Albera the head waitress put me in a servants’ uniform. It was a simple bck dress with blue trimmings. It didn’t suit me very well, I always looked better in colours, but it fit nicely. Since I arrived in Medora I had finally been able to buy one more dress in addition to my mother’s, but I had to buy it second hand and try to alter it myself. The servants uniform was actually the best fitting garment I had worn ever since I was home on Coconut Isnd, and wearing my own clothes.

  She paired me up with a blonde curly haired girl named Mina. So many members of the wait staff were sick, that various other members of the castle staff were filling in in their pce. Albera assigned each new person one healthy member of the regur wait staff to tell them what to do.

  Mina and I each picked up a basket full of silver cutlery and walked into a hall. It was mind blowing. I could never have imagined one room to be so big. There was so much seating, it would have been enough for a third of the popution of Coconut Isnd. Huge stained gss windows let the low light of the afternoon though, and coloured it in all colours of the rainbow. There was a big raised ptform on the other end of the hall, above which there was a splendid circur window.

  “What is that ptform?” I asked Mina, as we started to y the tables.

  “That’s the dais, where the royal family sits.”

  “But I thought I would be working in the Lower Hall, not the Great Hall,” I compined.

  She looked at me like I was stupid.

  “We’re in the lower hall right now,” she said. “It’s the lower part of the Great Hall.”

  Ah fuck.

  We continued with our duties. I held on to the hope that maybe Jarion was sick like a lot of the waiters, or that he wouldn’t be able to see me down in the lower hall. A couple of the normal castle servants had a simir skin tone to me, so I didn’t stick out that much.

  When the royals made their formal entrances we got to leave the room for a short break. Most of us just went and sat outside a bit as the st light of the day left the sky. We knew we had a long night ahead of us.

  Then it was time to start serving. First we brought out big carafes of wine to serve everyone. I tried to walk as directly behind Mina as I could when we entered. Then I tried to always turn my back to the dais at the head of the room, as I served the variety of finely dressed people in the room.

  Every single guest at this party had spectacurly luxurious clothes and jewellery. I had never seen such an abundance of riches in my life. I thought back to the diamond ring my father had given me, the that was probably more expensive than our home on Coconut Isnd. Here someone could have dropped it on the floor and no-one would have noticed at all.

  My room mate Amira had taught me a little bit about Pyrrha and their culture. They spoke a simir nguage to Medorans, but had a different religion. They tended to have darker skin than Medorans, but not all of them did. Many of them wore a gold coloured sun pendant around their neck, to signify their belief in the sun god Aten. Amira had shown me her pendant, which was not gold-coloured, but made of wood, with a carved out sun in the middle. Her brother had made it for her.

  Some people were speaking the High Tongue, and expected me to know it as well. I guessed that it was a requirement for the pace staff. Some of them seemed a little relieved when I answered back in Medoran.

  I noticed a table full of men and women in long robes. I remembered my foray as a rat in the castle, where one of the men speaking about my father and Sir Titius had worn a long heavy robe. I turned to Mina and asked her.

  “Who are these people?”

  “They are the high priests and priestesses to the Fathers and Mothers,” she told me, as if I was a slow child.

  “Do they always wear the robes?”

  “Yes, always.”

  I tried to walk past them and hear if I recognized any of the voices, but voices sound very different to a rat than they do to a person, so I went about my normal serving job.

  I tried to sneak gnces at the dais at the head of the room, but I always got too scared to really look. I served all the wine out of my carafe, and then I could return to the kitchen before starting the next part of the serving.

  As I left the room I stood in the doorway for a moment to sneak a proper look at the dais. The first people I noticed were the king and queen at the centre. They were a handsome, middle aged couple. Their clothes were not more vish than those of the other guests, but they wore light crowns on their heads, and carried themselves with an undeniable confidence. They both had dark hair and dark eyes, like Cato, but the clearest resembnce was definitely between the king and his son. It was like looking at Cato in the future, only a little bit shorter, with slightly softer features and a beard.

  Beside them sat two people from the Pyrrhan royal court, and then there was Cato. He seemed to be in a good mood, ughing with a Pyrrhan dy at his other side. He wore a blue outfit in the sort of extravagant silk style that one would expect from a prince. I was used to seeing him in high-quality but simple styles when he hitched rides from me in the mornings. I thought I preferred him that way, the fshy styles only distracted from his natural good looks. Then I scolded myself for thinking about the fact that he was good looking.

  I looked further, and saw the young man and woman that I had seen riding to the castle that first evening when I had met Jarion. I had learned that the prince had two younger siblings, and I assumed that they were them, Prince Caius and Princess Penelope. He looked very serious, speaking to an old man beside him. The princess looked shy, and did not speak very much at all.

  Then I saw him. Jarion. He sat near the edge of the table, next to a Pyrrhan diplomat on one side and a middle aged woman with the same cool blue eyes as him on the other. I was struck by seeing him. He looked so handsome, and pleasant. As soon as I saw him I remembered the feeling of his strong, warm hands on my body. I blushed.

  “Ria, get back to work!” Mina sneered in my ear.

  I snapped back out of it, and went back into the kitchen. At least there were no signs yet that he had noticed me. We brought out the rest of the dishes and then the rest of the evening I was only supposed to fill wine gsses. I went back and forth with the big carafe, filling it in the rder behind the kitchen and then bringing it into the Great Hall.

  I was constantly aware of Jarion’s location on the dais, and I tried to keep him in the corner of my eye without ever directly facing him. I was pouring for the fifth time for a ruddy old man wearing a lot of silver when I felt a piercing feeling. Even before I looked I could tell he had noticed me.

  His icy eyes were staring at me, his gaze fixed through the crowded room. I looked directly back at him like a startled rabbit. There was no hiding now. He stood up from his seat and started walking towards me.