✧─────── ⋅❦⋅ ───────✧
Morning at the estate began without noise. Everyone already knew their role and played it without prompting.
The door opened before Elara was fully awake.
"Up."
Mira set a pitcher of water on the side table and stepped back to the threshold.
"No one wakes anyone here," she added as if in passing. "You either know what to do... or you don't last long."
Elara sat up in bed.
Her head still held the remnants of a heavy, dreamless sleep — a solid darkness and a silence that would not fully let go.
/"The rules exist. They're simply not announced."/
She washed her face with the water. It was cold from the pitcher and smelled faintly of minerals. Not like the water they used to bring her. There, it had always been warm. He used to say cold water was bad for her.
She breathed in. And out.
No one here cared about the temperature of the water.
✧─────── ⋅❦⋅ ───────✧
Breakfast was communal — a long table in a low room next to the kitchen, thick with the smell of fresh bread and something meaty from a wide pot. The servants sat without hierarchy, though the seats still arranged themselves: everyone took the spot they were used to. Elara took what was nearest, at the very edge, her back to the wall.
The looks began at once.
Not unkind — just attentive. Quiet. No one asked questions, but they were already forming their own conclusions. Her moon-silver hair was gathered and covered with dark cloth — Mira had helped, silently, before they even left the room. But hair was one thing. Her hands remained her hands. Her posture, too. Even her grip on the spoon.
Someone to her left — a young man, a stable-hand by the smell of him — glanced at her a second time. Then a third. He finally looked away and did not turn back again, but the tension in his neck, the lean toward his neighbor, told Elara: he had already started talking.
She chewed slowly, eyes on her bowl.
/"Food is information too. Watch who takes more. Who takes less. Who does not eat at all."/
The older woman across from her — the cook, broad-shouldered, her hands dusted with flour — looked directly at her. Elara did not look away immediately. She gave it a second. Two. Only then did she lower her eyes to her bowl. Not submissively. Just enough that it would not read as a challenge.
The cook grunted. Quietly. Impossible to place — approval, or something else.
/"Testing me."/
Elara finished eating and left first. No one stopped her.
✧─────── ⋅❦⋅ ───────✧
The garden met her with quiet and the fresh smell of green growing things. The morning dew still clung to the leaves, and the ground gave slightly underfoot. The air here was different — alive, thick enough to taste, carrying the sharp scent of turned earth.
She stopped at the threshold and, for a moment, simply went still. She looked at the sky — grey-blue, one cloud slowly stretching thin toward the west. She thought of nothing at all.
Just — the sky.
She crouched beside the first row of shrubs and began to work. Carefully, without hurrying. Her fingers paused more often than necessary. She did not cut the branches right away — she checked them first. She touched the leaves, ran the pads of her fingers along the edge.
Fine serrations. She rubbed one between her fingers.
A bitter smell, with a metallic note.
/"Not for an infusion. For powder. But only the lower leaf — the upper one is too young."/
She set it aside, separately. Because before, haste was always punished.
/"Wrong proportion, and you start all over again."/
The thought came and went, but for a moment her fingers went numb.
She forced them to move again.
Comments (0)
See all