sometimes it was simply being allowed to refuse.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
Sera became easier.
That was the only way Zarina could describe it.
Sera did not need to remember where every noble family sat in relation to another at state dinners.
Sera did not have to ask whether a joke might be repeated outside the room.
Sera did not need to know which guild envoy was currently offended by which minister.
She could be bored.
She could be rude by accident.
She could admit she knew nothing about something.
One evening, Rike asked whether she knew how to tune a stringed instrument.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
Zarina looked at him.
“Can you teach me?”
He handed her the instrument.
She was terrible.
Rike corrected her fingers several times without becoming impatient.
When she finally produced something vaguely resembling the right note, he nodded.
“Again.”
So she did.
For nearly an hour.
Nobody applauded.
Nobody praised her for learning quickly.
Nobody turned it into an achievement.
When she was done, her fingertips hurt.
She liked that too.
Returning always placed a limit on the night.
Sera could wander the city, but Zarina still had to watch the hour.
Before dawn, food and supply crews began arriving at the palace. That was usually her safest opportunity to get back inside. Once the household stewards began their morning rounds, the lower corridors filled with people far more likely to recognize her.
So Zarina learned the bells.
She learned how long it took to walk back from Tessa’s theatre, from the curtained room, from the boarding-house courtyard.
Sometimes she left while everyone else remained.
She hated doing it.
But missing the morning deliveries would leave her outside with no convincing way home.
The palace began to feel different afterward.
Not unbearable.
Not yet.
Just louder in ways it had not been before.
Zarina became more aware of the small rituals surrounding her.
Doors held open before she reached them.
Meals appearing without her asking.
Servants standing behind chairs.
Conversations stopping when she entered.
Everywhere she went, somebody anticipated what she might need.
Once, at breakfast, she reached for a pot of tea.
A servant moved to pour it for her.
Zarina had already taken hold of the handle.
They both stopped.
“I have it,” she said.
The servant withdrew immediately.
“Of course, Your Highness.”
Zarina poured her own tea.
It should have meant nothing.
Instead she found herself irritated.
Not with the servant.
That made it worse.
The man had only done what he had been trained to do.
She had spent her whole life accepting it.
Now she noticed.
The late returns began costing her sleep.
Even on nights when everything went perfectly, Zarina still had to wait for the right incoming crew, get through the service yard, return to the storage room, change, clean her hands and reach her chambers before the palace properly woke.
Sometimes that left her only a few hours in bed.
Balif noticed.
He did not begin with suspicion.
He began with sleep.
Zarina had always disliked mornings, but lately she had become almost impossible before noon.
One morning he found her sitting through a history lesson with her chin resting against one hand.
She had not turned a page in several minutes.
Balif stopped speaking.
Zarina looked up.
“Why did you stop?”
“You weren’t listening.”
“I was.”
“What did I say?”
She looked at the page.
Balif waited.
“Something about the eastern provinces.”
“No.”
Zarina rubbed her eyes.
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
He closed the book.
“You’ve said that three times this week.”
She straightened.
“I’ve been reading late.”
“What?”
Zarina glanced at the shelves.
There were hundreds of possible answers.
That was the problem.
Balif watched her.
She chose one.
“Poetry.”
His expression changed very slightly.
Zarina knew immediately she had made a mistake.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You made a face.”
“I have a face. It does things.”
Zarina almost smiled, but Balif did not.
He looked tired himself.
“Are you well?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
He studied her for another moment.
Then he reopened the book.
“All right.”
He did not ask again.
That made Zarina more uncomfortable than if he had.
A few days later, Balif saw the shoes.
Zarina had forgotten them beneath a chair in her sitting room.
Cheap brown leather.
Poor stitching.
One sole beginning to come loose.
Balif picked one up.
“These yours?”
Zarina looked over.
“Yes.”
He turned it in his hand.
“Where did you get them?”
“In the city.”
“You bought these?”
“Yes.”
Balif pressed his thumb against the loose sole.
“You were robbed.”
Zarina took the shoe from him.
“I know.”
“Why are you keeping them?”
“I like them.”
“They’re falling apart.”
“I still like them.”
Balif looked at her.
Then at the shoe.
“All right.”
He let the matter drop.
At least outwardly.
He began noticing other things after that.
Nothing alarming by itself.
Expressions Zarina had not used before.
Songs she hummed without realizing it.
A familiarity with streets she had no official reason to know.
Once, during a carriage journey, she corrected the driver when he said a particular road was closed.
“There is another way through.”
The driver looked back.
