Silmaria was on her hands and knees in the drawing room on the west side of the Manor, scrubbing at the wooden floor with a soapy rag. She was not particularly in the best of moods; some idiot had tracked dirt into the room, which was made all the worse by the fact that no one ought to really have been in here in the first place. Of course, given how downhill the upkeep of IronWing Manor was these days, it wasn't even noticed or addressed until several days later, when she got to be the lucky one to clean it. By then, the dirt had plenty of time to get good and ingrained into the wood.
The Gnari sat back on her haunches, knees drawn up to her chest as she crouched there balanced on the balls of her feet. She was exhausted. In addition to her usual duties, Silmaria was awake late into the night last night helping Lirena tend to Taleesha, whose fever had returned with a vengeance. Silmaria wasn't particularly good friends with Taleesha, but she didn't want the woman to suffer, either. The Gnari girl wasn't a healer really, but she had capable and steady hands and was familiar with the remedies Lirena liked to use. Taleesha had been delirious and blazing hot with fever through most of the night, but the fever finally settled into a low burn just before sun up. One of the other servants came to relieve Silmaria, staying with Lirena and Taleesha while Silmaria snatched an hour of sleep before rising to face the day.
A yawn overtook her and she stifled it with the back of a soapy hand, then plopped her rag into the small bucket beside her. She took a dry, much used towel and began to wipe the soapy water from the floor. All she wanted to do was get through her chores and duties and fall onto her pallet and sleep. She'd even skip dinner to go to bed early. She was lucky she wasn't falling asleep face down in this puddle right now, really...
Her sleepy musings were interrupted by a loud, booming thud bursting through the house, and she leapt to her feet and very nearly fell on her ass. She froze, waiting for more commotion, then after a few moments of silence she at last remembered to start breathing again.
"Get a grip, Sil," the Gnari girl muttered under her breath, trying to collect herself and make her heart slow. It was probably just the big, heavy doors at the foyer of the Manor being thrown open with a bit too much vigor.
She heard footsteps cutting through the dining hall adjoining to the drawing room and the foyer. Muffled voices darted back and forth in hurried conversation. At least four or five people were making their way toward the front of the Manor. Silmaria's sensitive ears twitched forward attentively, but the voices were already too far down the hall for even her to make out what they were saying. Whatever they were about, they were about it in a hurry.
Since she was finished with her cleaning anyway, Silmaria decided to let her curiosity get the best of her. She gathered her supplies and slipped quietly out the drawing room, through the dining hall, and to the foyer. More than likely it was yet more of Steward Jonor's trinkets and gaudy fineries. Deliveries didn't usually come through the foyer, but it wouldn't be the first time someone got turned around and made a mistake.
The foyer was a spacious room fit to properly welcome visitors to the wealthy and Noble house IronWing. The ceilings were vaulted, reaching high overhead. The walls were finely made oak wood trimmed in mahogany, which itself was etched and hand carved in regal, ornate designs. Great wall tapestries were spaced regularly along the walls in House Ironwing's colors of blue edged in silvered. A grand imperial staircase swept upward on the far side of the foyer to the left and the right, the steps, balusters, and rails were also a rich, dark mahogany wood. A length of carpet ran from between the feet of the either stairs forward to the front of the foyer, also in the house colors. The foyer let out into the front lawn to the south through a great pair of heavy ornate, lacquered oak doors, and continued under and past the imperial staircase and into the formal dining hall to the north. The west wall of the foyer housed a large window looking out over the western gardens, and on the east wall hung a large painting of Master Edwin's departed wife. House IronWing's coat of arms, a fierce silver Dragon with wings spread wide open on a navy blue field, hung in the middle of the balcony where the imperial stairs swept upward to meet.
A small crowd of servants had already gathered in a little knot of people in the foyer. Silmaria hung back, her ears tilted forward and her eyes studying, but as she generally disliked crowds and saw no one in this one that she was particularly fond of, she stuck to the shadows under the stairs, removed but curious what the fuss was about.
