At the library, Zolani saw a child with twin pigtails in the window seat. Her face was somewhat familiar. Yes now she remembered from where. At 'her' funeral, one of the Countess' daughters, the youngest child and her step sister.
Liss
Sitting at the window seat with a book too large for her lap, feet tucked under her, the particular absorption of someone who had forgotten the world outside the page. She looked up when Zolani entered. Her blue eyes dilating. She was the only child who had the Countess' eye color.
She did not look back down.
"You came back," she said. Matter of fact. The tone of someone reporting an observation.
Zolani's brow rose. Did she mean from the dead or something? Randomly deciding to scare her away, she replied.
"I said I would."
"People say things."
Huh? She didn't quite expect that. Did the past Elowen make a promise of some sort to her?
Liss moved over on the window seat without being asked. The space appearing in the way it had with Cael— not a gesture, just a fact.
A funny one. Her throat constricted for some reason.
"There is room here if you want it."
Zolani sat.
The library was warm. The amber morning light coming through the window at its specific angle. Liss's book open across both their laps now — the naval cartography, the old maps with their uncertain edges.
"What are those?" Zolani asked, pointing to a cluster of small marks at the map's edge. Almost outside the frame of the known territory.
Liss peered at them. "Danger notations," she said. "Old ones. From before the current guild system." She traced them with one finger, careful not to press. "My tutor says they don't mean anything anymore. That the guild has proper systems now."
"What do you think?" Zolani asked because she had no thoughts on the matter and was lacking in knowledge.
Liss looked at her.
"I think my tutor says don't mean anything anymore when he means we've decided to stop paying attention to them," she said. "Those are different things."
Zolani looked at this nine-year-old.
"Yes," she replied. "They are."
Something shifted in Liss's expression — the specific surprised pleasure of being agreed with by someone who didn't have to. Zolani noticed it more quicker the...
Validation.
Liss looked back at the map.
"There's one that matches the east boundary," she said quietly. "Where the Fog has been closer this season."
Zolani looked where she was pointing.
The notation was small. Old ink, slightly faded. But it was there — at the east boundary, at the specific location Cael had mentioned this morning. And around it, in handwriting so old it was barely legible, a word.
She leaned in.
"Remnant ground," it said." Do not cultivate. Do not settle. The thing that watches here has not moved in forty years. Do not give it reason to."
Such an ominous warning.
She looked at Liss.
Liss was already looking at her.
"I found it last month," Liss said. Simply. "I haven't told anyone."
"Why not?"
"Because the people I would tell would say it doesn't mean anything anymore." She tilted her head. The frank curiosity that was her specific quality, the one she hadn't yet learned to soften into social palatability. "You won't say that."
"No," Zolani agreed. "I won't."
They sat with the map between them and the amber light moving slowly across the floor and the comfortable particular silence of two people who had found, without expecting to, someone who spoke the same language.
"What happened to your eyes?" Liss asked. Not for the first time. The same direct question as in the funeral, but softer this time. The tone of someone who had already asked once and was asking again from genuine curiosity rather than compulsion.
"I don't know yet," Zolani said.
"Does it frighten you?"
She thought about this honestly. When she looked at herself this morning in the mirror. It wasn't fear she felt. More of admiration.
Elowen was indeed unconventionally beautiful.
"No," she said. "It interests me."
Liss nodded. As though this were a completely reasonable answer. As though the crimson eyes and the being three days dead and the resurrection at the funeral were simply things that existed and might as well be interesting rather than frightening.
She felt, again, that specific thing.
The uncomfortable particular feeling of being found easy to sit with by someone who hadn't decided to find her easy to sit with — it had simply happened, the way things happened when neither person was performing.
She was about to ask about the east boundary notation — about whether Liss had found others, whether there was a pattern — when she heard it.
Footsteps. The specific kind. Measured. The weight of someone who occupied space like a decision.
The library door opened.
She was — there was no other word for it — stunning.
Not young exactly, not old — the specific age of a woman who had been beautiful long enough that beauty had become structural, woven into how she moved and stood and occupied rooms. Dark hair, swept up, not a strand out of place in the way of someone who had staff dedicated to ensuring it. A blue dress that did everything correctly — the color, the cut, the specific drape of it suggesting that impracticality, in the right hands, was its own form of power.
Blue eyes. Same as Liss.
The specific blue of deep water. Cold at depth. And looking at them — at the two figures in the window seat, at Liss's feet tucked under her, at the old naval cartography open across their laps — with the expression of a woman who had entered a room and found something slightly different than expected and was adjusting the assessment accordingly.
"Elowen," the Countess said.
The name arrived the way Sera had said it — not unkind, not warm. Placed. The specific temperature of a name used to establish whose territory they were in.
Zolani stood. The correct motion, the right speed. She felt Elowen's memory guide her posture into the appropriate curtsy — the depth exactly correct, held exactly long enough.
"My lady Countess," she said.
The Countess looked at her for a moment. The blue eyes doing something she didn't show on the rest of her face.
"I wasn't aware you frequented the library," she said. The pleasant voice of someone who had learned to be elegant even when delivering information that was supposed to land as a reminder.
"I'm finding many things are returning to me slowly," Zolani said. "The library seemed a good place to sit with the recovery."
"Of course." A pause. The pause of someone who had more to say and was deciding how to say it in the way a woman of her station said such things — which was never directly. "It's good to see you taking care of yourself." Another pause. "The physicians did recommend rest. I'm sure your room is equally comfortable."
There it is, Zolani noted.
Said gently. Elegantly. With the concerned face of a stepmother who wanted only the best for the household. Every word of it a closed door delivered with a smile.
Zolani's mind wandered to Liss beside her and the map. The notation at the east boundary and the thing that watches here and this woman's smooth blue-eyed competence and what she might know and what she might decide to do with a girl who was asking the wrong questions in the library.
She let the concerned face land. Received it with gratitude.
"You're right," she said. "I shouldn't overdo it." She looked at Liss. "Thank you for the company."
Liss looked up at her mother. Then at Zolani. Her face doing something careful — the calculation of a nine-year-old who had grown up watching adults communicate in layers and was now watching two of them do it in real time.
"Come back tomorrow," Liss said. "I found three more of those notations."
The Countess looked at her daughter, her eyes narrowing.
Zolani feared she would be scolded later in her absence.
Liss looked back with the specific innocence of someone who was twelve years old and had just said something completely harmless about some notations that were certainly nothing interesting.
The Countess smiled.
It was a beautiful smile.
It was also — Zolani felt the thread-sight register it — the smile of a woman who had noted something and was deciding what it meant.
"Elowen," the Countess said again. The name placed again. "Do take care of yourself."
"Of course," Zolani said. "Thank you, my lady."
She left the library, rolling her eyes once she closed the door.
In the corridor she walked steadily, her back straight as she practiced and kept her face neutral, her mind lingering more on the east boundary notations and naval cartography in old libraries and what the nine-year-old who seemed to have been paying attention longer than anyone realized had found in those maps.
The Countess's beautiful smile was indeed a wild mix of stunning and appalling for some reason and the specific quality of the attention behind it.
The system pulsed. Once. Quiet.
[Quest: Research more about the world you live in
Deadline: Twelve days.]
Well it was obvious what next she would do