Weekly Writing – October 19 2024

It didn’t make sense. There had never been any danger in the manor – there had never been anything but her mistress’s will. A sanctuary as solid and suffocating as a stone coffin.
The guest sitting with his dagger on his thigh couldn’t have known that, of course. Maybe he was just a suspicious man, used to danger himself, and so used to seeing it everywhere.
But when the clock chimed two in the morning and she peered through the painting at him again, he was still staring at the door as if he knew exactly what he was looking for. As if he had walked out of one of those grim paintings of kings and battlegrounds after all, worlds of deception and bloodshed only hinted at on their glossy surfaces. Was it her mistress’s will whispering to her that she had to know?
Or was it her own curiosity, waking and stretching painfully after long sleep? She crept from the painting’s secretive, scarlet-swirled view back to the lamplit hall and his door, locked soundly from the inside.
Nothing stopped her from raising her fist to it. Her mistress must have been as curious as she – must have been watching through her eyes, if not moving her hand, as she rapped her knuckles thrice, tentatively, against the door.