No. I shake my head, even as the girl immediately pleads her innocence, and Emmanika orders the guard holding the girl to search her. No, no, no.
I grip my skirt, fingers fisting around the cloth as the girl shrieks, and a second guard steps in to help hold her while the first empties her pockets: a half-slice of bread, three old acorns kept, no doubt, for a game, and that is all. “I’ve nothing,” the girl cries. “Please, my lady, I didn’t take it!”
“You were seen going into my rooms,” Emmanika says. “If you did not take it, who did? Come, child, tell me where the brooch is, and your punishment will be light. We do not suffer thieves here, you know, but if you confess, you shall not pay for it with your life.”
“I haven’t got it!” the girl cries. Her panic, her absolute terror washes through me.
“You are certain this is her,” Emmanika says, turning to Valka.
“Oh, yes, my lady,” Valka says earnestly. “I remember thinking she ought to clean that splotch on her apron.”
“Very well.” Emmanika turns back, and in her expression, I see the girl’s future: a flogging for certain, and if the brooch is not found, perhaps even execution.
I cannot stay silent—not anymore, not in this moment with the girl’s terror before me, and Valka’s lies in my ears, and the stark reality of what Emmanika intends staring back at me.
“No.” The word breaks from me as if I’ve spent a lifetime holding it in.
Maralinde glances at me, bewildered. “What?”
Emmanika, her actions arrested by the double onslaught of my command and her daughter’s voice, turns to stare at me. “Alyrra?”
I take a single, shaking breath and step forward. Valka blinks at me in disbelief. And then she laughs. “Oh, you are just worried about the girl, aren’t you, princess? Never mind, though. She’ll only be punished for what she’s done. And you’re too young to be watching. We all know how soft you are.”
“I’ll walk you to your rooms,” my brother says, stepping forward. “We’ll let Lady Emmanika deal with the servant, won’t we, sister? It’s not our concern.”
Does he know? Would it matter if he did? In any event, he will walk me away, and the girl will be beaten, or killed, and Valka will have had her game—for that’s what it is. Emmanika, who lectured her on respecting the servants, will be found out to have wrongly punished or even executed a girl, for the brooch will be found. I’ve no doubt of that. It will destroy the girl, and haunt Emmanika, and Valka will laugh about it all.
“No,” I say again, loud and clear. My brother stops three paces away, taken aback, and then his eyes narrow with fury. He has never turned such a look on me before. I force myself to swallow down my fear. I have to do this. I can’t stop now.
I step to the side, look Lady Emmanika in the eye. “Lady, what did your brooch look like? Was it sapphire and gold, by any chance?”
Emmanika nods, her brow creasing. “It was.”
“Then you should know that I walked down this hall when Valka did, and I saw her with it. That serving girl was not here at all.”
A silence rolls out around my words, riding a wave of gasps that die away to nothing.
“That is absurd!” Valka cries, in an accent of absolute disbelief. “Me? Steal jewelry? I am helping to find who stole it!”
Her outrage fuels my own, pushing back the terror roiling at the edges of my mind. How dare she pretend she is just a helpful bystander? She planned this.
“Where is it now, Valka?” I demand. “Did you put it somewhere, or is it still in your pocket?”
Her fingers twitch, and I know in that moment she still has it, that she hasn’t bothered to hide it away somewhere. She never believed she would need to.
“Alyrra, shut up,” my brother hisses. “What are you doing?”
“I—I cannot believe that the daughter of such a nobleman as Lord Daerilin would steal,” Lady Emmanika says.
“I would never,” Valka says, green eyes gleaming with fury as she glares at me. “Really, Alyrra, your imagination has run away with you!”
“Come along,” my brother says, his hand closing on my arm, tight as a vise. But I won’t go with him. I won’t.
“Search her,” I say, my voice hard and strong, an order that takes the guards by surprise. They stare at me as my brother turns, yanking at me. I can’t twist out of his grip, so instead I brace my feet and shout, “As your princess, I demand you search her!”
And they do. I don’t know who is more surprised, my brother or I. He manages only a growl before one of them reaches Valka, pulls her hand away from where it covers her pocket, and plunges his own hand in.
“Get away from her!” My brother releases me, surging toward the guards, but it’s too late to stop them, too late to save her at all, for there in the guard’s hand gleams the brooch, gold and sapphire.
“That’s it,” Maralinde says in a strangled voice. “That’s my mother’s brooch.”
The hall erupts in shouting.
In the ballads our old troubadour sings, the heroes who vanquish the pillaging hordes or the ravening night beasts are raised high; they are toasted in the king’s hall and fawned upon by all, and remembered for their courage and strength. But my mother, looking at me as I stand before her that afternoon, says only, “You stupid little fool.”
“She would have let that girl be killed,” I say earnestly, as if I could make my mother see the injustice, the ugliness of Valka’s intention. “And she had the brooch all along!”
“And you betrayed her!”
That silences me. Even if it was Valka who betrayed the girl, knowing she was innocent, picking her out because she was the easiest target of all the servants there. And did it out of
