Dei stood behind an ornate bronze colored chair. Back straight, chest up, head held high, arms clasped behind her back. She was the picture of refined grace, and the shining beacon of a statuesque servant. Or so she had thought.
“Square your shoulders more girl. How many times do I have to say it?” Gerald berated her posture as he always did over the past couple days. Every standing position, sitting position, and even the art of bending over to grab something was practiced ad nauseum between the two of them for the last three days straight.
“And keep your head level, not angled. Remember you are a servant now girl, not whatever you might have been before.” The man never seemed to stop finding something in her appearance to correct. If her posture was correct, then her uniform had to be disheveled. If her uniform was disheveled, it meant she hadn’t taken enough care with her daily duties. If her daily chores were half-hearted, it was only because her posture was criticized for each and every moment of the day.
Dei found herself fantasizing about all the different ways she could kill the man when all this was said and done. Would it be more painful to drown, or get drawn and quartered?
“Stop daydreaming! Your response time is delayed when you allow your thoughts to wander. You must keep better control of your inclinations towards laziness or you will look shameful in front of our lord.”
She let her thoughts wander anyways. How could he even tell whether she was thinking about something else? Not like he could see her face anyways, though he had certainly tried. They gave the servants some small time to themselves, even for the ones in training as she was given a short eight hours a day to eat dinner, bathe, sleep, and eat breakfast the following day before they started training once again. Now, for someone that didn’t need to do any of those things, that gave her some decent free time to play around with.
She had spent most of her free time devising different methods of adding hair to her body, with mixed results. The most promising option she had found so far was to form several thousand strands of bone sticking out from the top of her skull, but make them so fine and fragile that they bent and curled under their own weight. The only problem was that making them so fragile had left her with massive chunks of hair breaking off every time something touched them. Instead, she found that she could more or less freeze these thinner strands into place after she had them arranged the way she liked by fusing the thin bone pieces together into more of a hair like hood rather than individual strands of hair. All of which led her to the simple joy of looking just a little bit more normal when the black head covering sometimes clung tightly to the low ponytail she was currently wearing.
“You are so absolutely hopeless, I don’t even know what to do with you!” The man’s never ending tirade finally brought her back to her senses. She still stood, as still as a human could stand and perhaps even more so as she pretended to attend an invisible man in the chair beside her.
“Why do you have to be such an untrained bore of a girl? Lord Julius had to have chosen one of the most imbecilic, daft-” Dei turned around to face the man, breaking her character to immediately come face to face with the old badger and place her mask less than an inch away from him. She almost hoped he could see the way her eyes burned through the covered slats of the mask.
“Stop! Just what are-” She reached up and grasped him by the throat, then lifted him up and off the ground like he were a child. The man flailed with his legs, his head turning funny shades of red and purple. She let him hover there, contemplating his actions for a few seconds before the door opened.
“Put him down, Denise.” Lord Julius’s voice came from behind her.
She released the man, letting him fall to the ground. The man scrambled away from her on his hands and knees, one hand clutching at his throat as he hacked and gasped for air. He didn’t stop either, crawling behind Lord Julius and out of the doorway like he wanted to be anywhere other than where she was.
‘Perfect.’ She thought. He’d deserved it.
Julius raised an eyebrow at her as she watched the man squirming, only closing the door once Gerald had left the room.
“My staff have told me that you are doing quite well with your classes, Lady Dei. When you actually put the effort in, of course.” He waited after he spoke, obviously expecting an answer that never came.
“Oh, right. I suppose I can only ask you yes or no questions when you don’t have something to write with.” He reached up to paw at his graying goatee as he thought about things.
Dei shrugged, then walked over to a nearby bookcase at the side of the room. She withdrew and opened several books before she found the one that she was looking for, then opened the nearby drawer to take out an ink and quill. Dei returned to the table to start writing out her speech to Julius as he watched her with a slight smile on his face.
“I doubt any of my other staff happen to know exactly which books in this study are empty journals, just by memory.” He said.
“If your staff berate me one more time in the name of ‘training’, I will turn them into my staff instead.”
“Of course lady Dei.” He bowed his flamboyant bow to mark his words. “Though I will say I think you’re about ready for some real work anyways. There’s a ball tonight. I’d like for you to attend it with me.”
Dei studied him for a moment, “I thought I was training as a servant to sneak into mansions and kill people.”
