Quinn was exhausted. Ross hadn’t let her go and sleep for the rest of the night, like she had thought he would do. Grainne and Yvette had been called to serve the Sevenspell retinue, so Quinn had to pick up and complete the rooms they hadn’t managed to prepare. She had just finished laying out the rooms for Lord Erran’s men. The bed linen was set on the end of each cot. There were bowls of fruit and platters of salted beef and cheeses, as well as a selection of breads, for when they finally made it to their quarters. There were two bathing tins set up, and both had the firewood underneath them stocked. She hated filling the baths. The number of trips through the halls to get the water from the hot springs was agonising on her calves. She sat on the floor in the middle of the room, getting her breath and congratulating herself on a hard job well done, especially since she had been abandoned so Yvette and Grainne could help Ross tend to Lord Shiver. They had jumped at the chance. Of course they would. It didn’t matter if Lord Shiver was married; his sons were not, and their mistresses were well kept women. Everfell was the only city currently barren for the libidinous Lord of Sevenspells. Yvette and Grainne didn’t want to be maids all of their lives, but the only thing they were doing to elevate themselves was chasing the tails of taken men.
Quinn fondled the dirty hem of her dress. It had been white, once upon a time, but had been worn by so many other girls, trailed through so much dirt and dust, and squeezed through so many drying stones that it was now a murky anonymous grey. She wore much finer clothes when she worked for Sammah. She supposed that no one would take her other personality seriously if she looked like a beggar, much like they took to laughing when they found out she was really a girl.
Quinn stood, dusting herself down, not that it would make any difference to her overall looks in the grand scheme of things, and went to leave the room. She caught sight of herself in a mirror and stopped. It was rare she came across a mirror clear enough to show a reflection, let alone have the time to pay any attention to what she saw in it. Her life was full of toil. To stop and to think frivolously was not an activity sanctioned in the arduous hierarchy belonging to Baron Sammah. Her cheeks were full, bloated and a blotchy red, and her eyes bloodshot. That was exhaustion, she supposed, though she had worked through that barrier long ago and was processing tasks by rote now. Each duty had been done hundreds of times before; doing it without concentrating now wasn’t difficult. There were dark circles under her eyes, which made them look a dirty blue-green colour, instead of their usual azure haze that Sammah claimed to admire. Her neck was thin. She twisted her face this way and that, examining herself from different angles. She didn’t eat enough—couldn’t eat enough—for this borderline gaunt little thing she appraised critically.
As she twisted and turned, she felt an emotion tugging at the edge of her temples. That was odd. She hadn’t heard anyone around, and this felt like someone was annoyed. It was frustration, perhaps tinged with anger. She opened the door a tiny bit and peered out. There was a man wandering around in the hallway. She was about to duck back into the room, when she realised he hadn’t seen her. She thought about going to see him, seeing what was troubling him so much. From the back he looked intimidating. He was tall, almost as tall as Ross and Maertn, and had a lean build. What held her back was the sword hanging from his hip. Swords meant soldiers, and the only ones that had arrived were the men from Sevenspells. When the nobles from Sevenspells stalked around the castle, she usually had to hide herself. From Shiver, especially, though his son, Rowan, was steadily gaining the same reputation, with a streak of nastiness that he hadn’t inherited from Shiver. She had accidentally sensed Shiver only once. He had looked at her as she had met briefly with Sammah before starting her evening work with Ross. Behind those eyes had been a lust that had almost knocked her off her feet. She hadn’t felt complimented by that. He hadn’t considered her beauty, or her worth a person. The lust was simple, unadulterated, and contained no restraining or qualitative features. He had considered her as an object, and had found her to be desirable, much the way she’d expect someone to assess the purchase of a fine mare for breeding.
The emotions coming from this man were strange. Normally men from the kingdom of Everfell’s southernmost city walked with a sway and a swagger. They all regarded themselves as the men that had won the war, schooled and goaded this way by their leader. Quinn didn’t know much about this, it had ended not long before she was born. All she heard were the stories, still so raw in the minds of those not a great deal older than her. Sevenspells widely considered themselves the saviours of Everfell, primarily due to the exploits of their general at the time, now their lord. Shiver knew this. Shiver knew every positive feature he possessed, and his efforts to continually enhance them only served to accentuate every single aspect of his egotistical and flawed personality.
This worried man in the hallway did not seem like a normal man of Sevenspells. For a start, she had never known one to feel so unsure of himself. Quinn did consider again going out to help him, but as she went to leave the safety of her rooms he called out to someone. Yvette was gliding through the hallways. Quinn grimaced, expecting the man’s worry to turn into an emotion she would rather not sense. Instead she saw him physically tense, and as bile flooded her mouth and her ears began to ring, she had to admit surprisingly that he was only feeling negativity towards Yvette. She hadn’t felt strong reactions of tense disapproval in this combination, and had to report it to Sammah. She shut the door and dashed to the window, leaning out and trying to find something else to focus her attention on. By the time the sickness had passed, and she ventured back out in to the corridor, both Yvette and the strange man had disappeared.
Relieved, though more than slightly curious about who that man had been, Quinn trotted back to her apartments at the other side of the castle, her tasks for the day complete. The nausea was forgotten, and the exhaustion she had felt towards the end had been replaced with an alert wakefulness, with buzzing questions rampaging around her head.