Time passed beneath a suffocating calm. Eleanor Croft, patient as the most meticulous hunter, wove her web day after day. The small courtyard behind the church had become her second workshop. She sat quietly among the wives, her fingers darting through needle and thread, while her ears missed not a single whisper of sound that might serve her purpose.
She shared little tricks of thrift, listened to complaints of daily drudgery, and expressed sympathy at the right moments. Bit by bit, the image of "Father Croft's quiet, dutiful wife—frail in health, but gentle and virtuous" grew more convincing. Lady Anna even offered her sincere concern, while Lady Marjorie, sharp-tongued though she was, bestowed her own practical advice.
Lucien remained lost in his nightmares. Fear of Eleanor had dulled into habit, into numbness. He performed his duties mechanically and then locked himself away. At times he sat for hours staring at a tiny, timeworn wooden horse—an old gift Gabriel had once thrust into his hand after a tournament victory. Rough and clumsy though it was, it had become his last token of that fragile, counterfeit warmth from the past. Eleanor saw it once. She said nothing, only let a faint curl of scorn flicker through her ice-gray eyes.
The true turning point came on a seemingly ordinary afternoon.
Father Pete had fallen ill with fever, bedridden and coughing, and the petty clerical tasks he oversaw had piled up. The scribe in charge of low-level records was drowning in disarray. Catching sight of Eleanor sitting quietly in the corner, he recalled that she had once offered to help with copying. With little expectation, he placed a small stack of outdated, unimportant missal sheets in her hands.
"Make sure the script is neat. No mistakes," he said curtly.
"I will do my best, sir." Eleanor bowed her head and accepted the yellowed pages with humility.
It was not what she craved—no inquisitorial records, no confidential archives. Barely any paperwork at all. Yet it was a beginning. For the first time, she was permitted to work at a desk within the church's documentation system, even if only at its shadowed edge.
She copied the monotonous prayers with flawless precision, but her mind remained crystalline. She watched the scribes, listened to their brief exchanges, and noted the rhythm by which papers were sorted, delivered, and filed away.
Days later, with Pete still ill, the scribe again brought her a stack. This time, it was not mass sheets but faded records: old donation logs, repair accounts, long since outdated and ready for storage.
Eleanor accepted with the same composure, her penmanship still meticulous.
And then her gaze froze.
Amid the brittle papers lay several sheets of a different kind, clearly misfiled. They were summaries—non-secret, but rare—distributed after a regional church council some ten years prior. Notes on resolutions, personnel changes, and mundane administrative matters.
Her breath caught.
One memorandum ended with a long list of attendees and assistants, blurred by repeated copying. Most of the names meant nothing to her.
But two of them struck her like red-hot needles driven into her eyes:
"...Representative of the Fleming family: (signature illegible) Accompanying aide: Lydia Fleming"
"...Inquisitorial scribe: Seraphina (surname partially torn)"
Time stopped.
A roar filled her ears, her fingers turned to ice, and her heart pounded so violently she thought it might betray her. She forced her posture into calm obedience, her quill steady, only her lashes betraying the faintest tremor.
Lydia. Seraphina.
Two names—one the brand of her deepest hatred, the other the echo of her dearest love—surfaced side by side on a forgotten scrap of paper, buried in dust for more than a decade.
Lydia Fleming. So early? Already dabbling in church matters, under the guise of an "assistant"? A detail so small it might be dismissed, yet to Eleanor it was the first shard of a puzzle, hinting that Lydia's ties to the Inquisition stretched back far further than Eleanor had once believed. Perhaps her betrayal had not been a moment of jealous frenzy, but the fruit of a long-prepared design.
And Seraphina… her Seraphina. A lowly scribe once within the Inquisitorial machine itself? She had only ever spoken vaguely of "copying documents," never the details. Had their fates intertwined with this monstrous engine years before its jaws finally closed around them?
Questions surged like a tide. What had that council decided? What role had Lydia played? What had Seraphina been tasked to record?
Eleanor's eyes flicked up. No one in the scriptorium paid her the slightest attention. Her heart pounded, but the frozen steel within her steadied her hand.
She could not risk stealing the original. Too dangerous.
Without pause, she buried the memorandum beneath the pile. Her quill scratched swiftly across the donation ledgers, her movements unchanged. When the scribe stepped away for a moment, she drew out the scrap of paper she kept for shopping lists and, with a shard of charcoal, scrawled the key names, roles, and date from memory—fast, messy, and precise.
She folded the scrap and slid it deep into the hidden seam of her sleeve. Then she returned the memorandum to its stack, indistinguishable from the rest.
When the scribe came to collect her work, she handed it back calmly, asking in her quiet voice if more aid was needed.
"Not for now, Lady Croft. Father Pete should recover soon enough," he said distractedly, not noticing a thing.
Eleanor inclined her head, gathered her belongings, and left without haste.
Outside, the afternoon sun blazed warm and bright. Yet her body felt cold, her sleeve searing as if the tiny scrap of paper within had turned to molten iron.
It was not proof. Not even a clear lead.
But it proved two things without question: Lydia's ties to the Inquisition stretched deeper and earlier than she had imagined. And Seraphina had once been within its orbit as well.
Her path of vengeance and her path toward Seraphina—they overlapped.
Eleanor Croft lifted her head, her ice-gray eyes fixed upon the direction of the Fleming estate. They gleamed like a blade freshly quenched in fire.
The thread was gossamer-thin. Yet to the spider, it was enough to feel the tremor of prey.
She had found her first direction.