Lady Magdalena

They come while she sleeps. 

They creep in as cowards, armed and armoured and arrogant. They think she’ll be easy. They think she’s alone and asleep and vulnerable, and though they walk slowly, careful and measured, they don’t let the creaking floorboards concern them. They tend to let very little ever concern them. 

The inner door groans lightly as it swings in. Four sets of steps come into the bedchamber, taking up four different positions around the bed. She is outnumbered. All seems as according to plan. She lies on a bed, they see, alone and asleep and vulnerable.

But Lady Magdalena, last of the line of Eyr, is never vulnerable.

Her eyes are closed, just barely, her body tense and still. She lies on her side, perhaps half a foot away from the edge of the bed, facing out. She is curled in on herself under the covers, knees up by her waist, left hand somewhere level with her ribs, splayed, palm braced against the hard straw mattress. Her right arm stretches across her body, reaches under her bolster, fingers wrapping tight around a bound leather hilt. 

She is awake, and has been since they opened her outer door. They did so quietly - too quietly, really, to have forced it open somehow; they must have a key, which is worrying in itself, but will have to wait - but that doesn’t matter. A bell hangs on the wall above her bed, and string runs through small hoops hammered periodically into the coving, connecting it to the outer door, which hinges outward. It’s tone is low-pitched and dull, but paranoia runs through her veins and even the softest ring can rouse her from deep slumber. And her mattress means it’s rare she ever achieves any great depth in her slumber.

At her most relaxed, she would wonder if this wasn’t excessive, superfluous, outfitting her room so thoroughly, in such sure anticipation of attack. Now, she can feel a thread of glad relief running through the tangled knot of fear and nerves in her chest.

And she lies in wait.

Timing is crucial. She does not know for sure what purpose these intruders have, or what weapons, or more than a rough mental image of where each one is moving to stand. She can’t even be certain that there are only four people - hard-won experience has taught her that footsteps are easily misjudged.

What she can be certain of, is that someone - the leader, she assumes - is approaching her. They stop by her head. Beneath the bolster, her fingers tighten. She stops breathing.

A movement too soon, a movement too late. Either could cost her life. She can’t afford to mistime this.

She hears heavy breathing, the squeak of chafing leather armour. They’re leaning forward.

Slick as a striking snake, she swipes. Her right arm sweeps out, arcing wide, the dagger slicing through the throat of the man leaning over her. He stumbles forward, choking, as she swings her legs up and pushes herself to sitting, knees bent, feet and palms flat on the mattress. She leans back on her hands and kicks out, hard and fast, legs pressed tight together. She strikes him in the stomach and he falls to the ground, blood spluttering. She stands up in his vacated spot.

Her bed appears to have a small set of square drawers built into its base. In truth, she’d had them built in as removable panels - thick, handled hardwood, small enough to move with but big enough to provide some cover. She pulls one out now, not a moment too soon, and turns to face a second man, who is stepping towards her with his sword unsheathed and raised over his shoulder. She drops her knife as he swings, both hands gripping tight the handle of her makeshift shield, and ducks underneath the wood as she sidesteps the blade. It just glances off, and her arms rattle from the force, but as she takes another step in retreat to put the wall at her back, she sees the man spin with momentum, and watches his blade tear through her sheets, sink deep into the mattress, and catch.

She exhales as she keeps moving, sidestepping along the wall as she scans the room for more enemies. The man tries and fails to tug his sword free - it won’t buy her much time, but it should be enough.

She was right - there were four. One is down, and another - standing by the window, across the bed - is too far to pose a real threat. 

The woman blocking the door is not, however. She’s slow to start moving - no doubt expecting her to come to her - but is swift once she realises her destination is not the main exit, and the bedroom is not all that big.

She swings her own sword just as Magdalena reaches the wardrobe in the corner, and her shield deflection isn’t as successful the second time - the blade slices through part of her nightgown and into the side of her thigh. But no other harm is done, and in the handful of seconds her opponent takes to recover, she has switched her shield to her right hand, pulled open the wardrobe door with her left and slipped inside.

The wardrobe doors have handles on the inside, solely for a situation like this. She balances the wood panel atop them as a makeshift latch. It won’t hold for long, but it doesn’t need to - it just has to hold for long enough.

The wardrobe itself is not deep, but it is wider than it should be, stretching into her bedroom wall. Asymmetric, with the doors at one end, and at the other, a small hole in the stone back that’s only just big enough for a short, lean girl to force herself through, concealed from the gazes of casual observers by the ends of long, hanging cloaks.