The fuss seemed to be about a stranger who'd come to the Manor. Silmaria's slitted eyes rested on the man standing in front of the small crowd and took him in. He was hard not to notice, big as he was. Silmaria guessed he was close to six and a half feet tall, and his body had the breadth and build to match. Even bundled under a thick winter traveling cloak, the Gnari girl could tell the man was solidly built, hard and muscled with broad shoulders and long, thick arms.
The man drew down the deep hood of his cloak. He was handsome, very much so, if in a road worn way. Long hair the color of burnished copper was held back in a warrior's braid grown wild and shaggy from days on the road. Even under a few layers of trail dust his skin was fair white in the way of Dale men. A thick growth of beard as brightly coppered as his head covered the man's jaw, partially hiding a solemn, watchful face.
All this Silmaria noted, yet his eyes were what held her attention fixed. Even across the room, the man's eyes were impossible to miss. They were strange and bright, an almost ethereal silver. They were intense eyes, sharp and intelligent. Unforgettable eyes.
And forget them she had not, for Silmaria knew she'd seen those eyes before. When last she saw them she was a girl, and he a growing youth just five years her elder. She remembered a scraggly boy, more legs than anything, with the short cropped hair of a squire. He had been home for a visit from court, where he had been apprenticed to the Royal Knight Brotherhood to eventually become one of their own. He was a serious boy, so serious he had frightened her a little bit. Though he had never said or done anything unkind to her, he had a quiet, brooding way about him. She'd been glad, then, that she was just a servant girl and had been able to avoid his notice.
But for all that, she had never forgotten the young Lordling's strange, beautiful eyes.
And there he was, standing there in the foyer, a man grown and the rightful Lord and Master of her home, returned at last. Silmaria stared at him, watched him, and her jaw set in stubborn anger.
She hated him. Bad enough that the Noble had left his home, his birthright, and his people in the hands of an incompetent, power grabbing, lazy oaf like Steward Jonor. Bad enough he had let House IronWing fall into neglect and disorder, let his servants and people who depended on him turn into overworked, overwrought, half-starved shadows of themselves. Bad enough that he'd never in over a year since his father's death come home to check on his holdings or his folk or shown even a hint of interest in the rights and responsibilities tied to his family inheritance.
All these paled, to her, compared to his worst crimes. Never once as Master Edwin went to his sick bed, falling more and more ill until he withered away and died, did Lord Rael choose to visit. Not even after Master Edwin died did he come. Master Edwin was a good man, a kind and honorable man worthy of love. He had been her friend, her lover, and her guiding strength. And his son didn't even have the decency to come see him buried or visit his resting place after they put him in the ground.
Silmaria blinked away angry tears, took a deep breath, and pushed her anger and hate down where it could fester and seethe. She was smart enough even in her anger to know that exploding in the man's face as he so rightly deserved would probably earn her nothing but a swift boot in the ass out of her home. She would be forced to scavenge through the cold, bleak days and nights in the empty countryside, caught in the approaching winter. Or as bad, she would have to fend for herself in the capitol city just a few miles to the west. Trelling's Rest was a hard city, especially for disgraced servants living on the streets. The winter was as harsh behind the city's old walls as it was in the exposed open country side, and she was as likely to survive winter in one as the other. Which was to say, not likely at all.
So, she wouldn't waltz up to the young Lord and spit in his face. But neither would she simper and grovel and fawn at him. She would serve, but she would be damned if she'd do it with a smile.
As she turned to retreat from the room and go find someplace quiet and secluded and far away from him, Cook jostled her elbow from behind. Silmaria was startled enough to jump, and that caused her to outright scowl then. She was deep in her head indeed, for Silmaria, with her keen ears and sense of surroundings, was usually not an easy person to sneak up on. And Cook was not precisely the quietest of people, for that matter.
Cook took no notice of her friend's sour mood, though, gawping at the tall Nobleman in the foyer as she grabbed excitedly at the Gnari girl's arm. "Look, look, that's him! Master Rael! Eldeen's balls but the man is big! Where's the scrawny lad I used to have to give extra servings to, and who is this fine specimen of a man taken his place!"
"You're drooling, Cook," Silmaria said dryly, turning her gaze back to the man in question.
