Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Morgan
I’m doomed.
I thrust my hand toward the bottom of the bucket, the water quickly tapering from hot to tepid.
I’m so doomed.
My teeth have chattered hard enough to lodge a permanent headache at the base of my neck. It spreads tentacles up through my temples until the vice threatens to implode me.
Royally, massively, no way out of it.
The worst part is admitting it’s my fault, and Faye was right. The girl who hadn’t said more than a handful of words, modestly given, at a time had ripped me a new one, three nights ago. And I’d needed to hear it, but it was too little, too late.
I’d sealed myself in this fate irrevocably.
Drawing my hand up, I wring out the towel and smear the cloth in circles over the wavy glass. Window washing.
Daisy practically threw the bucket in my hand this morning. I’ve never seen a woman with such savage glee.
And she’d taken great pains to tell me she wasn’t going to help me this time. Wash all the outside windows on the ground floor, and when I finished… fresh torture waited.
It’s the job I’d wanted the other day, an offhanded commentary on my life and my future that I’d get to do now.
And yet I’ll take this a thousand times over being sent to the mines. Especially with the delightful pictures both Milkin and Faye had painted for me.
I’d been blind thinking I had the remotest chance of making it out of that place alive, let alone intact.
No more studying, no more attempts to get my mother’s sapphire back from the bony-necked Druella. No more anything.
The last streaky lines of soot disappear underneath the edges of the cloth, and I throw the towel back into the bucket, heaving it over the side of the terrace and sending the water away. It splashes out in an arc, and the thirsty stone sucks it up.
I’ll need new water.
Milkin wants me in the dining hall.
My knuckles dig into the small of my back and I stretch, face to the sky.
No fresh air in the mines, either. If they decide to work me in the pit, it’s worse.
The clouds are shaped like animals today. A great fluffy white pile thins out under the careful brush of wind and becomes a snake. A little further down, the sharp edges of a raven wing float lazily across the blue.
A shadow falls and I wince at the plaintive roar of the dragon zipping into the aerie. No more dragons, not for a long time. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see or hear one without thinking the worst.
My blood, torn between freezing and boiling, turns sluggish in my veins. I wrap numb fingers around the bucket handle and haul it around to the outside spigot to refill. There’s plenty of soap stocked in discreet closets throughout the castle.
The water reaches the uppermost line, the appropriate line, if you’re Daisy, before I twitch off the spigot. Then, in will go a healthy dose of lye.
I’m careful not to spill a drop on the way to the closet.
The paneled door is open slightly when I get there. A familiar black-haired girl ducks down to the bottom shelf.
I open my mouth to greet Faye, but nothing comes out. She eyes me up and down slowly, and I’m probably mistaking the flash of sympathy in her gaze. She dips her head in a curt acknowledgement before scurrying off with a feather duster.
At least it’s not pity. Or glee.
The girls love their glee, especially because today I’ll be handling the dining room. It’s another one of those jobs better made for multiple people and handed off only to one as a punishment. But it’s got to be better than the basilisk den.
Milkin is a sadist with a lot of years under her belt. She’s honed her craft with precision. I wonder if she truly understands what she’s done by giving me until the end of the week before booting me into the pit.
The clock’s ticking down before my departure but I have time to think, to figure out how to be useful. I’ll do anything to fix this.
The heavy bucket permanently bends my bones into arches to accommodate its weight. I slog it along the hallway without a single drop spilled on the black and gold marble floor.
Faye was right. I’m desperate to stay. Now that there is almost no way for me to accomplish it, my tune has changed, and I’m ready to sing like a trapped songbird.
Give me a task and I’ll manage it.
I can’t save anyone or honor my mother if I’m gone. Doing so makes her sacrifice nothing but a waste, which is outrageous.
Why had I let it get so far?
I’d been blinded by grief. Somehow even that feels like a cop out or some sort of victim mentality, which Elspeth would have beaten out of me if she’d heard. The one thing my sister hated most in this world was someone who played the martyr.
Someone like me.
Several other maids quietly snake past me with their gazes averted. They don’t hide their under-the-breath snickers—they think I’m one of the most ridiculous women they’ve ever seen, and at this point…
They’re absolutely right.
The side hallway opens up into the grandiose entrance hall. There’s no conspicuous trail of water behind me this time. This bucket doesn’t leak.
