I awoke to a hard jolt and a crack.
The wagon hit a pothole on a narrow stretch where a trader's rig was passing the other way. I peered out the back: the other wagon looked empty; maybe they had resupplied Eastwatch. The driver glanced over his shoulder. "We're almost there, laddie," he said, rural vowels plain as road dust. He was no fine coachman, only a supply hauler with just enough space between the crates for me to fold in. The whole journey had been cramped, and the weather had turned spiteful: what should have been ten days became fifteen on account of storms and mud-slowed miles, and some part of me had started to believe the keep would never solidify out of the grey ahead, only recede forever like a lie on a map.
I climbed up beside him, and within the hour the highest towers showed above the horizon. Seeing the place was not the same as reaching it: these wagons crawled, and the switchback roads meant half a day still lay ahead. I told myself patience was a kind of discipline. I was not sure I believed it.
Underneath that was a colder thought I tried not to unpack on an empty stomach: the invitation had been an exit from one life, not a promise of another. If Eastwatch spat me out, I would still be the same rank on paper, only with failure written where hope used to sit.
His name was Oscar. Along the way he had shown me how to hold the reins and handle the horses. That small competence felt like a gift, something I could do while everything else waited on distance and weather. It let me relieve him when he grew drowsy, and we gained back a little time in shifts. I drove four hours while he slept; for the last leg he took the lines again for the final push. We rounded a bend, and there at last were the gates, closer than they had looked from the ridge.
I had not quite prepared myself for the soldiers.
A solid line at the gate, more along the wall walks. For the greatest diplomatic keep on the border I supposed it made sense, yet the sight sat wrong against every story I had heard of courts as glitter and wine. This was teeth first. My stomach tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the road.
"Woah there, hold up!" one of them called. "Identity and cargo papers."
"Ah, right. Here you are." Oscar handed them over. The soldier scanned the sheet, leaned to peer into the wagon, then looked at me.
"And you?"
The papers did not mention a passenger. For a stupid second I thought they might send me back with the empty rig.
"Edgar," I said. "The new butler trainee." I dug out my invitation and passed it over.
"I see. So you're him." He looked over the papers. "We were expecting you days ago. You'll answer to Watson, the head butler, in his office this time of day." He jerked his chin toward a guard who was reading against the wall, book braced on his chestplate. "Barty!"
"Wha?"
"Come on, show him where the head butler's office is."
Barty sighed, shoved the novel into his jerkin, and swung up onto the wagon bench. "I was just getting to the good part," he muttered, then pointed. "Servants' entrance, round to the right. Follow the wall."
The wagon lurched on. Oscar followed the track away from the main approach until we stopped by a side yard where servants were already moving toward the tailboard with hands out for crates.
"Go on, laddie," Oscar said. "Good luck, and stay out of trouble, eh?" He turned back to the unloading.
Barty walked me inside, down a narrow passage, to an old door sitting ajar. From within came the scratch of a quill.
"Watson…" Barty knocked once with his knuckles and eased the door wider.
The office was barely a closet: a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and the man behind the desk older than I had pictured, hair iron-grey, eyes quick, the sort of eyes that seemed to notice the smallest of details.
"Yes? Ah, Barty. What is it?"
"The new butler you've been waiting for."
"A little late," Watson said, but he smiled thinly. "Still, glad you're here. We need you caught up before the big event. I haven't the hours to train you myself; we needed you sooner." He tapped his lip. "I have a thought. First, we can't have you walking the keep in those rags. Barty, fetch Lune for me. Meanwhile we'll see you in something fit for the floor."
He led me on to a small changing room. My clothes had gone sour over the road; Watson's nostrils flared once before he smoothed his face back to neutral. Of course he had noticed, everyone would have. The stench was permeating around me.
"Through there is the servants' bathhouse. Wash properly. I'll have Lune lay out your uniform."
I filed that as logistics, not kindness. A stain on the floor reflected on him; cleaning me up was the same as oiling a hinge so the door stopped squeaking.
The room beyond held several tubs, each screened by a low wooden partition. I chose the farthest and turned the tap. I jolted slightly when steaming hot water rushed out. Runestones, I thought, common enough in noble houses, rare in the lanes I grew up in. Magic held in stone, heating pipes ordinary folk could never afford. I slid into the bath and sunk down longer than I needed to, letting the heat unknit my shoulders.
I scrubbed until the water greyed, fighting the urge to doze. At one point I slid under and woke with a mouthful of soap-scented panic. Better not sleep the afternoon away, I was late enough without adding laziness to the account.
Towelled and wrapped at the waist, I returned to the changing room expecting only clothes on a bench.
