Page 49 of The Thornwyck Rose

“Then Lord Henry shall never know.” She looked once more to the secret staircase before releasing Margot andyanking the tapestry back to hide it. “I’ll use it only when needed,” she said and returned to her room. Margot took off Seren’s robes and helped her into bed.

“Goodnight, milady.”

“You too, Margot,” Seren said and turned her back to her. She heard Margot’s whispered prayers, though undecipherable through the alcove wall. After a while, she heard the door open, and Isolde enter, sniffling. The floorboard creaked as Isolde slipped into the alcove. Seren watched Isolde’s shadow but remained still.

It seemed they were all trapped in Castel Thornwyck under Lord Henry’s thumb.

Perhaps that was how he maintained control—pitting them against each other. Made them never know whom to trust. He was smart. He was cruel. He knew how to wield power, just enough to keep fear as a form of control while holding it in check to prevent rebellion.

She only had to be smarter, and maybe it started by mending broken trust—bringing peace to Mortlande, as she had promised for the Marches, when she spoke her marriage vows.

XIX

THE SECRET PARCHMENTS

THORNWYCK KEEP, DECEMBER 1088

The ink had begunas prayer, as a secret way to better learn to read and write after her time with Father Osbert.

Scratched with a dull quill onto parchment margins between Psalms and the Book of Ruth, her first entries were whispered names—so they would not be lost. So they would be lifted to heaven by the breath of paper and memory.

There was Mareth of the Outer Fields, who died in childbirth.

Ralph ab Glyn hanged for theft. A child at thirteen. She’d prayed for him, but the one drop of her pendant’s poison had not taken with the boy, though it likely dulled the pain. She should have used two drops.

Another: Bridget, the midwife, perished of fever after attending the Baroness’s stillborn.

At first, it was only these. Small marks. Silent griefs.

Father Osbert had taught her the letters at her request for religious devotion. He believed she was memorizing saints. She was. But she was also remembering those whom death had taken.

Sior, the brother of her former stable boy, was executed for stealing. Her poison had saved him from pain.

A girl only known as Lydia. She had been taken as aconcubine for Lord Stafford’s retinue in return for his assistance at Lord Henry’s border. She was never seen again.

The deaths weren’t all bloody. Some were simply from starvation in the wrong month. Most were for stealing food, and she had to be mindful of the poison’s chamber.

She needed to keep at least three in case Henry tried to kill her. It would be the only time she’d use poison for murder, not mercy. She prayed the Lord to take him in battle or illness, nonetheless.

By winter, the margins grew too narrow as her womb swelled with child again, just as Lord Henry wanted. She asked Osbert for discarded scraps.

“For practice,” she’d said.

He smiled and encouraged her discipline, praised her growing hand. He did not know what she was writing.

When she counted, there had been ninety-eight counts of death for stealing food. The others summed fifty-one altogether.

So she began to keep grain counts. Tithe notes. Women’s names from the chapel garden—their families, their burdens. Every whisper that passed through the courtyard, she turned into a record.

To have something real, something that proved the pain was not imagined. That she had not dreamed the suffering. That the truth lived somewhere, even if it only lived beneath her child’s cradle or the loose stone near the altar where she’d pressed the parchment tight and sealed it with beeswax.

Every injustice she heard—every hasty trial, every man executed for loyalty to the Welsh or the Scots—every time Erik lowered his eyes after returning from a sentence he’d been ordered to carry out, she wrote it down.

She had no power to stop it, but she wouldn’t let it vanish.

She wrote Erik’s name once.

Not because he had died, but because she feared he was dying inside, piece by piece, every year, Henry ordered him to strike down the defenseless for a petty crime and refuse him time with his growing son.