The woman in gold withdrew her hand from the transparent sculpture. Beneath the chandeliers, the waiting courtiers shifted impatiently.
“Another failure. None of them is the chosen one,” the prince said.
Elia had come to clear the glasses. She had never expected to stand before the pedestal. Yet she found herself moving toward it, her apron brushing the edge of the white marble.
“Elia, what do you think you’re doing?”
The woman in green stepped forward among the watching nobles.
“A miserable maid? How pathetic!”
Elia closed her eyes and lowered her hand. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
She could have returned to the servants’ passage. Instead, she looked at the glass fingers once more and raised her right hand.
A cold sensation passed through her fingertips.
“Wait. My hands?” She lifted both palms before her eyes. “Could it really be me?”
What the Queen Recognized
The queen moved first.
“Bring her a chair,” she said.
No one obeyed until she repeated the order. Elia sat, bewildered, while the queen examined her hands. The skin looked ordinary. There was no jewel, no wound, no mark for the crowd to see.
“What did you feel?” the queen asked.
“Cold. Then something like someone holding my hand.”
The queen drew a breath. Years earlier, her sister had described the same sensation. It was recorded in a private account kept with the sculpture, a detail never announced to the court.
“Someone could have told her,” the woman in green said.
“Perhaps,” the queen replied. “We will check.”
The Account in the Locked Cabinet
The prince fetched the court archivist. Together they opened the cabinet beside the throne and brought out the account. The queen asked Elia to describe the sensation again before the page was read aloud.
“There were two hands,” Elia said. “Mine was cold. The other felt warm. I thought I imagined it.”
The archivist stopped turning the page. That detail was there too.
The room fell quiet.
The test had been presented for years as a way to identify a bride for the prince. But the old account named the person who answered the sculpture as its keeper. The keeper would be responsible for the royal archives and the testimony held within them.
The prince read the passage twice. “Then why have we been choosing only from noble families?”
The queen looked at the council members standing behind the woman in green. “That is a question they will answer.”
Elia’s First Request
Elia was given a room near the archive and a teacher to help her read its oldest records. Her appointment remained provisional while the account and the test were examined. For the first time, the court had to explain its rules to someone who had spent her life carrying trays through the room.
The prince found her outside the archive the next morning.
“Is there anything you need?” he asked.
Elia looked down the corridor toward the servants’ stairs.
“My wages. The steward still owes me for last month.”
He stared, then nodded. “I’ll have it checked.”
“For everyone,” she added. “He owes the others too.”
When the steward’s books arrived that afternoon, Elia sat beside the archivist and opened the first page. The woman in green had requested a private audience with the queen. This time, she was told to wait.