Chapter 73: The art of being seen
The knock came in the early afternoon, sharp and deliberate.
Lilliana had been waiting.
She was already dressed, modestly, deliberately. A dove-grey day gown cinched at the waist, the color soft enough to blend into marble but crisp enough to suggest purity. Her hair was pinned in a neat coil, her face untouched by rouge. Just a brush of lavender oil behind each ear. She looked like the kind of girl older women pitied and younger girls forgot.
A maid entered without looking her in the eye. "The Lady will receive you now."
Lilliana rose with quiet grace, smoothing the front of her skirt. "Of course."
The palace corridors had changed with the day's progress. Sunlight fell at harsher angles, filtering through crystal chandeliers to cast patterns across the stone. The hush of morning had been replaced by a different kind of silence, watchful, coiled. The kind that came after an evening of whispered arrangements and sealed fates.
