Chapter Two

In the days that followed, I told myself the yard had been an aberration.

Hawthorne Castle had a way of swallowing moments whole. Work piled atop work until memory thinned beneath it, until even things that unsettled me lost their sharpness. I believed, then, that routine was stronger than a glance — that stone and labor and habit would press the strange feeling flat and leave nothing behind.

I was wrong.

The castle resumed its demands without pause. Floors were swept, linens folded, messages carried from one end of the keep to the other. I moved where I was sent, as I always had, my feet knowing the turn of each corridor before my thoughts caught up. Years of work had carved the paths into me — where the floor dipped near the west stair, which door groaned if opened too quickly, how to pass through the great hall without drawing a glance.

My body walked while my mind wandered.

I did not seek him out.

Nor, I told myself, did he seek me.

It was in the east gallery that our paths crossed again — a place of long windows and pale light, overlooking the inner courtyard where the noise of the castle softened into echo. I had been sent there with cloths and polish, my basket tucked against my hip. I reached the gallery without once looking up, my hands already planning the work, my steps slowing only when instinct warned me I was no longer alone.

I sensed him before I saw him.

Not as before, when his presence had been distant and untouchable, but close enough that the air itself seemed altered by it. I stopped without thinking, as though my body recognized him faster than my mind dared to.

He stood near the windows, turned partly away, dark coat unadorned and open at the throat. There was no armor this time, no blade in his hand, yet the authority I had noticed in the yard clung to him still — not worn, but carried.

I curtsied at once. “Your Highness.”

He turned fully then, and the distance between us shortened to something unavoidable.

Up close, the things I had not allowed myself to consider before became impossible to ignore. His eyes, for one — darker than I had thought, a deep, steady blue that held the light rather than reflecting it. And his scent — clean wool and leather, with something sharper beneath it, like steel warmed by the hand. It lingered in the narrow space between us, subtle but inescapable.

“You’re the maid from the yard,” he said.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

He studied me for a moment, expression unreadable. The pause stretched — not long enough to be improper, but long enough for awareness to settle where it should not. I stood still, basket pressed to my hip, my body rigid with habit even as my thoughts betrayed me, cataloguing details I would later pretend not to remember.

“You brought the water,” he continued. “I noticed.”

“I was sent,” I replied. It was safer to keep my answers simple.

Another pause.

“I don’t know your name.”

The question caught me off guard — not because he asked it, but because he waited. Because his gaze did not drift away while he did.

“Edith,” I said. “Your Highness.”

“Edith,” he repeated, quietly.

Hearing it from him made it feel suddenly heavier, as though the name belonged to something more solid than myself.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. The gallery seemed narrower than it had been when I entered, the space between us marked now not only by rank but by proximity — by breath, by warmth, by the quiet knowledge that I was standing closer to him than necessity required.

“You may go on with your work,” he said at last.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

I stepped past him then, my body moving on instinct alone. My sleeve brushed the edge of his coat — brief, accidental, nothing that could be remarked upon — yet the contact lingered far longer than it should have.

I did not look back.

The windows were cleaned as they always were, my hands moving in steady, practiced circles. My thoughts did not follow. They lingered instead on things that had no place in my work: the exact shade of his eyes, darker than the banners bore; the scent that clung faintly to the air even after he moved away; the way his voice had sounded when he spoke my name, as though he had weighed it before releasing it.

When I finished and gathered my things, the gallery was empty.

I walked the familiar routes back to the lower halls without conscious thought, my feet carrying me through turns and passages I could have navigated blind. Only later did I realize how little of the journey I remembered.

Before, he had been a presence — distant, almost unreal.

Now he was a man with eyes I could name, a voice I could recall, a nearness my body had registered even when my mind insisted it should not.

That night, as I lay in the servants’ quarters with exhaustion pressing heavily behind my eyes, I understood that whatever had begun in the yard had not ended there.

It had taken shape.

And shapes, once formed, are far more difficult to forget.