She was in her room when the knock came, along with the soft voice saying, "You have a visitor."
Nemia didn't get visitors. Nemia got deliveries, sometimes, or more often she got Morie hurtling through her door ranting about something-or-other, and she got messages telling her to come to training earlier or to bring another weapon.
But a visitor? For what reason? Uncharted territory. She wasn't sure she had the energy to deal with it.
She picked a small dagger from the pile of weapons she'd just finished taking off and stepped silently to the door, her hand on the knob for several moments as she debated pretending she hadn't heard, wasn't there. It had been such a long day, and such a long few days before that.
Another knock on the other side, several soft raps. "Hello?"
She could feel the vibrations through the wood against her hand. Slowly, with the dagger raised but out of sight on the other side of the door, she pulled it open.
"Oh. There you are."
She didn't know who she'd expected, but it hadn't been Irina Laycreek. "Hello?"
"I came to talk to you." She looked at her, her face expectant, and Nemia realized she was probably supposed to invite her in now. She wasn't sure she wanted to.
"Why?" She asked nervously.
Irina looked a little surprised. "Why not?" She responded airily and stepped past her. No invitation needed, apparently. There was a moment as she surveyed the room, from its bare floor to the painfully neat table and chairs and cabinets. The bed, pushed against the far wall, was a mess of blankets, the only other glaring exception to the order besides the weapons piled on the table. The door connecting to Morie's room was cracked open and she had a sudden, forceful urge to slam it shut before Irina's sharp eyes could glance through.
Everything about Morie felt intensely private since she'd left, and she didn't trust this noble girl to walk through their rooms without stepping all over that.
Irina turned around, mouth open to say something but her eyes caught on the dagger in her hand and stayed. Nemia dropped it on the table, blushing. She didn't know if she was embarrassed to have been holding it or to have been caught.
"I... what are you doing here?"
She seemed to consider her words. "Well, I know your friend the Thief has... gone away. And I thought you might want someone to talk to."
There was nothing to say to that. She stared at her, struggling to think of something.
Irina looked at her almost sadly. Pity, probably. Nemia almost wanted to pull a Morie and snap at her, but she lacked the energy to do almost anything. "You can tell me to go away."
"I don't... I don't know you."
"That's not true. We don't know each other well, maybe, but I'm sure you remember me."
True. Nemia remembered her. The surprising part was that Irina remembered too. Nemia, after all, was decidedly unnoticeable. She curled up into herself, made no noise, took up no space. Even if people besides her friends had made an effort to talk to her she probably would have scared them off with her unnerving quiet.
"We had a little mock-fight a few years, on midwinter. I remember because it was my last practice before I quit."
She wanted Irina to leave, but she was only entrenching herself further in the room. Sliding into one of the two chairs at the table, she leaned over the pile of weapons, her hair swinging over them like an inky curtain.
"I've been told daggers and such can be considered beautiful. Your Thief certainly thought so, didn't she? I was always hearing stories of her snatching Lord-Someone's ancient sword or something."
Snatching. What an ugly word for it. Nemia wasn't sure why, it just was. It made Morie sound... crude. Like she went around grabbing things out of people's arms and running away. Morie had never been crude. She regarded stealing as an art form, and Nemia was inclined to agree.
She hadn't missed the other carefully chosen words either. Your Thief. It wasn't untrue, but she had the distinct impression that she was being pandered to.
Irina was definitely waiting for her to say something.
"Yeah."
"I've never quite seen it, to be honest. Plain weapons are just that, plain, but any decoration just seems... overkill. Excuse the pun. Was that a pun? It wasn't funny, I'm sorry." She laughed lightly.
Nemia did see it. She shared Morie's love for metalwork, especially if it was attached to something useful. Morie would have been seething if she could hear Irina-- she appreciated a nice blade better even than a nice pair of earrings, her preferred jewelry to steal.
"Um..."
"But I can see the appeal." Irina sighed, looking over the back of her chair to face Nemia. "I think I envy you sometimes. I wasn't good enough to continue with training, but sometimes I wish I were. It must be so liberating to fight like that."
