No One Could Silence the King’s Twin Princes — Until the Wolfless Servant Girl They Chose Changed Everything She Thought She Knew

Part 1

I had been told my whole life that I was nothing.

Not cruelly, always.

Sometimes it was just the way people looked through me in the corridor.

Sometimes it was the apple core at my temple.

Sometimes it was the simple fact that I slept in a storage cupboard because nobody thought I needed a room.

I had no wolf.

In a palace full of shifters, that meant I didn’t fully exist.

The king had saved me once, when I was small.

I had gotten lost in the gardens and he had found me and carried me back to the kitchens.

He was tall and golden and his voice had been so kind.

I held onto that memory the way you hold onto a handhold on a cliff.

If a king could see value in me, I wasn’t nothing.

That was the logic I lived by.

For four weeks, the palace had been filled with a sound that no one could stop.

The twin princes cried without ceasing.

They had been cried since their mother left.

The nursemaids worked in four-hour shifts and still came out weeping.

The healers had been dismissed.

No one could soothe them.

I hadn’t meant to go near them.

I was only supposed to carry supplies for Edna.

I was supposed to stay by the door and be invisible.

But I heard the second prince screaming from across the room.

And my feet moved before I could stop them.

I reached into the cradle and placed my hand on his chest.

He went still.

His eyes opened — wide and dark and completely startled.

He looked at me like he had never seen anyone before.

Like he had been waiting for me specifically.

I didn’t think.

I just sang.

The only lullaby I knew all the way through.

My voice wasn’t good.

It was thin and nervous and a little off-key.

But the prince’s breathing slowed.

His small fist uncurled.

He reached for my finger.

And behind me, his brother — who I hadn’t touched, who had been screaming just as hard — went quiet.

For the first time in four weeks, the nursery was completely still.

“How did you do that?” one of the nursemaids whispered.

I didn’t answer.

I didn’t know.

I came back the next morning.

And the morning after that.

And the morning after that.

For a whole year, I slipped into the royal nursery three times a day like a secret.

I sang to them.

I played with them.

I watched them learn to sit and then to crawl and then to take their first lurching, thrilled steps across the rug toward me.

Edna warned me not to love them too much.

“You’re a servant,” she said.

“They’re princes.

There are rules about this.”

I nodded and agreed and went back the next morning.

Because nothing in my life had ever chosen me before.

These two small, royal, completely perfect creatures — they chose me.

Not because of what I could do.

Not because of what I was.

Just because I walked in the room and they wanted me.

I thought if the king discovered us, he would understand.

He had saved me once.

He would see how happy his sons were and he would understand.

On a bright morning in the twins’ second year of life, I had them both in fresh tunics and was wrestling their shoes onto their very fast feet when the nursery doors slammed open.

King Doran stood in the doorway.

Tall and golden, the way I had always remembered him.

But the look on his face was nothing like the garden.

The look on his face was rage.

Pure and total and directed at me.

“Let my children go,” he said.

His voice was very quiet.

That was when I understood that I had been wrong about everything.

The twins felt the shift in the room before I did.

They went still against me.

Vero buried his face in my neck.

Soren’s fingernails dug into my arm.

I tried to speak.

I tried to say: your sons are happy.

I tried to say: please look at their faces and see that they are not afraid of me.

I tried to say: I have done nothing wrong.

“Your majesty,” I said.

“Please understand.

Your sons need me.”

His gaze turned to me.

And what I saw there erased every memory I had carried from the garden.

He had never seen me in the garden.

He had seen a lost child he found convenient to be kind to for one afternoon.

He did not remember me.

He had never thought of me again.

“Need you?” he said.

Soft and terrible.

“Why would the heirs to my throne need you?”