“Your Highness?”
Zarina stopped.
Balif was sitting opposite her.
She felt his eyes on her.
“I heard someone mention it.”
Balif said nothing.
The carriage took another route.
For Zarina, the lies still felt small.
That mattered.
She did not think of herself as deceiving everyone around her.
Not really.
She was protecting something.
There was a difference.
At least she believed there was.
The palace already possessed most of her life.
Her name belonged to it.
Her duties belonged to it.
Her time belonged to it.
Surely she was allowed to keep one part for herself.
Sera belonged to nobody.
That thought began to settle more deeply than she noticed.
One night, she and Tessa sat outside on the steps behind the old theatre.
The others had gone ahead.
Tessa was sewing a tear in one of her sleeves because she had caught it on a nail.
Zarina watched her.
“Why don’t you replace the coat?”
Tessa glanced down at it.
“Costs money.”
“You work.”
“Sometimes.”
Zarina frowned.
Tessa threaded the needle again.
“The theatre hasn’t paid us for two weeks.”
“They can do that?”
“They can until somebody stops working.”
“Then why don’t you stop?”
Tessa looked at her.
“Because then I don’t get paid at all.”
Zarina was quiet.
It was an answer that made perfect sense and none at all.
At the palace, unpaid wages were numbers in reports.
Sometimes complaints.
Sometimes disputes between guild representatives.
She had never sat beside someone repairing the same old coat because a theatre had failed to pay her.
“Is that common?”
Tessa shrugged.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Who you work for. How badly they need you. Whether they think you’ll leave.”
She pulled the thread tight.
Zarina thought about offering her money.
The thought came automatically.
She had enough hidden in her room to replace Tessa’s entire wardrobe.
Then she imagined explaining why Sera happened to possess that much.
She said nothing.
Tessa finished the stitch.
“It’s fine.”
She held the sleeve up.
The repair was crooked.
Zarina smiled.
“That doesn’t look fine.”
“It’s good enough in the dark.”
They sat there a little longer.
Nothing else was said about it.
On her way home that night, Zarina realized there were things about these people she did not understand.
Their lives were harder than hers in ways she had never had to consider.
But they also possessed freedoms she envied.
Tessa complained about work and then simply did not go the following day.
Oren argued with his uncle.
Leni changed rooms after a disagreement with her landlord.
Their choices carried consequences, but they were still choices.
Zarina’s life was safer.
Easier.
Kinder, in many ways.
She knew that.
Yet everything had already been decided for her so far in advance that sometimes she felt she was merely arriving at appointments made before she was old enough to speak.
The thought troubled her.
So she stopped thinking about it.
The next morning, the Supreme Ruler joined her for breakfast.
He was reading correspondence while he ate.
Zarina was tired again.
She kept her eyes on her plate.
Her father set one letter aside.
“You’re quiet.”
“I’m eating.”
“You can usually do both.”
Zarina looked up.
He was not accusing her of anything.
She relaxed.
“I stayed awake too late.”
“Reading?”
For one terrible instant she wondered whether Balif had spoken to him.
Then her father smiled faintly and returned to the letter.
Zarina understood.
He was teasing her.
“Yes,” she said.
“What?”
She hesitated.
This time she had prepared an answer.
“A travel account from the western coast.”
“Any good?”
“Not really.”
“Then why stay awake?”
“I wanted to finish it.”
He nodded as though that was perfectly reasonable.
The conversation moved elsewhere.
A dispute among merchants.
A delegation arriving the following week.
Something about repairs to one of the southern roads.
Zarina listened.
She answered when asked.
She smiled at the right moments.
After breakfast her father kissed her forehead before leaving.
“Try sleeping tonight.”
“I will.”
She meant it when she said it.
She even intended to.
That evening, Tessa had told her there would be music in the courtyard behind the boarding house.
Zarina lay in bed for nearly an hour.
She could stay.
Nobody was forcing her to leave.
Her father believed she was reading.
Balif had stopped asking about her sleep.
She could close her eyes and wake in the morning and nothing would be wrong.
Then she imagined Tessa sewing costumes beside the courtyard while Rike tried to tune somebody else’s instrument.
Oren would probably arrive late.
Leni might bring bread from the bakery.
They would not wait for her.
The evening would happen whether Sera was there or not.
Zarina sat up.
A few minutes later, she was dressed, and she let the first opportunity go because she did not trust it, and took the second.
By the time she reached the eastern stairwell, she was no longer thinking about whether she should go.
Only whether she would arrive before the music started.