The smell of the kitchen wafted over her as she climbed – onions and ginger, mingling with the pot of seafood stock bubbling over the firepit. The servants moved around one another with the grace of dancers, narrowly avoiding collisions, plates and vegetables clutched in their hands. Even after they’d married, even after she’d moved her paltry things into the palace, it was difficult for her to believe she lived here – that everything here was now hers as well. She still woke up sometimes from dreams where she was back on the streets, hunting for scraps to eat, trying to piece together enough things to sell. When she was in those dreams her life in the palace seemed an imagined thing.

Someone scurried among the servants, her head just below their shoulders. Ranami froze on the steps as she recognized the girl. Not some kitchen servant’s wayward child. Ayesh.

Ayesh had been at the palace this morning – and though Phalue had given her leave to eat at the kitchens and to sleep in the room they’d set up for her, Ranami had watched her leave. What was she doing back here?

A couple of the servants glanced at Ayesh, but they’d seen her here before and they were busy preparing the evening meal. Dishes scraped against one another, knives chopped and always they talked – gossiping about Unta, about the Emperor and her visit, about the Shardless Few. Ranami had listened in on these conversations more than once, eager to know what was being said among the commoners. They paid the gutter orphan little mind.

And as Ranami watched, cloaked in the darkness of the cellar stairwell, Ayesh took full advantage of their lax attention. She went to the pantry, peeled off a banana and began to eat it. While she ate, she surreptitiously pilfered a whole leg of cured pork, three mangoes and a jar of dried fish. These went into a bag she carried at her side – one she didn’t have when she’d been there for lessons in the morning.

Ayesh slung the bag over her shoulder and made for the door.

Swiftly, Ranami crept up the rest of the stairs. She might not have been small like Ayesh, but she’d spent enough time creeping around city alleyways to know how to make herself unseen. She strode along the walls, keeping servants between her and the girl, ready to duck behind one of them if Ayesh turned around.

She waited just a bit after Ayesh left the kitchen to follow her. A glimpse of short black hair and brown tunic disappeared around the corner. Ranami frowned. The girl wasn’t headed in the direction of the gate.