Chapter 20

Ch. 20: Janice

“You really didn’t mean it?” I ask tearfully as if I truly wish to validated by the maid in front of me. I don’t care to hear her voice anymore, it is annoying like a fly buzzing in my ears.

Janice, not knowing my line of thought, nods her head vigorously, suspiciously resembling the Harry Potter bobblehead that sat on my bookshelf in my past life.

“No! Not at all. I-I swear, your highness, that the words that fell from my mouth are as untrue as the phrase ‘the sky is green’. This is not how I usually am! An unusual malady or some seasonal flu must have overtaken me in the heat of this room. No! No, no, it was Akira whispering in my ear. He influenced me to say these cruel words!” Janice desperately cries, her eyes wide with unshed tears.

Such a pity, it looks like she truly wants more than anything to work somewhere else in the palace. But with her current attitude, I’m probably doing her a favor. In the future, she could’ve pissed off the wrong person and gotten a haircut at the neck.

But I don’t feel the least bit bad. I wonder what this maid expected to happen when she went down this foolhardy route. There certainly must be easier ways to be transferred out of a palace. I let my face fall flat and allow the real Winter to come out. The angry, bitter Winter who hates her circumstances. The Winter who would rather tear the script to pieces and allow everyone to suffer the consequences rather than read another damn line.

“So you lied to me, Janice?” I say darkly.

The maid senses a shift in my tone and her tight grip on my leg loosens a tad.

“If you’re going to lie to me, at least be good. Because there’s nothing more I hate than a bad liar.”

.....

In actuality, I dislike peppermints and my half-sister far more than poor liars. But this sounds like a line from a movie and I’m a pretty decent liar, so I can get away with saying this.

Janice releases me like I have the plague, staring at me like I’m the devil, no Akira, himself. Akira seems to be the equivalent of Satan in this world and I’ve heard many people use his name as a curse. I smile down at her, but say nothing else.

The clock is ticking and if I stay bent in silent conversation with this maid, people will assume that something is underfoot. Snatching a meaty bit of my thigh, which has healthily begun to fill out over the past month, I twist hard until tears prick my eyes.

“Marie!” I wail dramatically as I run into my nursemaid’s arms.

She covers my face so I don’t watch Janice get dragged from my palace and I hear nothing because Janice isn’t screaming like a banshee anymore, a refreshing change from before I spoke to her. There will be two bruises on my thighs tomorrow, but it will be worth it.

There is a subtle deviation in the air and I know these staff who snubbed me in the past will think twice before disrespecting me. At the price of a small fry like Janice, I have successfully warned everyone under this roof not to outright mistreat me as if I’m a nobody and protected my cover of being an innocent peasant with little to no understanding of palace politics.

A win-win situation if you ask me.

With Janice out of the picture, I dry my tears quickly and carry on with my seeing everyone who works in my palace. No one dares to meet my eye and I make it down the row without incident. An all too familiar face waits for me at the end.

“You!” I exclaim in surprise.

The dark-haired maid who tried to stick up for me at the Sunset Palace is the last person in line as well as the shortest. Her cute face looks down at the floor in embarrassment and I have to hold myself back from patting her head since I’m a child too. Everyone in the line is shocked by my outburst and Marie rushes over, a question mark written all over her face.

“Did you have a problem with this maid, your highness?” she quickly asks me.

I shake my head with a grin.

“This maid tried to save me when I was at Sunset Palace,” I say valiantly. “Without her, I don’t think anyone would’ve known that I was there.”

Marie’s face brightens.

“So this is the young maid you were speaking of, your highness.”

“Yes! And I want her to be my playmate!” I announce. Everyone in the line looks at the child maid in surprise and she shrinks further into herself, her shoulders practically touching her ears. She must be shy. Seeing her nervousness makes me have even better feelings towards her, since it was incredibly brave of her to try to pull me out from under the hedge and then argue with the terrifying Sir Berrick.

I ignore tradition, which would require the dark-haired maid to curtsey to me and stick out my right hand. She jumps at my sudden movement, but realizing it is just my little hand, she reaches out hers and we shake them. Her hands are ice cold and incredibly dry, but I grip them tightly so she doesn’t see me recoil from her touch.

“What’s your name?” I ask softly as if I’m speaking to a baby deer.

“Emma... your highness,” Emma replies quietly. I smile in the most friendly way possible and hesitantly, like the sun peeking out behind clouds, I see the glimmer of white as she tentatively smiles back. Emma seems like a smart enough girl, I’m certain we will get along well in the future.

As I gaze hopefully at our time to come, Janice’s prospects have all gone to naught. She had stopped wriggling in the arms of the stewards long ago as it only hurt herself. The humiliation was almost more than she could bear. Her left shoe had caught on a loose tile and dislodged, leaving her stockinged foot to stick out from beneath her skirt. Janice’s hair and makeup that she took care to do every morning in case she ran into a handsome gentleman were smudged and ruined, her hand stained black when she had wiped away a tear.