She pushes through to the hidden room behind it. The wall is thick and stone - it won’t be broken down - and while it is not impossible that someone could follow her through the hole, it is very unlikely. And they wouldn’t manage armoured. Anyone who tried would be leaving themselves completely vulnerable to her own blade.

There is a sword mounted on the wall, sharp and well balanced, with the top of a hilt carved into a small, hooked cross. She lifts it down.

She is safe, for a beat.

But she can’t stay here. Already she can hear the wardrobe door start to rattle.

The room is very small. A door on one end is fastened to another stone wall, to give the impression of it being locked, rather than useless. A simple time-wasting ploy. Instead, a trapdoor is set in the middle of the floor, out of view of the hole in the wall, innocuous to the point of being invisible in the dark. It has no handle, but the shallow carving of an incomplete cross sits where you would expect one to be. She flips her sword upside down, and it takes a little maneuvering, working by sensation alone, but she manages to slot the hilt into the hole and wrench it open.

She hears yells. She pulls the sword out and jumps, not letting herself look down for fear of hesitating. The jump is only a few feet, but it is onto cold stone and she is barefoot and bleeding from one leg. She just manages to keep from crying out.

There’s a rope. She grabs at it, pulls, and slams the trapdoor shut. Then she hobbles off down the stone corridor as fast as she can manage.

****************************************************************************

The Eyr family tree had once been full and resplendent, among the most powerful lines in Saoryse, but generations of daughters and death and battles of derring-do had mercilessly pruned its branches. Magdalena had once had siblings, but when, in the second year of this uneasy peace, she had moved back into the family manor, not without some healthy, and now vindicated, apprehension, she had done so alone.

When someone experiences so much loss at such a young age, it is only natural that they take great measures to ensure the same fates will not befall them.

The corridor she is in right now had once been empty and unremarkable. It served no purpose, walled off at one end and opening onto the grounds, running parallel to the manor’s outer wall, but she and her siblings had found endless entertainment within it, staging heroic battles and quests of valour, back when war was just a word, something intriguingly unfathomable, distant rumours of unrest, and not their life.

The corridor ran underneath her bedroom, and even as a child she had dreamt of secret tunnels and trapdoors, that would run from her room and allow her to move about undetected. Upon her return she had made that dream a reality. Partially.

She half stumbles through a door - one of a series she had set up, none particularly sturdy, but hopefully numerous enough to provide some form of obfuscating, attritive defence. It swings shut behind her, and she slides across a deadbolt to lock it, more out of habit than of any belief it may be useful. She already knows that her safety relies on them not being able to find her corridor - if they do track her here, then no amount of flimsy doors and desperate booby traps will protect her. This is merely an interim refuge.

She collapses against the wall. The rush of the attack is wearing off, and the wound in her leg has decided that now is an appropriate time to make its extent known.

She groans. Once. Low and self-indulgent and more than a little pained. Then she keeps moving.

She has to move. She has to leave. She has to take care of her leg.

Beyond granting her temporary reprieve, she’d made sure her corridor was well-stocked. It’s a moment’s work to find medical supplies, and a few minutes later her thigh is well bandaged and smelling of alcohol over the faint tang of blood.

She starts to lean on her left foot, tentative. It hurts no worse than just standing. She breathes.

What to do…

She needs to leave - she needs to find somewhere to stay. 

For that she needs to know who she can trust.

She needs to know who sent the soldiers.

The manor has very little in the way of staff. Though her eldest brother had died in battle, her younger brother and only sister had died in separate attacks facilitated by their own servants, all pitifully paid off, which in itself should be shamefully telling. That it happened the first time was tragic, that it could happen again was carelessness. Fool me once, fool me twice.

So she left most of the household behind in the move, and those she’s kept she pays thrice as much. A cook, a maid. A stablehand for her one horse. The lands of the estate she divided up and rented out cheap to the townsfolk, forgoing a groundskeeper. Mrs O’Malley will sometimes hire errand boys to make her market runs, and Magdalena sends out for anything else.

No soldiers. No guards. No one whose job was to be better than her in a fight, no one with political aspirations, with the base means and ability to gain real power. To hell with how things have always been done, she learns from the mistakes of the past. 

Besides, she’d had enough soldiers to last a few lifetimes. 

But she wonders, now, if that wasn’t a mistake, spares a moment of thought for what might happen upstairs. Michael doesn’t spend nights at the manor, but Holly, local and desperate to leave her home, had come to her insisting on room and board as part of her employ, and Mrs. O’Malley has a couple of rooms for her and her family. Neither know of the corridor, or the trapdoor in the secret room - she’d hired a man from town to help with the latter, someone with dreams of travelling abroad, and she’d paid him handsomely to do so. Stocking and improving the corridor was a task she’d undertaken alone. Neither Holly nor the O’Malleys know anything about her defences - she has to hope her would-be executioners will take them at their word. Perhaps she should have hired someone to look after them.

