The Weight of Silence
The bell in the east tower rang four times before the sun dared to rise, and I was already awake to hear it.
I had learned, over the years, to wake a breath before that bell tolled—some animal instinct bred into me by a decade of servitude, as though my body had grown a clock of its own devising. I lay still a moment in the dark, listening to the soft breathing of the other maids crowded into the narrow room we shared beneath the eaves of Castle Thornhold. Mira's foot had found its way into my ribs sometime in the night. Tomasin muttered in her sleep, something about turnips, which struck me as funny in the particular way that exhaustion makes everything funny at four in the morning.
I rose without lighting a candle. I knew this room with my eyes closed—had known it since I was seven years old and small enough that three of us fit on one pallet. The castle had taken me in in exchange for my labor, and I had given that labor faithfully, the way an orphan learns to give what is asked because the alternative is the road, and the road is colder than any attic.
I dressed quickly: the gray wool dress, the white apron gone soft and thin from a thousand washings, my hair bound back…