“Well yes, it’ll help with that too, but first I need to show you who needs killing. I can’t have you wandering around the city trying to find a person you’ve never met before. And don’t tell me you were planning on interrogating people with pen and parchment?”
“You might just have a decent point. But wont bringing me to balls draw attention to my lack of training?”
“Nonsense. You'll hardly have to do anything but stand there and look pretty. Marianne can take care of the actual servant work throughout the night. I just need you there to point out the nobles of importance so you can start learning who's who.”
“And your staff?”
“My staff will do whatever I tell them to do. The only person with more sway here is the house leader himself, and he's far too distracted by council proceedings to pay attention to little things like servants.”
Dei nodded, satisfied with the answers. She snapped the book closed with the ink still wet inside, aware that it would likely ruin the pages just as well as it erased her text.
“Now then Lady Dei. Would you like to join me for the afternoon? It might give you some last minute practice before we force you to stand still for several hours at the ball.”
Dei rolled her bony shoulders, though the motion didn't give her the same pleasure that it would have in life. She wordlessly walked behind Lord Julius to take up her spot in the customary position for the Princedom’s ‘elbow servant’ as she had learned. If a living servant was considered a talented statue in the eyes of these nobles, she'd just have to show them what they were missing.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
—
The carriage clattered down the street as Dei watched a crowd of people squished unceremoniously along the side of the road as they let the massive device through. Matthew sat to her left, while Julius and his typical elbow servant Marianne were seated across from them. The carriage was so loud as they bounced around on the uneven cobblestones below them that Julius had to almost yell across the carriage to be heard.
“Matthew, are you ready for this?”
“Of course, my Lord.” Matthew said.
Julius nodded approvingly as Matthew bowed his head slightly in his seat. Dei hadn't known what to expect from his role in the plan, but when Matthew fit into the servant staff just as easily as he fit in anywhere else? Well, she was starting to expect these things from him at this point. It turned out that his firemaking skills translated to cooking as well, a convenient skill to have when the Princedom nobility typically brought their own cooks to functions. It was all in the name of ‘personal taste’, but it seemed a bit obvious to Dei that they just didn't want to give their competition an easy chance to poison them.
There was something extravagant to the function as well, since many house leaders would bring entire wait staffs to the large balls, turning the kitchens into culinary battlefields between the great houses. For the lesser houses that couldn't afford to bring a talented cook with them from their often more distant country homes, the great houses would make extra dishes to fulfill the needs of the masses.
‘The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.’ Dei thought, ‘Unless you're trying to stab him I guess.’ She hid a glowing smile under her mask as she refused to allow any ounce of her mirth into the rigid posture she held matching the girl across from her. Marianne was like a mirror reflection of Dei's own appearance, though she did have a couple inches of height on her, she wore the same thin gloves tucked into a plain dress shirt and the customary servant's mask. More importantly, she was good. She hardly moved an inch, nor shifted in her seat a single time as the carriage rustled and bounced its way down the street.
Twin masks of white glowed in the dark carriage inside, neither breaking their forward stare for an instant. In the harsh lighting of the setting sun behind the nearby houses, she couldn't quite make out the eyes of the girl set deep into the mask across from her. There was no gauze stretched across the inside of her mask like Dei had been using, your average servant having no such need for anonymity to such a degree. Still, Dei found herself imagining what the woman might look like under the mask, if only to pass the time as they trundled along.
It didn't take all that much longer until they reached their destination and the carriage came to a stop. Marianne exited first, swiftly unlocking the door, making her way down the outer rim of the carriage in two graceful steps, then turning inward to hold the door open for her charge. Julius exited a bit more slowly, standing up tall as his chest made it through the door until he was fully upright before starting to make his way down the carved footholds like he was walking down a simple flight of stairs. Dei and Matthew followed after him, grasping the side rail meant to help people up and down as they made their way out without making too much of a fool of themselves.
Dei took up the elbow servant position, though she did so on Julius's right side instead of his left, allowing Marianne to close the carriage door after them and take up the more traditional position as they walked forward. Matthew hovered behind the group as all three ‘servants’ walked forward with their hands clasped behind their backs. They marched up the keep steps towards the house of whispers and a small retinue of guards that gathered by the entrance. A servant man with a list of paper greeted them as they got closer.
“Lord Julius, thank you for joining us tonight. But I see that you have two elbow servants today for some reason?”
