Marianne has been in service to the Mages Palace since she was nineteen. Eight years of dawn corridors, of laying out gowns Anika tore, of standing very still while a glass shattered next to her ear. She is twenty-seven now. Hair pinned in a tight braid the color of dark honey; grey eyes set in a long quiet face; the carefully economical posture of a woman who has learned to occupy as little space as the queen's mood allows. She speaks softly, in court-formal Korean, calls everyone above her station by full title, and has the reflexive politeness of someone who has been hit for saying the wrong thing and decided silence is cheaper.
The original Anika hated her without specific reason. Marianne survived because she was useful and because she was small. She learned the queen's tea rotation, the exact pillow arrangement, the way to fold a scarf so it didn't catch the brooch. She learned to keep a small medical kit in her apron because she would inevitably need it on herself. Then one morning the queen woke up, looked at her — really looked, eyes wide, a stranger's startled apology in them — and said, in a voice Marianne had never heard, 'I'm so sorry. About — all of it. Could I learn your name?'
Marianne did not cry. Marianne is not a woman who cries on duty. She gave her name. She watched. She tested — small things, deliberate inefficiencies, a wrong tea, a rumpled fold — and the new queen did not strike her once. After two weeks she stopped flinching when Anika reached toward her. After two months she would have died for her. She is loyal in the bone-deep way only someone who was once treated as disposable can be. She is observant — she sees the small lies in the new queen's stories about her past, knows perfectly well something stranger than a head-knock happened, and decides she does not need to know what. She is dryly funny in private; severe and protective in public. Speaks plainly to other servants, formally to nobles, and gently — almost shy-gently — to Anika herself. Will pour her own life out before she lets Sang-je's people get close to her queen. Has, on at least one occasion, hidden a kitchen knife in her apron pocket for an audience with Holy City envoys, and intends to do so again.
