I grip my skirt, fingers fisting around the cloth as the girl shrieks, and a second guard steps in to help hold her while the first empties her pockets: a half-slice of bread, three old acorns kept, no doubt, for a game, and that is all. “I’ve nothing,” the girl cries. “Please, my lady, I didn’t take it!”

“You were seen going into my rooms,” Emmanika says. “If you did not take it, who did? Come, child, tell me where the brooch is, and your punishment will be light. We do not suffer thieves here, you know, but if you confess, you shall not pay for it with your life.”

“I haven’t got it!” the girl cries. Her panic, her absolute terror washes through me.

“You are certain this is her,” Emmanika says, turning to Valka.

“Oh, yes, my lady,” Valka says earnestly. “I remember thinking she ought to clean that splotch on her apron.”

“Very well.” Emmanika turns back, and in her expression, I see the girl’s future: a flogging for certain, and if the brooch is not found, perhaps even execution.

I cannot stay silent—not anymore, not in this moment with the girl’s terror before me, and Valka’s lies in my ears, and the stark reality of what Emmanika intends staring back at me.

“No.” The word breaks from me as if I’ve spent a lifetime holding it in.

Maralinde glances at me, bewildered. “What?”

Emmanika, her actions arrested by the double onslaught of my command and her daughter’s voice, turns to stare at me. “Alyrra?”

I take a single, shaking breath and step forward. Valka blinks at me in disbelief. And then she laughs. “Oh, you are just worried about the girl, aren’t you, princess? Never mind, though. She’ll only be punished for what she’s done. And you’re too young to be watching. We all know how soft you are.”

“I’ll walk you to your rooms,” my brother says, stepping forward. “We’ll let Lady Emmanika deal with the servant, won’t we, sister? It’s not our concern.”

Does he know? Would it matter if he did? In any event, he will walk me away, and the girl will be beaten, or killed, and Valka will have had her game—for that’s what it is. Emmanika, who lectured her on respecting the servants, will be found out to have wrongly punished or even executed a girl, for the brooch will be found. I’ve no doubt of that. It will destroy the girl, and haunt Emmanika, and Valka will laugh about it all.

“No,” I say again, loud and clear. My brother stops three paces away, taken aback, and then his eyes narrow with fury. He has never turned such a look on me before. I force myself to swallow down my fear. I have to do this. I can’t stop now.