Mother grimaced. She knew that these points were true.
I dusted the sand from my breeches and said, “What do you expect from us in return for this supposed alliance? I will be the first to admit that I don’t know you very well; the ways of the harpies remain mysterious, even to the other winged peoples who traverse these portals. But the most obvious trait you all share is your—forgive me, my lady, for saying—cutthroat and self-serving nature. The only creatures about whom you seem to care are, at best, other harpies. One of your kind, or so I’ve been led to believe, would never strike a deal in which there was no gain for the self or the nest.”
“You’re right,” Parnassia replied. “You don’t know us very well. We are not just, I prefer to say, excellent brokers. We are also… wrathful. And a deal broken with a harpy is not only a deal broken. A deal broken with a harpy is a new deal struck. But in this new deal, the harpy will ensure the destruction of the dishonorable party.”
I nodded, satisfied, and even managed a smile… but the smile did not quite reach my eyes. I was thinking about Nell. She too had struck a deal with this harpy. And I knew now that it was a deal she could only ever break.
Nell
The head of the bustling servant quarters in the Everwinter palace—Dorid—was a gaunt older woman with pure white hair.
“Ah, the new girl,” she greeted me. “What have you dirtied?”
“I didn’t dirty anything,” I stammered, small beneath her wintry gaze. She must have been an ice dragoness.
“Lost?” she snapped.
“Nothing,” I said again.
“Broken?”
My cheeks flushed. “Yes,” I whispered.
Dorid rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll send Misty and Ronquil—”
“His Highness Lethe instructed me to request to be paired with Merulina,” I interjected.
Dorid glared. “Merulina?” The name twisted and rolled off her tongue as if it was an item of zero worth, but then the woman did a little shudder, as if to shake the exchange from her thin shoulders, and forged on. “Very well. Merulina is in the scullery. I’ll call her. What have you broken, child?”
I wanted to correct her usage of the word “child,” but I didn’t suppose it would do any good. Her lined face dictated that, to her, many adults were in fact children.
“A porcelain bed pan—”
I would have gone on, but Dorid’s guffaws cut me off. Apparently there was something which could break the stoic witch from her stony stare, and it was the image of me covered in dragon feces.
“Go on, go on,” she begged, rubbing at the corner of her tearful eyes.
“In the wash room,” I finished, cheeks still blushing with embarrassment. You would think that being removed from my homeland, and thrust into this war, and separated from my husband, not to mention discovering my infertility, might have hardened me to such trivial assaults on my dignity. But it hadn’t. I was still lamentably human.
“Well,” Dorid said, clapping her leathery hands together, “I will guide you to the scullery and we shall fetch Merulina together. She’ll go with you the rest of the way to the wash room and help clean up”—Dorid giggled and cleared her throat—“everything.”
Merulina was hunched over a sink which appeared to be filled solely with bubbles when we approached her. She was a tall girl, willowy, with kinky auburn hair which spilled down her back, unkempt, from out of a stained bonnet. Her skin, like the skin of all ice people, was an ivory that looked like it had never been touched by the sun. She was scrubbing a large, flat pan, and amid the clatter and clank of all the dishware, didn’t notice either of us entering the room.
“Merulina,” Dorid snapped, breaking the girl from her daydream and causing her to spin around.
She had a heart-shaped face, unusually soft for her lineage of ice, with deep olive eyes. It was only the eyes that betrayed her to be an ice dragon, for they, much like Lethe’s, seemed to bluster and howl with the elements of a savage storm. A blush rose to her cheek, and just as quickly drained away. She dried her hands on her apron and curtsied.
It was noting her beauty which gave me the epiphany about where I had heard that name, Merulina, before. This was the “imprisoned” girl Altair spoke of.
Of course. The meaning of the imprisoned fire dragon’s words dawned on me. Merulina had been no prisoner. She was a servant… and the reason their love was impossible: they were from two different sides of the warring world.
Dorid swept forward and placed an arm over Merulina’s shoulders. “This is the new girl, Penelope,” she informed Merulina. “She’s a human, and she is an old acquaintance of the new queen.” The way Dorid spoke made clear her distaste for Michelle, which did not surprise me. “It garnered her a position amongst the staff, though she once knew the manacles of the dungeon quite well.” Dorid winked at me, as though we were old girlfriends and my history with torture was an amusement to us both. I didn’t let my face show how unbelievably rude Dorid was being. “Today is her second day, and she’s broken a”—Dorid had to pause to straighten her facial expression yet again—“a bed pan,” she finished. “It’s in the wash room. Go with her and help the poor thing get the place in working order again. We can’t have the castle looking like an outhouse.”