The summons came like a bell in the night, sharp as a blade.
Aradia was scrubbing the east corridor when the Head Servant's voice cracked through the quiet: "Mira! To the emperor's wing. His Majesty requests a maid at once."
Her knees went cold. "Mira," she thought — the name she had borrowed to survive — sounded thin and foreign in her mouth. She had hoped to keep that mask on, to move unseen. Now the emperor wanted her.
She wrapped a clean shawl around her shoulders and smoothed her hands. In the mirror shard tucked beneath her dress her eyes glowed faint violet — a small, stubborn proof that the curse still pulsed under her skin. She swallowed the thought of his gaze and moved toward the upper wing, through halls that felt lately like the throat of a beast.
The servants along the way watched her with quiet fear. Some crossed themselves as she passed. Others avoided the mirrors entirely. Maera, the Head Servant, met her at the threshold to the emperor's private corridor, face like flint.
"You," Maera said, measuring Aradia with cold eyes. "Don't blunder. If you spill incense on the carpets or drop the tray, I'll have you stripped and scrubbed again."
"Yes, Head Mistress," Aradia answered. Beneath the formal voice, something hotter stirred — the scent of cinders and a memory she had no right to feel. She moved forward and tried to breathe as if she were only a maid called to duty.
The emperor's wing smelled of sandalwood and old velvet. Tapers burned in metal sconces, their light trembling. Two guards flanked the entry to the inner chamber; they looked at Aradia as if seeing a ghost. One of them, a younger man named Ronan who had once spared her a courteous nod in the barracks, did not look away.
"Step forward," ordered a voice like cut glass. Lucien.
She stepped. For the first time since her rebirth, she stood within a few paces of the man whose soul had once held half of hers. He sat upon a low seat near a covered mirror, the silver circlet of his rule heavy and unfamiliar. Up close he looked smaller than the legends made him — not monarchic, but afraid, raw at the edges like a wound.
He surveyed her slowly, his gaze a dense winter light. "You serve the east corridor?"
"Yes, Your Majesty." Her voice did not tremble. She forced a smile that tasted like ash.
"You have violet eyes." The observation landed like a thrown stone.
Aradia's jaw tightened. "They say the city has many unusual children, sire."
A humorless half-smile crossed his face. "The city does not have your eyes, maid. Not like that."
Her skin prickled. He was looking for something in her — not a name or a paper, but a recognition that did not belong to his conscious mind. The curse was a slow spider; he was beginning to feel its footprints.
"Bring the tray," he commanded, and the chamberlain pushed it forward: a small silver dish of rare incense, plumes of lavender smoke curling in the air. Aradia bowed and stepped closer, balancing the tray.
She kept her gaze low as she served — until the tip of her finger brushed one of the folded cloths. A tiny spark jumped across their skin at the contact: not heat but memory, a tiny shard of sensation that was both his and hers. Lucien inhaled, eyes closing for a brief tremulous moment.
"You—" he began.
She could not help the whisper that slipped from her. "Forgive me," she said, and the sound of the name sliced through the room like a knife and a plea. It was not meant to be said now, in this cheap servant's bow, but the name had a life of its own.
Lucien's hand clenched on the arm of his chair. For one heartbeat his breathing faltered and the room tilted. The servants around them froze, the air thick and electric.
"Did you say something?" the chamberlain asked, voice low and on edge.
"No," Lucien said quickly, too quickly. His lips were white. He stared at the small burn on his wrist where the mark had flared last night, where the echo of her magic had left its trace. The brand pulsed faintly under his sleeve as if answering her. In that small, private pain, he recognized the echo of a remembered touch.
Aradia forced herself to bow again and back away. "If there is anything else, Your Majesty—"
"Stay," he said.
It was not a simple order. It was a command wrapped in uncertainty, an admission that he did not want her to go. For reasons he could not name, he had asked for her and now he must have her near him.
Her heart stuttered. She stayed.
The chamber closed to them with the hush of old snow. Lucien rose, not toward her, but toward the covered mirror at his back. He moved to the cloth and drew it aside.
Inside, the glass did not show him the room. Instead it showed a distant memory: a younger prince, hands trembling, watching a woman bound to a stake. The image was not long; it was a jagged shard of an old life he could not place.
Lucien's face lost color. He glared at Aradia as if seeing her for the first time. "Why do you look familiar?" he asked, the question raw as a wound.
Aradia felt the truth like a blade under her ribs. His soul was touching the same thing hers had been bound to for a century. She could use this. She could make him see the whole. Or she could leave him wrapped in the slow death of not-remembering.
"You should not ask questions of a servant, Your Majesty," she said softly. But the words held no defense now; they were fragile paper in a gust.
He turned away, hand pressed to his chest, closing his eyes as if squeezing a thorn. Then, to everyone's surprise, he spoke into the quiet: "Send word. Let no mirror remain uncovered tonight. And tell the priest he shall visit me at dawn."
Aradia watched him instruct the chamberlain, watched the way the command sounded like a lifeline. She felt her own pulse tug — a tether answering a signal across the palace like a bell.
When she finally left, escorted from the room in a procession of hush and tight smiles, the corridor seemed colder than before. Behind her, through partially opened doors and draped mirrors, she imagined the palace bending its face toward them, listening.
As she crossed the threshold back into serving shadows, her mind churned with a thousand small calculations: he had asked her to stay. He had seen her. He had felt that echo. Those three truths could be the spark that toppled a throne — or the chains that bound her to the same fate.
