The Queen's Chair by Chloe Garner

Author:Chloe Garner [Garner, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Horse Called Alpha
Published: 2022-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

She settled into a routine of sorts. She broke her days into pieces, spreading out the time that she spent up across the street from the butcher such that she covered as many days and as many times of day as possible, but also wandering the city, looking at apartments in the cheaper regions and starting the process of renting them. She was trying to do them one at a time, working on one while she made arrangements for another, and then visiting each of the completed ones at least every couple of days, talking to neighbors and vendors, being familiar without being specific.

She suspected that a number of the men and women she met thought that she was setting up a secret meeting location for a romantic tryst, which offended her at first - why, especially in an enlightened city like Verida where women held important roles in government and were educated right there alongside the men, was it so impossible to believe that a young woman might just be setting out on her own? - but she realized that there were dual benefits to that. If they thought that she was engaged in a romantic entanglement already, she avoided the advances of the young men who noted her, and it also meant that she could arrive with a stranger and simply validate what everybody had already thought of her. No one would be surprised if someone turned up living in the apartment she’d rented.

She put a lot of effort into trying to make the apartments themselves livable, but she was poignantly aware that a lot of the people in the queen’s circle might find them simply unacceptable, with the amount of time that Stasia was prepared to put into them each, individually. She left new cleaning supplies at each apartment, rather than carrying them with her, and she stocked them with basic grooming supplies, at least, in hopes of being able to help get any one of them up to par with a little extra time. It was just the first night, she told herself over and over again. Just for the first night, and then they would make things better.

She squared up accounts with Jasper every week, except the week that the guards were in the castle, keeping a careful log of all of her expenses and giving it to him. He gave her the money to compensate what she’d spent, and then there was another villing a week for doing the work. It was too much money, Stasia thought, considering she was just wandering around talking to people and writing down the things she saw, but Jasper told her that it was the amount set by the queen and she should look at it as a sign of value, rather than profligacy.

She went out to the Westhauser estate twice more, taking Schotzli out for long rides, once with Lady Westhauser and once with just a stable boy in tow. It was beautiful country, and provided a

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