Instead, a young woman waited there in the neat black-and-white of a house maid: apron crisp, sleeves buttoned, not a thread out of place. She was small, fine-boned in a way that almost read as delicate until you noticed how still she held herself, like slackness were a luxury she did not permit. White hair, too pale to be mere age, was wound into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. When she lifted her head, impatient, the light caught blue eyes narrowing beneath pale lashes and the look of someone who had been wronged on purpose.
My first instinct was apology when someone looked at me like that, but I did not yet know what for.
"Took you long enough," she said, eyes narrowing. "I have better things to do than babysit you. The least you could manage is to be timely." She stood before I could answer, turned to a locker, and pulled out folded black cloth. "Put these on. Quickly. We haven't got all day."
She shoved the bundle at me. I blinked.
"Well?"
"Uh…"
"Don't tell me you can't dress yourself."
"I can. Could you turn around?"
Her eyes widened a fraction. Colour touched her cheekbones. "Oh. Fine."
She faced the wall and I dressed fast. The suit was finer than anything I had owned: black wool, crisp white shirt, shoes that gleamed like mirrors. The keep certainly spared no expense on its staff's appearance. I felt both armoured and exposed, like the cloth announced pretender to anyone who knew how to look.
The bow tie defeated me.
Silk slipped through my fingers; the mirror threw back a stranger with the right clothes and the wrong hands. I fumbled until a huff sounded behind me.
"It shouldn't take this long," she said, still turned away.
"I'm dressed. I don't know how to tie it."
She spun.
For a moment she only looked at me, assessing, I thought, the same way Watson had, except her mouth was tighter and I couldn't tell whether the flush in her face was annoyance or the ghost of embarrassment still lingering from before.
She took the silk from my fingers. Her hands were quick, capable, closer than anyone's had been in weeks of jolting wagons and solitary miles. I smelled soap and starch and something faint and clean that might have been her skin or only the laundry's work; I stopped breathing without meaning to, then breathed carefully, as if she might hear it and judge.
"Come here," she said, and stepped in.
There was little distance left between us, only the small space of a dressing room and the fact that a bow tie required proximity the way a lock required a key. This close, I could not help but notice the white of her bun gleaming when she dipped her chin to judge the knot, almost luminous against her collar. Fae-touched, I thought, half a whisper. Here it seemed ordinary enough that nobody had remarked.
"What's that?" she said lightly, voice deliberately soft with proximity, head tilting up until our eyes met, a slight tilt of curiosity.
"Oh… it's nothing. Sorry." I panicked.
Her lashes lowered as she concentrated once more. I watched the precise placement of her fingers as she looped and tightened. They brushed my collar, then the hollow of my throat as she adjusted the knot. I gulped.
She straightened, eyes still on her work. "This is wrong," she murmured, not the tie; she was looking at my breast pocket now, at the handkerchief I'd stuffed in without thought. She eased it flat with two fingers until it sat like a small white flag of surrender, corners matched, the kind of detail I would never have noticed until someone important did.
She is good at this, I thought. She is already saving me from myself.
"There." Her voice had softened a fraction as she let out a sigh, annoyance maybe, or the same reflex that made a craftsman exhale when a joint seated true. Then her edge returned. "Now move."
She was already in the corridor. I had to half run to keep pace; for someone shorter than me, she set a brutal clip.
"My name is Lunette. Everyone calls me Lune." She did not look back. "I have the unhappy job of teaching you while keeping up with my own work, so learn fast. I am not here to hand-hold. Understood?"
I nodded though she could not see it.
"Six in the morning, you leave your room. Servants' breakfast in the wing until a quarter past. Miss it and you don't eat. Then your morning task. Tasks post outside Watson's office every evening at five; read them before bed. Work until the job is finished. Highest standard: no corners, no shortcuts. You fail and we all catch the heat. Clear?"
She barely waited.
"You serve the Castillo household, their guests, and any foreign dignitary under this roof. Stay in the background. A good butler is not heard, not seen, yet every need is met before it is spoken. You appear only when required. If someone addresses you, answer with the minimum proper words: correct titles, correct names, no familiarity."
Part of me tried to sort rules into boxes: safety, pride, politics. Another part understood I would fail the first week anyway, and the real lesson was which mistakes the house could absorb and which ones would mark you for good.
The rules kept coming: stairs I must not use before noon, side doors for staff, how to carry a tray, how not to. I tried to fix them in order and lost half in the echo of our footsteps, until the rhythm of her feet became something to match without thinking, the way I'd matched Oscar's shifts on the wagon without comment, two people keeping time so the work could move.