But there’s nothing she can do about that now. With any luck they'll realise that she wouldn’t stay here, and start searching for her outside instead.

And she needs to be gone before they do.

Her bag is mostly packed. She tucks the bottle inside and starts to change out of her nightgown.

Why would someone want her dead? 

She isn’t proud. She knows that, as she is, nineteen and alone, she is not a threat, and certainly not in a time of peace. Her value lies in the few lands she still holds, and while they may be enough to buy her marriage to the third son of some Duke, they were hardly worth killing her, solely in the hope of receiving some small share of the spoils when, her lacking an heir, they were redistributed amongst the most loyal royalists. 

Except... that they won’t be redistributed. She has no heir in the traditional sense, and no will either - no sees no use in making her death appealing. But, she isn’t completely alone.

Her mother had died when she was young, but she had had a brother. Magdalena has the faintest memory of him visiting once, when her family was still whole and the nation with it. Stronger are her impressions of the man from when he’d paid her a call, a couple of months ago, whilst she was still settling here. 

He had not stayed long. Neither Magdalena nor the manor had been in any state for company, at the time - she still isn’t, she knows - and besides, she’d been busy with her renovations. 

And, she recalls, Holly hadn’t felt comfortable around him. She said he’d been walking around their rooms, hers and the O’Malley’s, with a shade too much intent. Searching. And even in those early days, she trusted Holly’s judgement.

So she’d sent him away with some feeble excuse about needing time to adjust, and she hasn’t had another visitor since. 

An uncle. Her only living relative. Not of the line Eyr, but of House Braxley, who had not raised arms against the King but had not shown much in the way of support for him either. They were not in total disgrace, but their status was diminished and unlikely to be restored, certainly during the current reign.

House Braxley, a House in disrepute, whose only chance at redemption is through marriage or inheritance.

No one else could stand to gain.

And the soldiers had a key.

A loud crash from upstairs brings her back to herself. She needs to be gone.

She finishes dressing, in her breeches and boots, and light padded armour under her shirt. Her hair she braids, and tucks into a cap. She straps a knife to her left thigh, and hides two more in the holsters at her calves. Her knapsack has the rest of her medical kit, skins of stale water and as much dried meat as she could carry. Money is sewn into the pockets and lining of her coat, in small packets, the sound muffled by scraps of fabric.

She almost leaves the sword, heavy as it is, but can’t bring herself to abandon an extra weapon.

She hefts the bag onto her back and stumbles, adjusting to the weight. The corridor exits into the extension she’d had built connecting the manor wall to the stable. She walks there now, locking decoy doors behind her, and avoiding the trip-rope labyrinths stretched across the floor by muscle memory alone.

Ebon is asleep, but wakes without making a fuss - she seldom does, unless threatened. She saddles her up, and mounts with ease.

And rides into the night.

****************************************************************************

It’s been a tough few years for Josef, of House Braxley.

Still, it’s nice to be able to stagger out of the public house happy with his lot, for once.

He hums as he walks, loud and tuneless, and abruptly cut off by the sudden feeling of steel against his throat.

He takes a step back. Another. The cold metal follows, until he finds himself with his back against the tavern wall and nowhere to run.

The moon is dull in the sky, but enough light seeps through the window for him to make out his assailant.

They’re short - shorter than him. Hooded. Their knife is sharp and insistent, and their forearm clamps across his chest like an iron bar.

They lean up, into his face. The pressure eases, just slightly, at his throat but he can’t bring himself to breathe. 

She whispers into his ear, and now he can hear that the voice is feminine, and just faintly familiar besides.

“I could kill you, right now.”

The pressure’s back. She’s right. Beyond the knife at his throat, he can hardly walk in a straight line right now, and he knows better than to hope anyone who sees will step in to help him.

Neither move, for a moment. Waiting.

“But I’m feeling generous.” 

Suddenly the blade turns, flat against his windpipe. 

“I survived tonight. So will you.”

The edge cuts into his chin.

“Remember this, the next time you try to cross me.”

A scrape of the knife.

Then she’s gone.

And Josef stands there, breathing hard and held up by the wall, with blood dripping from his chin, for a long long time.

Tomorrow he’ll wake up and tell himself he imagined the whole thing.

But he’ll feel that small gouge, that rawness of skin, and put a hold on his plans for acquiring the Eyr Estates. At least for a while.