Only she knew the truth of it. The girl who had once dreamed of nothing more than a small cloth shop with flowers planted outside its door had never actually crossed through those palace gates at all. That girl had died somewhere far outside them, beneath a plum tree, on a night she could never fully bring herself to remember in its entirety. The woman who walked through the palace gates that day, who smiled so convincingly at the King and bowed so gracefully before the assembled court, was someone else entirely, someone Aleel herself had been forced to become in order to survive what remained of her life.
Back in the present, Aleel slowly opened her eyes, drawn from the depths of her memory by the quiet crackling of the brazier beside her. Zanine remained seated silently at her side, apparently unaware that tears had begun slipping unbidden down Aleel's cheeks while she had been so completely lost in thought. Aleel raised one hand and wiped them away quickly, before her attendant could take proper notice or ask the kind of gentle, concerned question she had no wish to answer honestly.
"It has been many years since I last thought of that night so clearly," she murmured, more to herself than to Zanine, her voice carrying a weariness that seemed far older than her years.
Her gaze drifted, almost without her willing it, in the direction of the small servants' quarters where two children were likely already asleep beneath warm quilts for what might well have been the first time in years. A little girl who had somehow managed to bargain with nobles far above her station without a trace of fear in her eyes. A quiet, watchful little boy who observed the entire world around him in near-total silence, as though committing every detail to memory before deciding what to make of it.
Aleel allowed herself a small, sad smile as she considered them.
"You know, Zanine," she said softly, "if those two children ever truly manage to leave this place one day, and find some life for themselves beyond these walls..."
She paused, her fingers unconsciously seeking out the small shape of the wooden comb still hidden within her robes, worn smooth now from years of quiet, secret touching.
"...I hope, more than anything, that they choose more wisely than I was ever permitted to."
Because she, herself, no longer could.
####
Kazu had never understood why people smiled. The women of the White Tower smiled whenever visitors came to inspect them, servants smiled whenever they were handed some small reward for their obedience, and even Lady Ifka smiled, more often than not, in the exact moment she ordered someone to be beaten. To him, smiles had always seemed like strange, unreliable things, the kind that vanished the instant they had served their purpose, the way frost disappeared the moment the morning sun climbed high enough to touch it. The only smile he had ever truly believed in was Hazia's, and even that belief had taken him a long time to understand, because he knew, better than anyone, that her smile was very often a lie.
She smiled when she was hungry enough that her stomach ached audibly in the quiet of their little shack. She smiled after Faman struck her across the back with the bamboo rod hard enough to leave welts that lasted for days. She smiled whenever she lied smoothly to some adult who would have hurt them both had she told the truth. She smiled while pocketing stolen buns from the servants' kitchen, and she smiled while pretending, again and again, that everything was perfectly fine. But Kazu knew better, because he watched her constantly, far more closely than anyone else in the entire palace ever bothered to. Long before anyone else noticed anything was wrong, he had already noticed. He noticed the way she quietly pressed a hand against her stomach when hunger gnawed at her in the middle of the night. He noticed how she always managed to give him the larger portion of whatever meager food they had, claiming she wasn't hungry even as her hands trembled from the effort of holding herself together. He noticed that she drank water instead of eating whenever she insisted she was already full. He noticed that she rarely slept through an entire night without waking suddenly, breathing hard, her eyes darting around their tiny shack as though she had briefly forgotten where she was.
The first few times it happened, he had assumed some monster had frightened her in her sleep. It was only much later that he understood the monsters existed only inside her dreams, in memories he could never fully see but somehow understood belonged to her alone. Whenever she noticed him awake and watching, she always smiled the same tired smile and said the same tired words. "I'm alright. Just some silly dream." He never once believed her, not from the very first time she said it, but he never pushed her to explain either, because some part of him understood that she needed him to pretend to believe it just as much as she needed to say it.
Something changed, though, after they began working in the servants' kitchen outside the cold palace. Her smiles became less frequent, strangely enough, yet they reached her eyes far more often than before, as though she had finally begun rationing something precious instead of spending it carelessly on people who didn't deserve it. She laughed easily with the cooks. She argued with Inae over the smallest of things. She negotiated with servants twice her size without a trace of fear in her voice, and sometimes, while she cooked, she even hummed quietly under her breath, a sound Kazu had never once heard from her before that time. He liked that sound more than he could ever have explained. It made their small, precarious world feel warmer, as though the two of them had finally found somewhere the cold couldn't quite reach.