Halfway down a gallery, a footman swept past with a stack of linens so high he navigated by chin. Lune's hand flicked sideways without looking fully at me, palm toward the panelling of the wall. I pressed in before I'd reasoned why; her shoulder brushed mine for the span of a step, light as the tie silk, then she was ahead again and the footman's wake was only cool air and the smell of fading starch.
She never broke stride. She didn't praise. She didn't need to.
When I reached for a latch two corridors later, I could tell the instant my fingers touched metal, some instinct scraped raw, her voice came flat and fast, not loud enough to carry: "Not that one." No idiot, no sigh for the household to hear. Just correction, delivered like covering a dropped spoon with a napkin before a guest noticed.
I felt gratitude and kept walking.
When she finally stopped, I was turned around in my own head.
"Did you get all of that?"
"I… think so?"
"This is your room." She pushed open a door. Inside: a narrow bed, a dresser, barely space to stand between them. "You won't live here, only sleep and change. Spare uniforms in the dresser. Stay immaculate. If you spoil your clothes on duty, change at once."
It was a flood. And I was fairly sure she did not like me much.
I was also sure she had already kept me from two small disasters without making a performance of either, which felt more intimate than kindness would have, and I didn't know what to do with that.
She did not slow for breath. The rest became a blur: the servants' wing mapped at marching speed. Who slept where, which bell meant what, which door led to the linen stores and which to the coal. My head rang with names and places. Somewhere in the middle she corrected my posture with two fingers at the small of my back; quick, impersonal, the way you'd straighten a candlestick, and I stood taller the rest of the way without her asking again.
"Finally, the galley."
The kitchen could have fed an army. Pots hung like dull bells; one man chopped vegetables at a far bench, blade ticking steady as a metronome.
"Lune! Ello there, lassie, how've ye been?" he called, voice broad and northern.
"Hello, Angus."
"Ah, this the new lad I've been hearin' aboot?"
Lune nodded, plucked a carrot end from his board, and crunched it without asking, permission assumed. I had the sudden sense of a house held together not by speeches but by a thousand small agreements like that one.
"Somehow I must train him for a job I don't even do," she said, "while keeping my own duties, all before next week's event."
"What is it you do?" I asked instinctively.
"I am a Lady's Maid to Lady Mia Castillo, the youngest daughter of the Castillo family," she replied quickly. "Though she doesn't need my full attention throughout the day due to her studies and other activities, that means I am to help more with preparing events in the quieter hours," she continued.
"Eh, ye'll manage." Angus switched from the carrots he'd been preparing to a bag of potatoes. "We're never just one job round here. Somethin' always spills, an' somebody always covers." He wiped his hand on his apron and offered it to me. "Angus. Cook. Ye need owt, ye ask."
I shook it. His grip was warm, flour-dusted, but sure.
For a moment the only sound was the knife on the board again, thock, thock, like a second heart in the room.
Lune exhaled through her nose. "Supper for staff is at seven," she told me. "Don't be late for that, either. Your evening task list should be on Watson's door by five. I'll check that you actually read it."
She turned on her heel. I thought she would leave me there, but at the threshold she paused, just long enough that I thought she might look back. She didn't.
"Watson wants you in his office at eight tonight," she said. "Not a minute after. He'll tell you what the event entails, since you're too far behind for me to bother explaining twice."
Then she was gone, footsteps sharp down the passage.
Angus chuckled low. "Don't mind her too hard, lad. She's fierce, but she's fair, an' she's carryin' half the house on those shoulders."
I heard what he was doing: translating Lune into something a frightened newcomer could stand beside without flinching. I was grateful for it, and a little resentful that I needed the translation at all.
"I didn't mean to make her wait."
"Waitin's part o' the work." He tipped his chin toward the corridor. "Go find your feet before seven. An' lad, first night in a keep like this, ye'll hear bells in yer sleep. That's normal. Means ye're still listenin'."
I found my way back to the little room by memory and mistake, one wrong turn corrected by a maid who looked at my suit and pointed without speaking. I sat on the bed. The mattress was thin but clean. Through the wall came faint clatter: kitchen, maybe, or distant boots on stone.
Outside my narrow window, if I craned, I could see a scrap of sky turning the colour of cooled iron. Eastwatch was no longer a line on a letter. It was stone, rules, a girl who had tied my tie like a verdict, and a head butler who would decide whether I belonged.
I could not tell yet whether I was being shaped into something useful or simply worn smooth until I fit the slot they needed. Both ideas sat badly. Both felt possible.
I touched the bow tie once, checking it was still straight. It was. The thought of her delicate hands tying it crossed my mind for a moment before a bell rang out. I jumped to my feet and headed down for supper.