They arrived at first light. Twelve of them, which was three more than she had been led to expect, which was itself information. They filed into the dressing room and arranged themselves with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this exact thing for someone else before her, and probably before that person, and possibly before that.
She watched them from the doorway. They were young—mostly—and female—mostly—and their expressions shared a quality she spent the first ten minutes trying to name. Not blankness. Not hostility. Something more specific. The expression of people who were performing the act of having no expression, which was different from actually having none.
The head attendant introduced herself as Maren. She was perhaps thirty, with the careful posture of someone who had learned that her spine was the one thing in her world she fully controlled. She was good. Elyndra respected it immediately and trusted none of it.
"My lady," Maren said. "Will you sit?"
"In a moment," Elyndra said. "Tell me your schedules."
Maren's pause was exactly one heartbeat. "My lady?"
"Your hours. Your rotations. Who is present in the morning, who at night, who has access to which rooms and when." She kept her tone conversational. "I like to understand the structure of a space before I occupy it."
The pause this time was two heartbeats. She watched Maren make a decision. "I will prepare a document outlining the household schedule," Maren said. "Will that serve?"
"That will do for a start," Elyndra said, and sat.
· · ·
She asked each of them one question before the morning was finished. The questions were not the same. She varied them by the attendant—what they seemed comfortable with, what their hands did when they were thinking, where their eyes went when they wanted to hide a reaction. She asked one girl about the palace gardens and noted the longing that crossed the girl's face before she controlled it. She asked another about the kitchens and received an answer that was too detailed, too eager, which suggested the girl had been specifically prepared for that question.
Someone had coached them. Not extensively, but deliberately. They had been told what to say about certain things. This meant someone had anticipated her questions, which meant someone had studied her, which meant someone was paying careful attention to a woman who had just arrived and had not yet done anything worth watching.
She added this to her inventory without changing her expression.
By midmorning she knew: two of the twelve would report her movements, one would report her conversations, and at least one—the quiet girl with the ink stain on her left forefinger—was present for a reason not yet clear. The other eight were ordinary attendants doing an extraordinary job of appearing ordinary. She had no plan yet for any of them. But she knew them. That was the first step.
· · ·
Maren produced the schedule document before noon. It was thorough, which was itself suspicious—no one produced a thorough document without reason—and it contained, Elyndra noticed, a precise and detailed account of every room she was permitted to access, without once acknowledging that the list of permitted rooms implied a list of rooms she was not. She read the document twice and handed it back.
"Thank you," she said. "One more thing. The locked door in the anteroom."
Maren's hands, clasped in front of her, did not move. "I'm afraid I don't have information about that room, my lady."
"I didn't ask for information about it," Elyndra said. "I asked about the door."
The distinction mattered. She watched Maren understand that it did.
"It is not among your current access points," Maren said, finally. "I believe it connects to a private corridor."
"Whose?"
This time the pause was different. Longer. The kind of pause that had an answer inside it that the speaker was deciding, in real time, whether to give.
"I believe," Maren said carefully, "it connects to his highness's eastern corridor."
Elyndra nodded. She thanked Maren. She asked for tea and spent the next hour drinking it by the window with a book open on her knee that she did not read.
A door between his corridor and her rooms. Locked. But existing.
She thought about what it meant that no one had mentioned it.
She thought about it for three days before she understood: the door had not been concealed because it was secret. It had been left unremarked because everyone who knew about it assumed she already knew what it was for. She did not know what it was for. And that gap in her knowledge, she suspected, was the most dangerous thing in her rooms.