Janice had never thought she would be in such a situation. When she had woken that very morning, it had been the same day as always. Her disgraceful firing now felt like a nightmare rather than reality. But she could feel the stares and whispers from the maids who did know her and the awful blend of pity and contempt in their eyes. If there was even a chance to loosen her arm and free herself from the steward’s grasp and spit on them.

Everyone knew exactly where she had come from because the stewards were known to be the staff of the cursed Rose Palace. There would be no living this down. Even after she was dragged out cruelly from the palace, eventually those on the street would know that Janice had been forcibly expelled for the unlawful conduct of a royal family member. In order to save themselves, no self-respecting business owner would hire her, other than the brothels.

Janice’s face curled into an ugly snarl. She had paid the ultimate cost to enter the beautiful, yet deadly game of the palace. And what about that stupid princess? She had paid nothing, but the good fortune of possessing golden eyes and being seen by the right people? In fact, Janice was certain that whoever had been the caretake of that royal brat had intentionally been caught by the royal guard so they could benefit from the payday that comes from sheltering a royal family member.

Princess Winter didn’t deserve to be here in the royal palace. Janice did! This was all the wrong way round. She could only watch with her jaw clenched tight as the stewards began to drag her towards familiar ground. The walls were no longer the fine marble and gold of the main palace, further out where no one of noble blood ventured, the walls were gray and covered nicks.

The smell as well... Janice had sworn when she entered the palace she would never breathe the foul air of the main servants’ quarters again and within a fortnight she had returned. This section of the palace was crawling with more servants and maids than before and they all laughed at her with their eyes at her pathetic fate.

“There’s that maid I was telling you about. Yes, the one who swore up and down she would bag nobility.”

“All beauty and no brains. I didn’t expect anything more from a simple village girl.”

“Oh my, wasn’t it only yesterday we saw her strutting through her with her head in the clouds. Tut, tut. Such a shame.”

The malicious whispers reached Janice’s ears and brought her fury to a feverish pitch. How dare those lowly beings speak to her in such a rude manner. She knew they were only jealous because she had a better chance than any one of them at advancing herself in life. Those fine dishes that Winter had eaten on, one day she too would dine on them. And the little organza dresses that Winter had special maids dress her in every morning? Janice would one day be dressed in even finer gowns!

Sunlight slapped Janice in the face, indicating that she was no longer within the servants’ quarters. Now all that stood between her and the outside world was the servants’ gate, manned by two guards. Tilting her head further backward so she could see the direction she was being pulled in, Janice broke out in cold sweat at how quickly the stewards were dragging her to the guards.

“Wait!” Janice yelled fearfully, her struggling renewed.

“Stop moving. You’ve been released from your service. Even if you somehow escaped us and ran back in, you would just be taken to the dungeons for trespassing into the imperial palace,” one of the stewards snapped, annoyed by Janice. Janice curled her lip at him, vowing revenge someday.

The other steward let out a chuckle at the expression on her face and then without warning, let Janice go abruptly. She tumbled to the ground roughly, her elbows painfully catching the brunt of her fall.

“Hey!” She barked out, furious at the treatment. All the other maids in the Rose Palace had walked around her in eggshells yet these two lads were being so careless with her person. The stewards didn’t pay her any mind, ignoring her as she lay on the floor.

“Take care of this, will you?” a steward said to the guard. “This maid was disrespectful to her highness, Princess Winter and caused her to cry. Her service has been terminated at the palace. Please escort her out.”

There was an emphasis on escort and Janice’s stomach lurched.

“Don’t worry about it,” the guard promised. Janice looked at him and felt her heart sink further. The guard wasn’t a royal guard or even handsome, there was no use in seducing him. Unceremoniously, the guard grabbed her on the injured area the stewards had held her and quite literally tossed her out of the palace as if she were a bag of potatoes.

“No trespassers welcome!” he barked, before turning to his partner and the both of them slapping each other on the back as they chuckled at their bad joke. Janice’s bottom going to be a patchwork of colors if she survived until the morning.

The streets outside the imperial palace were busy and not many people paid mind to Janice quite literally being thrown from there. She was stranded, without even the opportunity to collect her pay from the past two weeks. Janice stood slowly to her feet, her body jittery from the abuse. It was all so sudden, she felt as if she had hardly blinked before winding up outside the palace with nothing but the clothes on her back.

People were starting to look at the disgraced maid standing before the servants’ entrance so Janice began to slowly shuffle away, her dreams crumbling into pieces. If she went back to her village, she would be the laughingstock who spurned all the eligible men just to be spurned herself. Janice bit her lip so hard she drew blood, the iron flavor coating the tip of her tongue. She would rather die than go back to her hometown, the determination not to return helping her put one foot in front of the other.

One block separated her from her dream, then two. Silent, furious tears poured down her face and clogged her throat. If only she could make Princess Winter feel this same hopeless, angry feeling of being kicked out of the palace, Janice would sacrifice all her dreams of marrying rich to make it so.

“Bad day?” someone asked, a grin on their voice just after Janice had walked into an alley to shed a few more tears.