She stepped down the corridor, and the mirrors watched her retreat like eyes. The servants averted their faces. In her pocket the shard of the mirror she carried pulsed faintly, two heartbeats now — one her own, one not. She swallowed, and felt, for the first time, how close danger and desire could stand.
The night that followed was restless as a snare drum.
Aradia slept little. Her bandage pressed against the growing burn along her ribs — the sigil yearning like an ember. She woke each time she thought she had forgotten the sound of his voice. The sound of him calling to a mirror, asking why something he did not own still haunted his halls.
Dawn found her at the water basin, fingers trembling as she washed the tiny flecks of ash from a tray. She had to show calm; servants who wore jittery hands for long were noticed. Maera watched her with narrowed eyes. Ronan glanced with unguarded tenderness and hurried away as if embarrassed to care.
At mid-morning the chamberlain sent a runner to the servants' wing with a short note: "The Emperor requests the maid who served the morning incense to remain in the west antechamber for now. Do not leave your post."
Aradia looked at the scroll in the runner's hand and felt the world narrow like a throat. Her knees were suddenly weak. She wrapped a cloak about herself, folded the shard of mirror into the lining of her bodice, and moved.
The west antechamber was smaller, lined with tapestries of distant forests and stitched crowns. Lucien sat on a low bench with no guard near him, uncharacteristically exposed. He seemed older in daylight: the lines around his eyes like cut stone, the crown a little too heavy. He did not look up when she entered; instead he watched the door the same way someone waits for something to happen.
"You came," he said without looking, voice flat.
"Yes, Your Majesty," she replied, and set the empty incense tray on the side table. Their hands brushed — a mere accidental touch, but the shock lanced between them. Lucien inhaled sharply, and a color flooded his face.
For a breath they stood in a silence that rang like a struck bell. He turned then, slowly, and his eyes found hers as if through fog clearing. There was a look there that twisted her insides: recognition without memory, like a ghost that remembered the song but not its words.
"Why do I dream of fire?" he asked finally. It was almost a childish question, the kind one asks when sleep is haunted and geography has been rearranged. "Why does my chest feel as if it burns when I close my eyes?"
Aradia steadied herself with the weight of honesty. "Because someone wanted you to remember," she said. "Because someone cursed you."
He blinked. "Cursed me?"
"Yes." The word dropped into the room like a stone. "Long ago. Someone whose name—" She stopped herself. The name was a trap. She had to wield it carefully.
He was pale, all at once. The thin control he maintained in public crumbled here in the hush of the antechamber. "What do you know of those stories, maid?" he asked, an edge of command in the question returning as if to steady him.
"Only what the palace keeps in the dark," she answered. "That the past does not rest easily. That mirrors remember what people prefer to forget. And that sometimes, a curse wants more than punishment. It wants to be known."
He closed his eyes, jaw working. "If it remembers, does the world remember with it?"
Her throat tightened, and a soft laugh — with no humor — escaped her. "Yes. The world remembers. The dead remember. And sometimes the living remember for them."
He reached out, out of desperation more than dignity, and took her hand. Not a summons — the gesture of a man grasping at a life-line. His fingers were cool and trembled at the tips.
"You feel me too, don't you?" he whispered. "In the night — like a phantom that presses against my ribs."
Aradia's own breath flared. The tether answered as if delighted at being noticed. "I felt you when you dreamt," she confessed. "Like… like a drum down the corridor. Like someone trying to call across a locked door."
His throat worked with a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "Then we are two halves with one wound," he said. "And both of us bleed for it."
They sat like that for a long moment — hand in hand, separated by everything and nothing. Outside, the palace shifted, like a living thing adjusting its breath. Somewhere a mirror chimed faintly, a fragile note that made the hairs on Aradia's arm rise.
"You could leave," Lucien said suddenly, as if offering her an escape. "Disappear into the city, find a new name, a new life far from this palace and its dead reflections."
She looked down at their joined hands. "I cannot," she said. "Not while the curse remembers him. Not while he still breathes guilt into the world." Her voice hardened. "I will not die twice by his order."
Lucien's eyes softened with something like pity. "Then stay — until I know what to do with my nights." The words were not a command; they were a plea. "Stay so I know what the dreams mean. Stay so I can see if the world is still salvageable."
Aradia's lips curved in an expression that might have been a smile. "Very well," she said. "I will stay."
The decision settled with a dangerous ease. It was a compact born of strangers: a servant will remain to tend a haunted emperor, an emperor will keep a servant close to learn what his dreams mean. Beneath the arrangement, unseen to them both, the palace leaned in like a waiting animal.
As she rose to leave, Maera's shadow fell through the doorway, face composed like stone. For a heartbeat Aradia feared exposure. Maera's eyes flicked between them, sharp and judging, as if cataloging wrongness. She took one slow step forward.
"His Majesty asked for no servants in his private wing tonight," Maera said, voice flat. "But perhaps exceptions are made." Her gaze sharpened. "We shall see if you are faithful to your post, girl. One misstep and you will wish your previous death back."
Aradia bowed. "I understand, Head Mistress."
Maera left as if dismissal were mercy. Lucien watched her go and closed his eyes, leaning forward. "You must be careful," he said quietly. "These halls will not forgive mistakes."
Aradia watched him for a long beat before turning to go. She had agreed to stay. The promise felt like a rope thrown into dark water: it offered a tether, a risk, and the hope of salvage. In the folds of her dress, the mirror shard burned against her skin; the twin pulse of two heartbeats drummed hot and dangerous.
She walked out into the corridor again, and the palace watched her, and somewhere, a mirror cracked.