The candle flames wavered when Oona entered Elena’s chamber. The silver goblet she held, etched with delicate patterns dulled with time, shimmered faintly in the firelight.
Here in the North, outside Castle Threadneedle’s walls, a gale lifted curtains of snow up and over the ramparts, rattling the shutters where Oona stood.
Elena didn’t take her eyes off Oona. Three days of fever had stripped away the child’s softness, leaving her suspicious.
“You were gone a long time,” Elena said finally.
“The kitchen is far away, my lady.” Oona turned, holding the goblet carefully in both hands. The glow of the fire lit her face, casting shadows that made her look timeless.
The room was surprisingly austere for a lady, practicality having won out over comfort. A sturdy wooden wardrobe with light scratches stood against the wall. A fire crackled weakly in the hearth, but the draft lingered, gently stirring the heavy maroon drapes. Dominating the room, a bed with intricately carved posts framed the figure of Lady Elena Thorn of Threadneedle.
Elena’s skin, flushed and slick with fever, seemed out of place against the bleached white linen sheets. Resting on a pillow, she looked as though a careless touch just might shatter her. Her piercing brown eyes, her father’s gaze, held an intensity that illness could not erase.
But unlike Lord Edric’s severe and empty paranoia, Elena’s eyes reflected a different kind of doubt: fear, certainly, but also intuition.
She now redirected that sharp suspicion on the healer, Oona, and the contents of the goblet she was just handed, which was wine laced with yarrow and willow bark, balanced with a touch of honey.
Oona was taller than most women in Threadneedle, and unnaturally still when she wasn’t moving—an unsettling quality that only those who watched her closely would even notice. Though her hands were chapped from work, she gracefully measured herbs from her satchel into a ceramic bowl and turned to the fire for warm water.
Even in the dim light, her skin seemed sun-kissed. She wore her dark hair loosely gathered at the back of her head. Her face, though plain to some, held a quiet symmetry that drew the eye for a moment too long, daring you to notice her without truly understanding why.
“This will help break the fever,” she added, stirring the ingredients with practiced accuracy—but there was something else, an unsettling, mechanical precision that sped up when no one was looking.
Before Oona could finish the potion, it came. Suddenly.
The scream.
Raw and high-pitched, the sound scraped against stone, then vanished without a trace. The steaming bowl trembled in Oona’s hands as she swiveled toward the source of the sudden noise. Lord Edric’s study.
Elena bolted upright, wide-eyed and fever-bright. “Father?”
“Stay in bed,” Oona said quickly, her calm fraying. She set the bowl down on the bedside table, but Elena was already pushing back the covers.
“Help me up,” the girl demanded, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
Oona hesitated.
She could already hear the castle guards’ heavy footsteps, their shouts smothered by the stone walls. But beneath it all, Oona knew. Threadneedle was very different now.