“Yes, I do.” Julius spoke, drawing out his words just a little bit more than was natural for him in private. “My head steward said that it might do her some good getting some practice in before serving in an official role at a later time.” He gestured over in Dei's direction.
“Of course my lord. And what might your name be, dear?” He addressed the question towards Dei, but Julius answered for her.
“Denise D'elm” he said.
“Oh my.” The servant made a small but respectful bow towards Dei. “Then you may proceed lord Julius.” The man held a thin smile on his face alongside a twinkle in his eye as he bade them inside.
‘Just who is Julius making me out to be?’ Dei thought. She hadn't been bothered much by the pseudonym he had given her upon arriving as his servant, but she also hadn't been aware that it would have such an effect on people when they heard it.
Dei matched pace with Julius and Marianne, the three walking in lockstep as they made sure to time their left feet to match lord Julius's casual gait through the entrance way. The hallways of the stone keep were decidedly more militant in architecture than Dei had been expecting from the head state building in the capital. Plain stone corridors lined with numerous torch sconces alternating with thick wooden doors marked the path deeper into the palace grounds. It was technically a palace in Dei's opinion, the seat of power within the Princedom domain, but the fact that it was also the headquarters for their military as well as the location of the council chambers made it a bit more utilitarian than the home of the Golden King.
A single guard led them forward down the twisting corridors, beckoning towards a closed door halfway through that marked Matthew's turn to leave the group. A roar of pots and pans clattered in the distance as he stepped through the door, disappearing into the kitchens as the rest of the group continued on. A few more nonsensical turns and corridors later, the guard led them through an open set of double doors into the first room with any real warmth to it since they had arrived. They walked through a close knit mass of people who ranged in colorful dresses and suits corresponding with the houses that they belonged to.
‘Red for house Brent, Blue for House Jocell, Yellow for House Jurn, Purple for House Geld, and Green for House Whisper.’ The teachings recounted themselves in Dei's head in the same snot-nosed tone of voice that Gerald always used when he was teaching her something he thought she should already know. Which was everything.
In between them all, servants in various shades of black clothing meandered between groups of colorful nobles, guiding food and drinks to their intended recipients. While the nobles did bring their own cooks to the functions, the serving staff was operated almost entirely by House Whisper, the true owners of the keep. Under every upheld platter of refreshments was a small green splash of color attached to the breast pocket of every server. Combined with the matching green uniforms of men standing guard around the outside of the massive room, Dei was surprised that green wasn't the dominant color.
Instead, a mix of various unaffiliated shades melded into the group as lesser families in brown, orange, beige, and white filtered into the holes left between the great houses. Dei was thankfully not so distracted by it all that she didn't stick to Lord Julius's side as the trio walked up a wide set of carpeted steps up to the second floor of the ballroom. Julius walked confidently towards a small table set into the corner of the room, near the ledge overlooking a grand dance floor laid out below. It was then that Dei noticed the pull of the string instruments that played in tandem with the constant chattering of nearby conversations.
As Julius took up his seat for the evening, it finally allowed Dei to lose herself in the moment as she took up the statuesque posting behind his seat and next to Marianne. The music that filtered through the room and up into a massive chandelier that poured light down into the different seating areas was beautiful. Beautiful, but not quite enrapturing like the last time she had heard a girl play music in a tavern.
‘Oh, what was her name? Stella something?’
Below, a gathering of perhaps fifty nobles arranged into pairs danced a choreographed waltz as they spun into interlocking circles like moving cogs. They weren't all graceful in their actions, some moving more rigidly than others across the lacquered wood, but they at least all fell into place without bumping into one another. At an individual level the dance was simple and repetitive, but when looked at as a whole, the swarming mass of couples was quite impressive to the uninitiated.
Red clothed men danced with red dresses, and blue danced with blue while a couple splashes of the lesser colors intermingled with mismatched pairings. Dei took note of the fact that while the great houses were most often dancing with each other, a splash of yellow or purple could sometimes be seen coupled with a beige or brown.
Julius remained in his seat, looking out over the gathering below as he started to speak softly to the open air.
“Denise. As your, benefactor, shall we say? Welcome to the pride of the Princedoms. May it stand far into the future.”
Dei heard the smile on the man's lips. The coy nature that seemed to peek out whenever he addressed her. She wished she could speak back. Not just respond as she often did in text and chalk, but to actively trade words with the man seated in front of her.
‘Pride? You speak as though we're not about to tear the whole thing down, Julius.’