My hands are steadier than they should be, given what I'm looking at. I reach for parchment, and then I stop. Because theparchment is not where I left it. It has moved six inches to the left, which means someone has been at this table since I stepped out to retrieve the bark sample from the storage room. I was gone eighteen minutes. The door to the workroom is accessible from two corridors, and I have been working here every day for the past week at the same hours, in the same pattern, with the same materials laid out.
I pull the samples toward me and cover them with a cloth. Then I look at the cup of tea Fenra brought me an hour ago, still half-full on the corner of the table.
I haven't touched it since I started working. The smell reaching me now — faint, sweet, beneath the herb scent — is wrong. Not obviously wrong. Wrong the way a slightly-too-ripe piece of fruit is wrong, the kind of thing you dismiss as nothing if you haven't spent years learning to read what plants do to other substances when they're introduced in the wrong combination.
Pale-leaf extract, probably. Sedative at low doses, cumulative at high ones. Difficult to taste in anything warm and sweetened. Not designed to kill immediately — designed to look like exhaustion, like illness.
I am very still for several seconds. Then Mirelle opens the door without knocking, which she never does, and her sharp green eyes go immediately to the cup.
She moves fast for someone who conveys permanence in everything she does. The cup is in her hands and away from the table before I've finished standing, and she is studying the contents with the face she wears during inventory discrepancies — controlled outrage, precise and cold.
"I smelled it from the corridor," she announces. "Fenra didn't bring that."
"Someone used her tray."
"Yes. You're pale."
"I haven't drunk it."
"I know. Can you walk?"
"I could before the cup arrived."
Her mouth tightens briefly. She crosses to the corridor door, checks both directions with the efficiency of someone who has managed this household through enough crises to have developed protocols for things no one officially planned for, and then returns.
"The east servant stair. Now." She picks up my satchel from the floor and passes it to me. "Leave the samples covered. Don't take anything that can't be replaced."
"Mirelle." I pull the satchel over my shoulder and look at her directly. "Someone in this manor did that."
"I am aware."
"Someone who knows my schedule. My routine. What I've been working on and when I'd be alone with it."
Her expression tells me she has known this longer than I have. "I have had my suspicions for six days," she states. "I was not certain enough to act. Now I am."
She doesn't say who. She moves to the door and I follow her, because Mirelle running interference between me and someone who just tried to sedate me into something that looks like natural deterioration is not an offer I'm going to refuse on principle.
She takes the route fast enough to suggest she's walked it many times in the dark. We emerge two floors up, in a section of the manor I haven't used. She installs me in a small room with a lock that takes a specific ward to open, tells me to stay until she sends someone, and is gone before I can assemble a proper response.
I sit on the edge of a chair and catch my breath. Whoever targeted me knew the discovery was close. Not what it was — they moved too quickly for that, before I'd reached theconclusion myself. But they knew the work was progressing toward something that threatened them.
That's not Malrec. Malrec is outside these walls now. That is someone who walks Mournhold's corridors without suspicion. Someone who receives intelligence. It's been visible for weeks. I lasted five minutes before deciding a locked room was only useful if the person inside it intended to stay there. The ward was old household work, not battlecraft, and it gave beneath my knife with less resistance than my conscience.
I find Draekir standing with his back partially toward the door of the room with the maps, and he registers my entrance by the way he changes posture — a slight shift at the shoulder.
"Elowen." He glances at my face and reads it. "What happened?"
"Someone attempted to poison me. The tea in the workroom." I don't cushion it. "Mirelle caught it. I'm not harmed."
He turns. Fully. The map table sits between us and he doesn't move around it, and neither do I, and the distance of it is specific — not accidental. We have not been in the same room without furniture between us since?—.
"Where is Mirelle?"
"Handling it quietly. She asked me to stay out of?—"
"Where is she?"
"I don't know exactly." I press forward anyway, because I did not walk through half this manor with my pulse in my throat to be stopped by a question. "Draekir. I need you to listen to me. The person who did this has access to the inner house — they knew my schedule, they knew what I was working on, and they moved before I could finish because what I found threatens?—"
