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.
"You're going to be fine," she asserts, as though I asked.
I push through the door and let it fall closed behind me.
The room is still absurdly large. Someone has left fresh candles burning and a second blanket folded neatly across the bed beside a small ceramic pot of salve.
I open it, test the scent, and pause. Correct herb base.
Better than what I would have mixed for the shoulder.
The satchel is where it's been since I woke — on the table beside the basin. I reach into it and pull out the wrapped cloth bundle. The herbs. Still intact, still sealed, still smelling faintly of forest floor and old copper.
I reveal them carefully and lay the stems flat across the table surface. The feverroot looks healthy at first glance. Then I notice the darkness threaded through the base of the stems. Not rot. Not disease. Pattern.
I pull the fungus fragment closer to the window. The veins repeat at consistent intervals across the surface, deliberate enough that my stomach drops immediately. Nature doesn't spread like this. Someone altered it. Then, the door swings open.
No knock. He doesn't knock. It just simply opens, because it's his manor and apparently that's sufficient, and there he is filling the frame with the same preternatural stillness.
I put the fragment down, frustrated. "This is my room," my voice sounds flat and even, which I'm counting as a success.
"It is." He steps inside. His eyes move to the table — to the herbs laid out.
"You didn't knock."
"I rarely do."
"In your own rooms, certainly. This one's mine."
"I assigned it to you."
"Assigning a room to someone and owning it are different concepts. Most people learn this before they're a hundred and forty."
He surveys the table with an expression that is not quite neutral.
"Those are the samples from the attack."
"Yes."
"You've been examining them."
"Obviously."
"I asked you to leave that to—"
"You asked me nothing. You issued instruction. In my medical experience, the person with the most relevant knowledge should be the one examining the evidence. Unless you have a working theory about transfigured moisture patterns in feverroot root systems."
He turns his head. The look he gives me is like he's choosing not to say the first three things that come to mind.
"You govern by fear," I continue, and I should stop here, but I find I don't. "You've built the whole structure of your authority around people being too afraid to question anything you do. And then you brought that same approach into a sickroom and expected it to work on me."
"I govern this territory," he declares, "because I have held it together since the beginning. Fear is efficient."
"Until it isn't."
"You disagree with the results?"
"I disagree with the premise." I stand, because this conversation requires that I'm upright for it. "People here would follow you without the fear. I've seen it."
He goes quiet.
"And you go into the forest, for a place that calls you strange and avoids your cottage and was, according to every account I've gathered, perfectly prepared to let a child die of fever rather than enter the cursed wood themselves."
"How do you know that?"
"I have hunters who talk to people." He glares at me. "They told me. And what Duskmire thinks of the woman who gathers it."
"That's — you had no right —"
"I had every right. You are under my roof, and I do not operate on ignorance if I can help it. What I want to understand is why someone who is called strange by her own village returns, repeatedly, into a forest everyone has labeled cursed, for people who do not thank her for it."
"Because Dara had a fever," I snap. "Because her mother had nothing left to try and someone had to go.
" I take a step toward him before I've thought it through.
"You can't call it irrational just because it cost me something.
You have no right to dig into my history for data and then question my reasoning with it. "
"I'm not." He takes one step forward. "I'm questioning the cost."
"The cost is mine to calculate."
"Not anymore."
He moves — toward me. Directly. Intentionally closing the distance until I take one step back and find the table's edge pressing into my lower spine.
Not touching. Not required to. The table sticks in my back and he's in front of me, cornering me.
I refuse to look away as my hands find the edge of the table and press flat.
His eyes stay on my face with an intensity that makes my grip tighten.
"You should move," I whisper.
"You're not going anywhere."
He leans forward slightly. Heat brushes against my skin. His eyes drop briefly to my mouth. Then he straightens abruptly. Something is happening to his composure that is unfamiliar, and I'm not prepared to name aloud what's happening to mine.
Suddenly, he steps back. Two clean, deliberate steps. Turns. And leaves. The door doesn't close behind him hard. It's controlled, like everything he does, even now.
I freeze at the table. I feel the tremor moving from my palms up through my wrists and into my arms — and I press them to my chest. When I look up, I catch the shadow under the doorframe. His hand on the frame, the white of his knuckles against the dark stone. He was shaking too.
I look back at the herbs spread across the table. The wildspont is modifed. And somehow that isn't the thing unsettling me most anymore.