Three years later.
The kitchens had turned Emery into a creature of steam and silence.
Her hands, once soft and smelling of jasmine, were now calloused from cleaning iron pots and red from the lye she used to scrub the endless stone floors. She had learned the art of disappearing while standing in plain sight. She kept her head down, her white hair tucked strictly beneath a drab grey cap, and her voice—the "Songbird" gift that was both her heritage and her curse—remained locked behind her teeth.
But a girl like Emery could only stay hidden for so long.
On her eighteenth birthday, though no one in the palace knew the date, she was promoted. Grizel, the head maid, had hauled her out of the dough room, looked her over with a grunt of disapproval, and handed her a fresh uniform of stiff black wool.
"The Prince needs a new personal maid," Grizel had said, her voice like grinding gravel. "His last one was too loud. You are to quiet. Stay that way, and you might remain alive."
