The Quiet One

7 | An Escape

So yeah, this feels a lot longer than chapter 6. Guess it makes up for it being shorter? Idk. :) I hope you enjoy! Please vote and comment, and thanks for reading!

I didn't really talk to the servants around the palace. They usually were quietly doing their work, suddenly vanishing when visitors came by. I didn't take much interest in them; I was so absorbed in my studies that I never paid attention to them.

Well, I got bored (big surprise) one night, I'd say two years after seeing the Mask of Deception for the first time. I pretended to be asleep, but around midnight I unhinged my window and crawled out silently.

Walking along the roof and pressing my back to the wall, I found myself facing another tower of the palace. Checking for other people, I swung down from the roof and silently landed on a balcony one story below my room. I did so for two more floors until I reached the ground floors, which were the servant's quarters.

Like I said, I never really got to know any of the servants, much less learn about their daily lives. To my surprise, I found several servants wide awake, pressing sheets and doing other chores. There was a large open area where the servants mingled, and there were old-fashioned tables and chairs neatly pushed together. From the looks of it, this was where the servants came together for mealtimes and some jobs.

A thick cord was strung from one wall to the other, creating a place for the servants to hang clothes from. There were enough clothes to completely cover the cord. They wouldn't notice if two or three clothing items vanished, right?

Crouching on an overhang above the servant's commons, I silently snatched some clothes. I turned them over in my hand, squinting in the dim light offered by the moon and the lamps below me.

I had to repeat that several times before grabbing clothes that fit me and were practical for my needs. (The first couple times, I came up with underwear and a water bottle... somehow.) Bundling them up under my arm, I climbed back to my room (hey, I'm a pretty conservative person) to change into them. Upon my second time climbing out the window, I couldn't help but to notice that the glass was rather thin. If I leaned my full weight on it, I could hear it creaking. If I threw my body against it, the window would most definitely shatter. I took a mental note of that as I carefully opened it again.

I snuck out to the garden and sighed with relief, rolling my shoulders and stretching a bit. It was nice to be able to walk around in something that wasn't a dress.

The garden was my mother's, but the servants were the ones that really kept it all in order. There were cherry blossoms everywhere, gently showering a rain of pink petals on the stone paths and long grasses. There were tall bamboo forests and oak trees blocking out the sky at some times. Carefully trimmed hedges of dark green and deep purple evenly circled a large wishing-fountain in the center, the water shooting into the air even though it was 1 am and nobody was supposed to be looking at it anyway.

To my regret, the only clothes that fit me were a dark green color. It wasn't surprising, for dark green ("jade", as my parents liked to call it) was a signifying color of the Ninjagian royal family. On the bright side, I easily blended in with the surrounding greenery. I walked around the garden, enjoying my freedom and the exhilaration of disobeying the rules. I made sure to stay quiet, as I knew Father liked to keep guards patrolling all the time.

The stomp of boots came from a path ahead of me. I sucked in a gasp and instinctively pressed my back against the wall, carefully peeking around the corner, and sure enough ten soldiers were marching in formation down the path I had been on seconds ago. Had I not ducked away, I would have been in a huge mess.