It’s a small win.
I’ll take everything I can get but somehow I can’t make my mind interpret the fraying smile as something genuine. Despite my best efforts, of course.
I step into the dining hall, and breath catches in my throat, bucket in hand instead of a school satchel. The gothic arches above stretch like cathedral bones, elegant and cold, too grand for someone like me now. Rows of long wooden tables stretch across the room like battalions ready for a feast.
Now, the golden tablecloths glimmer mockingly, as if the tables are dressed for a ball I’ll never be invited to.
Each one is crowned with a black candelabra, its curved arms arching like the claws of something ancient, the flames casting romantic light across emptied plates and ghosted dreams. Even the chandelier overhead gleams with a kind of cruel beauty, a jeweled spiderweb, its crystals catching firelight as if winking at my fall from grace.
My steps echo—soft, careful, unwelcome. This room wasn’t made for servants. It was made for heirs, for the chosen. For the powerful. For alliances, rivalries, and whispered truths traded over silver goblets.
And here I am. Soon I’ll be sweeping crumbs beneath golden cloths and erasing traces of a world I was never allowed to join.
I draw in a breath scented with burned sugar and something heady, like roast beef. My stomach growls and my mouth instantly waters in the worst kind of way. I’d kill for a slab of roast beef.
None of those things ever trickle down to us. The maids are fed well, Faye was right again, but that doesn’t mean we eat like the royalty we serve in the floors above.
Hearty peasant fare, Elspeth would have called it. She’d hate this room on principle.
The dining hall is large enough to host an entire battalion with space to spare. Not one but two fireplaces stretch across the east and the west walls, stocked with neat pyramids of logs in preparation for tonight’s dinner.
The mess left behind from lunch makes my eyes water.
Be useful.
My hands ache and I set the bucket down delicately before I make an even bigger mess of things.
The students are nothing but slobs. Deliberately?
I’m not sure whether it’s intentional cruelty, deliberate chaos, or the sort of offhanded lack of care that comes when you are too busy to notice there is anything, or anyone, beneath you.
The underside of every table is decorated with debris and food, the detritus of a good meal. Several goblets are overturned and leaking the last of their contents through the cracks in the wood, staining the tablecloths.
It’s hopeless. My stomach sinks lower and lower.
“How can I be useful this way?” I glance at the ceiling, agonized. “How am I going to save myself here?”
The beams have no answers for me, clearly.
The only way to prove my usefulness would be to do the best job cleaning anyone has ever seen, which essentially amounts to working miracles. I’ve got no magic. No one does. Which means miracles aren’t a part of my wheelhouse and finding one now will take an act of some benevolent god or goddess.
“How do I prove myself?”
My voice echoes back to me and the hopelessness of each syllable grows louder on the return. The sound overpowers the last of my flimsy hope and the deceptive layer of confidence I’ve wrapped around me in self-preservation.
A soft snicker echoes from the doorway. I turn to see Daisy leaning against the frame, arms crossed, with two other maids flanking her. Her satisfied smirk tells me everything I need to know.
“Having trouble, Morgan?” she calls sweetly. “Such a shame the students were so… messy today.”
The other maids giggle, and Daisy’s eyes glitter with malice before she disappears down the hall.
My jaw clenches as their laughter fades down the corridor. Fine. They want to make this harder? I’ll show them exactly what I’m made of. Let them watch me turn their sabotage into success.
I get to work on the closest table, clearing the dishes into a bin for the kitchen workers to haul away. They are silent presences behind me, doing their job without looking up for small talk.
How can people stand it? How can they keep doing this, day after day, with nothing but silence as company? There is no laughter and no life in this place outside of the students making the most of their time here.
It’s no use wondering about what I’d have done. The acceptance letter belongs to someone else in a different lifetime.
It definitely doesn’t belong to me. I wouldn’t have fit in here, anyway, no matter how smart I always thought I was.
Now I’m a mixture of pain and resignation. I’m made up of the aches in my body and the permanent throb in my hips. I’m the calluses hardening my palm and the ticking clock damning me more with every passing day.
Finally, the tables are clear, and the uneasy tread of footsteps marks the silence. Several maids with their heads down load their arms with the filthy linens.
I glance over and greet them. “Hey. Hi.”
Both look literally anywhere but at me.