But Selena did not retrieve Lydia’s unexpected present, not that night or the next.
Instead she went to see Lucas, who surely thought she had forgotten him. She did not bother with a coat. Spring had settled over the land, the warmer air melting the snow, if not yet softening the ground, as Selena discovered when she dropped from the top of the fence and landed with a grunt.
She had to knock twice before Lucas came to the door, and in those seconds, she feared the boy had forgotten her.
However, a couple of minutes later, they were together in the hayloft, their private sanctuary.
“Sorry to hear about your granny,” Lucas said. “I hope she’s all right.”
“As good as can be expected, I suppose,” Selena replied. “I just wish I knew how she had fallen in the first place. I went to see her today, instead of taking a nap at lunchtime, and…”
“Yeah?”
“She called me by my mother’s name,” said Selena.
Lucas did not appear impressed by the revelation. “That happens a lot as you get older, I think. Sylvia’s ma always calls her by her sister’s name and the other way ’round. And just look at how many people there are in your family. Both you and the Duchess have red hair—”
“I am more than half a foot taller than my mother and not half as wide,” Selena snapped. “There was no reason she should have mistaken me for her…and the look on her face when I told her that I was her granddaughter, not her daughter-in-law…she looked so confused…”
“She’s still bedridden, right?” Lucas asked. “Maybe she’d just woken up.”
Selena shrugged.
“So…um…how was the fair?”
She gave him a mostly honest summary of her trip to Mongalith. She complained about having to spend so much time with her brothers, but she did her best to make the jousts and duels sound interesting. If nothing else, Lucas would have enjoyed seeing the many breeds of horses.
Selena described the bustling city in terms quite different than she had perceived them at the time because she wanted to ignite the spark of curiosity in Lucas—a spark she could fan later.
There is so much to see outside of Castle Nelesti, she wanted to scream at the boy. Do not waste your life in this stable!
Selena made no mention of her encounter with Lydia Spade or the contraband in her bedroom.
While she trusted Lucas would keep her secret, she was reluctant to confess how foolishly she had behaved at the bookshop. No one had noticed her missing strands of hair, but Selena feared she had left something more valuable than a few hairs with the shopkeeper.
Since their first meeting as small children, Lucas had looked up to her, even though he was the older by a year. She had taught him to read, at least a little, and she saw it as her duty to encourage him to pursue a more worthy course than becoming the next stablemaster at Castle Nelesti.
“I shall surely go back to the fair next year,” Selena said, though she doubted the truth of it. “Maybe when I am old enough to travel alone, we can go to Mongalith together, so you can see the festivities in person.”
Lucas’s bark of a laugh made Selena’s eyes go wide in surprise. “Don’t be daft. The Duke and Duchess’ll never let you go nowhere without plenty o’ servants, and I’d not likely be one o’ them. There’s a reason you’re sneakin’ out o’ the castle to see me, you know.”
Lucas had spoken the words matter-of-factly, which infuriated Selena all the more. She wanted to shake him and declare that Charlotte Nelesti did not rule her life, even if “the Duchess” ruled his.
She wanted to shout at him, to get him as riled up as she herself was, though the boy had done nothing more than speak the truth.
There was a reason why Selena could not visit Lucas during the day, why she could not invite him into the castle, have lunch with him in the dining room, or show him her room. Charlotte would not only disapprove of Selena’s friendship with Lucas, she would destroy it—not for the sake of being cruel, but because she had outright forbidden the “unseemly” relationship six years ago.
Selena had been eight at the time. Riley had not wanted to play that day, and she had not yet forgiven Evelyn for quitting their game of hide-and-seek midway through. Daphene was supposed to be watching her because Vivian was ill, but since Daphene had never come for her, Selena slipped out of the castle. It was a nice day, and it was not long before she came upon children playing.
There was nearly a dozen of them, their ages varying from five to ten. Selena approached them. Both carried dolls made of burlap and cornhusks. They stopped chatting when they saw her coming.
“Where’d you get that dress?” The first girl asked.
The child wore a simple smock covered in dust. Her blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight. Her golden ringlets were bound with scraps of ribbon. Selena thought she was the prettiest person she had ever seen, including Vivian.
“Don’t be a dunce, Amelia,” the second girl said. “She’s from the castle, one of the Duke’s daughters.”
“My name is Selena.” She performed a curtsey that would have made her mother nod in approval.
The first girl giggled. “I’m Amelia Brown.”
“And I am Sylvia Finch. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” the other girl said in a snobby tone, performing an exaggerated curtsey that made Amelia laugh louder.
