Before I take another step, the awareness lingers.
I don't have a target, or a confirmed threat. Just direction. And I am already moving to secure it.
I have held territory for ninety years. By tomorrow, I intend to understand why or what caused the beast to surface.
5
ELOWEN
Mournhold isn't what I thought it was.
I've been walking for the best part of an hour, moving slowly through halls and galleries with my bad leg complaining at every turn. What I've found has steadily dismantled the architecture I built around this place in my head. I expected oppressive. Dark elf estates exist in rumor as monuments to dominance.
There's iron, yes. But there are also tapestries so old the colors have faded into something subtle and beautiful, scenes of forest hunts and moonrise. I have Nyssara's slippers now. She left them outside my door without comment. They are two sizes too large and I've nearly lost them twice, but I am not walking these floors without them again.
"You look like you're mapping it."
Turning around, I see Fenra — the woman who held the thyme in the kitchen — at the junction of two corridors, arms full of folded towels, curly auburn hair escaping whatever she tried to pin it with. Her round cheeks are flushed from carrying something heavy, and she has her eyes on me with transparent delight.
"I am," I tell her. "This place seriously has no logic."
"Oh, none at all." She falls in beside me with the easy confidence of someone who has lived here long enough not to need a map. "The lord had two wings added in the same decade and never bothered matching the floor heights, so there are four places in the manor where the corridor steps up or down by exactly one stone and absolutely no one warns you. Not even a sign."
"I found two of them."
"Only two? You're doing well."
We turn toward my room, which I know now by the smell of the window herbs Nyssara left on the sill — and Fenra shifts the towels under her arm and glances at me sideways.
"You know the stories people tell about this place, right?"
"Unfortunately."
"Oh, it gets worse." Her voice drops, I know she's about to divulge some gossip. "The settlements east of the boundary line tell stories about him. A Lord from House Eldren once tried contesting the wildspont boundary. Sent messengers twice. Both came back with the letters unopened and a black stag seal pressed in what they swore was blood."
"Was it?"
Fenra shrugs. "No one stayed curious enough to confirm it."
"And Lord Eldren?"
"Moved his entire household further east within the month."
"What did he want?"
"No one knows. They signed three separate concessions before they left." Said with the reverence of someone recounting legend. "Vuldren says the lord doesn't need weapons in negotiations. The shape of the lord's attention is sufficient."
I think about those crimson eyes of his, assessing damage with the same expression a physician uses — not warm, not cold, simply thorough.
"Fenra."
"Mm."
"Does he frighten you?"
She considers my question as though she hasn't needed to before. "He frightens everyone," she admits. "But — no. Not me. Not personally. I know what they say. But, he's never once been unkind to anyone who worked here. Exacting, certainly. Quietly terrifying when something displeases him. But not unkind."
We reach my door. Fenra adjusts the linens to free a hand and smiles at me.
