Reynhild didn't even turn as Elena clattered into the doorway, struggling with a tray piled high with fresh buttered bread, pears, cold sliced venison, a wedge of good cheese, and an earthenware mug of herb tea. Callum, on the other hand, who was dozing at her feet, woke up long enough to wag his tail at the approaching maidservant. "Oh, sod off, Elena," she muttered, but there was no venom in it. In truth, she was tired. The bank of candles she'd lit to read by had long guttered down and snuffed themselves in pools of spent wax, but she hadn't even noticed, as dawn gradually crept through the narrow window. Tomes and scrolls were piled high on her bureau, most from the castle's library, a few from traveling merchants.
Elena, undeterred, directed a barrage of fuss at Reynhild. "Oh, by all the gods, look at you. You've circles so dark under your eyes they look like bruises. And your hair-- you haven't let me tend to it in days. Ever since you and Lord Cathal and Lady Mara and the men got back from the mountains, you've barely slept, barely ate! All you do is ride and shoot the straw butts full of arrows and read these dusty old books! What on Cerilia are you reading about, anyway?" She waved a plump hand at the stacks of tomes. Elena, like most of the servants, couldn't read; the pastime of staring at dusty parchment inscribed with black squiggles must have seemed a manner of sorcery unto itself to her, Reynhild mused.
"Oh, nothing interesting," she replied.
Well, perhaps that's not entirely true, she thought. A few of the books were stuffed with slices of scrap leather marking interesting passages, and she had filled up a half-dozen parchment scraps taking notes from her two favourites. One was a beautifully illuminated codex called On The Art and Science of Physick, by the Khinasi physician Samad. Reynhild had always had a knack for stitching wounds. She'd learned from skilled hands, after all; the mercenary company her mother had serviced for a time boasted a surgeon of rare skill, and he had seemed not to mind as a grimy red-headed whelp of a girl had watched him work, even occasionally explained what he was doing and why. But these Khinasi were something else entirely-- Samad insisted that applying distilled spirits to your needles and blades would ward off infection. It seems like a damned waste of liquor, but I may as well give it a try sometime, she thought with a smirk.
But the prize of her collection was a book called A Treatise on Tracking Prey in Woodlands, by none other than the legendary Ghost in the Pines himself, Lord Caedmon Fulcairn, Cathal's great-grandfather. The Ghost was supposedly a tracker so skilled he could trace the steps of a bobcat over near-naked bedrock. And he was as much a philosopher as a hunter, Reynhild had discovered; the book read as much like a manifesto as a manual. Most folk blunder through life with eyes half-closed, read a particularly stirring passage, unable to see through the veil of their own preconceptions, passions, expectations, emotions. Thus is the world and its abundant truths hidden from them. Set aside these things, set aside yourself, and you may see. If you look, you may see, instead of a swipe and three bright flecks in the snow, the gradually-slowing flight of the stag whose lung your arrow pierced. If you look, you may see, instead of your enemy's slight tendency to favour the right foot, a deadly vulnerability that you may exploit. To learn to live, one must learn to see, and to learn to see, one must learn to look.
"Just set it down, Elena, I'll eat it later. And thank you," Reynhild said absently.
Her maidservant was right, she supposed. But how was she to sleep, with the assassin's words-- the House is doomed-- ringing in her ears? She'd always been able to rely on two things that kept her alive: her speed, and her wits. But suddenly they weren't enough anymore, and suddenly there was more at stake than merely the goal of staying alive for one more day.
It seems I've need of speed and wits enough to keep all of us alive, and if that's the case, this seems like the easiest way to acquire them.
Aye, there were other ways. Her blood-power, stolen from that poor Rjurik lass three years hence, had honed her already sharp reflexes to near-inhuman. But that taste, barely a whisper, of the power of that golden-haired awnsheghlien... she shuddered, remembering the repulsive feel of it. She could feel it, deep down in her soul, like the whiff of a latrine pit too far away to see, but not to smell. It resonated with her own blood-power, trying to shape her inhuman awareness into... something else. Something dark. A hyper-awareness of enemies, enemies everywhere. Shadows lurking, slipping poison into wineglasses, daggers in dark alleyways, crossbow bolts streaking from quiet corners. A paid assassin, an unknown patron. Enemies everywhere. The House is doomed.
Gods, when she thought of how close they had come, her blood turned to ice in her veins. The horrifying sight played itself out a thousand times in her mind, of Cathal crumbling beneath a blow from Eldric's greatsword that would have cleaved any other man in half. Had her arrow not flown true, had the little wizard not been there with her hellfire...
That won't happen next time. Next time, they won't get close enough to us to swing a sword or poison the wine. I will see them coming and my arrows will skewer their hearts.
I failed Corrac. And I failed Cullan. I won't fail you, Cathal.
Or Mara, for that matter. Hellfire aside, that tiny slip of a silk-clad city girl had fought with the Fulcairns, bled with the Fulcairns, faced down forty armed men and a gods-cursed giant unflinchingly. That made her family enough for Reynhild.
Any doom that comes for this House will have to tear me apart, flesh and bone, first.
She opened Caedmon Fulcairn's ponderous book to the scrap of leather marking her place. She stifled a yawn.
-------------------------------------------------------
Elena returned to find the full golden light of morning bathing the room. Stepping almost as quietly as her mistress, she gently shuttered the windows, fed a slice of venison from the untouched tray to Callum, then draped the wolfskin from the bed onto the shoulders of Reynhild, who was fast asleep at her desk, face down in a dusty old book and a tangle of auburn braids.
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