The spectacle drew the attention of the other children. With so many pairs of eyes on her, Selena felt like a caged rarity in a menagerie. She was suddenly very conscious of the bold colors she wore, how they made her stand out from the dull-hued clothes the other children wore.
Sylvia made another curtsey. Bolstered by the renewed peals of laughter, she strode up to Selena, who was too stunned to even flinch.
“You’d best be careful, milady,” Sylvia said, her hands on her hips. “There are some awful big mud puddles out here. ’Twould be a shame if you was to fall in one and ruin your fancy dress.”
This evoked more laughter from the others. For some reason, Selena glanced over at Amelia, but if she had hoped for help from that corner, she was sorely disappointed. Amelia Brown was laughing with the rest of them.
As she ran from the children, her eyes welled up with tears, which then dribbled down her face. She could hear the cajoling laughter long after she had left the mob behind. Finding herself in a secluded area right outside the castle, Selena fell to her knees and bawled.
After a few minutes, she was startled into silence, as a voice behind her said, “There’s no need for that now.”
The boy who had spoken was an inch shorter than her but might have been older, since Selena was always tall for her age. She had seen him with the other children, and her first thought was he had come to push her into the mud.
Hands balled into fists, Selena said, “What do you want?”
Undaunted by her vehemence, the boy replied, “Wanted to make sure you was all right. Sylvia can be a bully. Likes the attention, she does.”
The boy’s mellow voice eased Selena’s temper. Her fingers uncurled, and the glare evaporated from her face. The boy smiled at her reassuringly, but she was not yet ready to return the gesture. His hair looked as though its curls and tangles had never been tamed by a comb. The ends of his trousers were caked in what looked like mud but might have been something worse.
“I like horses,” he added.
She spent the remainder of the day with Lucas Thorne, who did not once tease her for living in the castle. Lucas filched a couple of apples for them for lunch, and they drank the water directly from the well. Selena felt as though she were visiting a different country. Even Castle Nelesti looked foreign from the outside.
It was during that nebulous period between late afternoon and early evening that Daphene found her and put an end to Selena’s adventures. She scolded Selena mercilessly, scowling at her and Lucas, who smiled back sheepishly. Daphene grabbed Selena by the arm and tugged her back to the castle. She had only time enough to send a desperate glance back at her new friend.
Daphene took Selena straight to their mother, who was not at all pleased to learn her youngest had spent the day frolicking with the son of a stableman. She told Selena never to wander from the castle unescorted, and under no circumstances was she to mingle with the village children.
“You are of noble birth, Selena,” Charlotte said. “It would not be proper for you to cultivate a friendship with a peasant boy because we aristocrats must maintain a distance between us, the rulers, and those we rule.”
“I don’t rule over anyone,” Selena muttered.
“Don’t?” Charlotte repeated in a disgusted tone. “You spend one afternoon with the boy, and already you are speaking like him. Grammar is not the only difference between his class and yours, my daughter. We are refined and learned. If we were to treat our servants as equals, they would undoubtedly start to believe that they know as much as we do. Orders would go unheeded; commands, ignored.
“The next thing you know, a stableman thinks he is as capable of governing the realm as a noble-born lord and all of Superius is ruled not by the wisest, but by the strongest. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Selena nodded. It was not the first she had heard of the social hierarchy that divided the citizens of Superius into classes.
Four years later, Selena learned that Lucas had been avoiding her. Sylvia Finch had told his mother about his afternoon with the Duke’s daughter, and Lucas got a spanking for it. Lucas had related the incident to her as he filled a row of troughs with hay. The thirteen-year-old boy had started working in the stable a year ago, but that was the first time Selena had worked up the courage to reintroduce herself to him.
It would prove to be the first of many visits to the stable for Selena.
Now, sitting across from Lucas in the dark, she thought about how much their relationship had changed in those two years. His hair was as curly as ever, but he usually reined it in under a woolen cap. On warmer days, he tied it back in a thong, his ponytail rivaling Selena’s in girth, if not length.
His face had changed, too, losing some of the roundness of childhood. Long days of hauling hay and handling horses had carved Lucas’s body into a mass of hard muscles. His shoulders seemed to grow broader by the day.
Even in the shadowy loft, she could see that patches of light hair had sprouted here and there on his cheeks and chin. There was no denying Lucas Thorne was well on his way to becoming a man.
Realizing she had been staring at him in silence for a long time, she coughed and asked, “So what do you call that stuff growing on your chin anyway?”