The second rule of surviving in a kingdom that wants you dead — don't be memorable.
Be competent enough to keep your position. Be quiet enough to avoid attention. Be forgettable enough that when people try to recall your face later, they find nothing but a vague shape and a uniform.
I had been forgettable my entire life.
I was good at it.
Or so I thought.
Three days into my assignment at the library, I had already mapped every corner of it. Every shadow, every blind spot, every place where the candlelight didn't quite reach. I knew which floorboards creaked near the east entrance and which ladder tracks needed oil and which scholars stayed late enough that I had to wait in the corridor before I could begin my evening duties.
I knew the library the way I knew every space I occupied — not because I was curious, but because knowing was surviving. Every room was a puzzle. Every puzzle had an exit. I always found the exit first.
That evening the last scholar left just before the seventh bell. An older man with ink on his collar who never acknowledged my presence beyond moving his papers slightly to the left when I needed to wipe down his table. I preferred him to the ones who watched me work. Watching made the darkness restless.
I waited until his footsteps faded completely before I moved through the main doors with my candle tray and my cloth and the careful quietness I wore like a second skin.
The library in the evening was a different creature than the library in the day. The high windows went dark first, then the upper shelves disappeared into blackness, and the candlelight pulled everything into warm gold and deep shadow. It was the closest thing to beautiful I had found in this palace. I didn't let myself think that too loudly. Beautiful things had a way of being taken.
I started at the far end, the way I always did, working my way methodically toward the entrance. Replace the burned down candles. Wipe the wax drippings from the holders. Straighten the books the scholars left crooked on the shelves. It was simple work. Quiet work. The kind of work that let my mind go still in a way it rarely managed anywhere else.
I was halfway through the third shelf when I heard the doors open.
I didn't turn around. Servants didn't turn around at sounds. Servants kept working and waited to be addressed and made themselves as invisible as the furniture. I adjusted my grip on the candle I was replacing and kept my breathing even and listened to the footsteps cross the threshold.
They were different from the scholars' footsteps. Heavier. More deliberate. The kind of footsteps that were used to rooms making way for them.
Still I didn't turn.
The footsteps stopped.
The silence that followed had a weight to it. A texture. The particular quality of silence that means someone is looking at you.
Every nerve in my body went alert.
I finished replacing the candle. Moved to the next one. Kept my hands steady through sheer force of eleven years of practice. Kept the darkness inside me flat and pressed down and absolutely, completely still.
Be small. Be nothing. Be forgettable.
I moved to the next shelf. Adjusted a book spine. Wiped a wax drip with the cloth in my left hand.
The presence behind me didn't move.
Didn't speak.
Just watched.
It took everything I had not to run.
I don't know how long it lasted. Long enough that my shoulders ached from the effort of appearing relaxed. Long enough that I had cleaned an entire section of shelving I had already cleaned earlier that day just to have something to do with my hands. Long enough that the darkness beneath my skin had gone from restless to very, very still — the way prey goes still when a predator is close enough that movement is more dangerous than stillness.
When I finally reached the end of the shelf row and turned naturally, the way the work required me to, I kept my eyes down.
I crossed to the next section.
And in the space between one step and the next I looked up.
Just once. Just for a second.
He was standing near the entrance, one hand resting at his side, dressed in dark practice clothes that had nothing to do with the formal portraits of him I had seen hanging in the main corridor. No crown. No ceremonial armor. Just a young man with dark hair and an expression so controlled it barely qualified as an expression at all.
But his eyes.
His eyes were on me.
Not the shelf behind me. Not the room in general. Not the vague middle distance that people stare at when they're thinking about something else entirely.
Me.
I looked away immediately. Kept walking. Reached the next shelf and picked up my cloth and began working with the same steady rhythm I had maintained for the last however many minutes. My heart was hitting the inside of my chest so hard I was certain it was audible.
He's just a person, I told myself. He's just standing in a room. People stand in rooms.
People don't stand in rooms in complete silence watching servant girls dust shelves.
I worked to the end of the section. Gathered my tray. And when I finally walked toward the doors to leave, I kept my gaze on the middle distance the way a forgettable girl would, the way a girl with nothing to hide would, the way a girl whose mother's name was not written in red ink on page forty three of a book behind a pillar would.
I did not look at him again.
But I felt his gaze follow me all the way to the door.
Outside in the servant corridor I pressed my back against the cold stone wall and stood there for a long moment in the dark.
My hands were shaking again.
Not from the darkness this time.
From something I didn't have a name for yet. Something that felt almost like being known, which was ridiculous, which was impossible, which was the most dangerous thing I could afford to feel in this palace or any other.
He hadn't spoken. Hadn't moved. Hadn't done anything except stand in a room and look at me the way people looked at things that didn't quite add up.
Crown Prince Kael. Seventeen executions. Instinct for shadow magic sharper than any instrument the kingdom had ever built.
And he had just spent ten minutes watching me dust a shelf.
Don't be memorable, I reminded myself.
Too late, something whispered back.
I pushed off the wall. Straightened my uniform. Picked up my tray.
And I walked back to the servant quarters in the dark, counting my breaths, and praying that forgettable was something I could still learn to be.