Fateful by Claudia Gray

the rugs, washing the floors, that sort of thing. Daisy was brought on as a nursery maid, the assistant to the nanny, to help with then newborn Beatrice.
    We both worked from before dawn until almost midnight, seven days a week, with one afternoon off a month for walking back into the village and visiting our parents. At least they let us share a room, which was the only thing that made that attic bedroom bearable. It was at the highest point of the house, but with no window to provide a pretty view of the grounds. Hot in summer, so cold in winter that the water in our bedside jug often froze overnight—the first thing we did, on waking up in December and January, was take a stone and crack the ice, so we could wash our faces in the frigid water beneath the surface. The bed was rather small for both of us, but we’d shared one as small at home; the crowding was worse only because we were growing older, and in my case, growing taller. At least at home we’d had the luxury of packing our mattress with clean, fresh straw once a year. From the musty smell of the one we had at Moorcliffe, it had last been restuffed decades ago.
    “Look on the bright side,” Daisy said to me one night, when I was crying. I’d had to scrub the front steps with lye, which had blistered my hands. The pain of it bothered me less than the fact that I’d have to scrub the back steps the next day, and blister them again and even worse. “We don’t have to listen to Dad preaching at us day and night, not here.”
    “It wasn’t so bad.” But I didn’t really mean that. Ever since our little brother had died of influenza a few years before, our father had become almost frighteningly religious. We were never naughty anymore; instead we were wicked, or sinful. It was hard to be told you were sinful all the time. But it was also hard to feel the skin on my hands cracking from the lye.
    “We’re making money to send home to Mum,” she said, stroking my hair. The light of our one candle flickered, blurring the silhouette of her hand against the wall. “And we have chances to get ahead here, you know. Ways to improve our station.”
    “If I work very hard, maybe someday they’ll make me a head parlor maid.” So I could wear a slightly less ridiculous uniform, and instead of burning my own hands, I could make the poor little housemaids under me burn theirs. It didn’t sound so marvelous to me.
    “That’s not what I mean.” She pulled the thin blanket more snugly over me, as if the chill was my biggest problem. “I just mean—chances, is all.”
    I ought to have asked her what she was really speaking of, but I didn’t.
    “Be careful with that!” Horne demands as I restitch the lace on the sleeve of the gown Lady Regina wore last night. Really, this is Horne’s job, but she’s busy doing the absent nanny’s job and wrestling Beatrice into her pinafore. “She’ll inspect it today, probably as soon as she comes back to the suite.”
    I’m a better seamstress than Horne, and she knows it. But the truth is, my fingers are shaky, and it’s all I can do to keep my stitches straight. I try to focus only on the lace in my palm, only on the needle between my fingers.
    I need sleep. I need a proper meal. I need to feel safe from Mikhail. I need to know what the Brotherhood wants. I need Alec to—to be someone he can never be. I need to go back to before, to warn Daisy. The things I need, I can’t have.
    When it began, just over two years ago, I thought Daisy was merely sick. No great surprise, given the coldness of that winter and the chill in our attic.
    She was losing her breakfast nearly every morning; I’d awaken to the sound of her vomiting into a basin. “Tell Cook,” I would say, as I held back her hair. “She’s not as mean as old Horne. She’ll save you something easier for tea. Chicken broth, maybe.”
    “Don’t tell Cook,” she choked. “Don’t tell anyone. Not anyone, Tess.”
    We had so little privacy with our small