She clearly had a very romanticized view of what went on in the training yards. Most likely she'd spent her limited training in the noble courts and seen the training yards only from a distance. The blood and sweat of common training didn't translate in her mind.
But Nemia hadn't though she was the romantic type. She was clever, even cutthroat, or so she'd observed in the process of being quiet and unnoticeable, not feather-brained. And she'd been raised by a man largely considered to pretty cutthroat himself. But then why was she waxing poetic about it?
"Well, I suppose I have to leave all that to you and the guards and your Thief. Or maybe not your Thief anymore, since she's gone. Or is she coming back soon?"
"I don't know."
"She didn't give you a timeframe?"
"No." She wondered why Irina thought she would know. Hadn't she realized Nemia was as clueless as the rest of them? No one had known Morie was going to run away.
Irina shrugged. "Hmm. Seems a bit inconsiderate, but I suppose she had her reasons. Really I'm just worried about you."
Of all the things to say. Nemia simply had no answer. Irina had no reason to worry about her. One interaction years ago didn't amount to knowing each other, or being in a position to worry about each other. This had to be the strangest girl she'd ever met.
"I need to go to bed," she said abruptly. For the first time in ages she'd been allowed to leave training early, and she'd meant to take advantage of every second by throwing herself into bed with the book she hadn't had time to read for weeks. But Irina was eating up her precious time.
"Oh. Of course. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to keep you." She stood up and smoothed her skirt primly. "Well, if you need someone to talk to-- I know you two were close, and I don't know if you have anyone to turn to with her gone. If you need to talk to someone, let me know."
Maybe she should have been insulted. She had people to talk to. Sam and Cara and Nick didn't cease to exist just because Morie was gone. But her prerogative at the moment was just to get Irina out of her room, which she did by nodding in what she hoped wasn't a binding way.
"Wonderful. Goodnight!"
She breathed a deep sigh and listened to her footsteps fading down the hallway, then grabbed her sleeping clothes from the bed and changed as quickly as possible. She needed sleep, but more than that she needed a few minutes in her book, a little bit of escape. But as she reached under the pillow for the book, she looked back to the door between her and Morie's rooms. She hadn't closed it while Irina was there-- had she looked through it?
She went to the chair Irina had just vacated, sat down, and twisted around, seeing all the angles Irina could have looked from. There was only a sliver of the room visible through the crack in the door. She would have had to lean back to really look in, and she didn't think she had.
Good. She didn't want anyone else examining the room before she'd had a chance to draw her own conclusions. She got up and, putting her book off another few seconds, went into Morie's room. There was her stealing box, tipped over on the floor and spilling jewelry and trinkets under the table. Her clothes trunk was open, its inside a jumbled mess, and the bag of stealing tools wasn't on her bedside table. Everything exactly as it had been when she'd come looking for her late the night of the princess's ball. Wherever Morie had gone, it had been in a hurry. And it hadn't been planned.
She was about to go back to her room when she noticed the scrap of paper on the floor near the lopsided box. She stared at it a moment, then snatched it up. She'd left a note! How had she missed it the other night? Of course Morie wouldn't leave without an explanation. If she'd just been smart enough to find it sooner--
But it wasn't Morie's handwriting, and her excitement deflated quickly.
It was much neater than Morie's barely legible scrawl, though she still had no idea what it said. It was a chart was filled out with numbers on one side-- 530, 800, 1000, 1130, and such, only getting higher-- and words on the other. But not really words, because the letters, clearly written as they were, didn't add up to any words she knew. It looked like a code.
She went back to her room slowly and shut the door. Why would Morie have had a coded note in her room? Surely she wouldn't have left it on the floor kicked off to the side like that. Could it be that this had gotten there after she was gone?
She didn't like that idea.
Carefully, she tucked the note deep into the pages of her book and slid it back under her pillow before crawling under her blankets. No one had the right to go through Morie's room, except her because she knew Morie wouldn't mind. But anybody else... she rolled over, restless and worried. Almost anyone could have taken advantage of her being gone all day to come up to this remote part of the castle without being noticed.
She sat up and lit the candle on the bedside table and pulled the book back out. As the night grew even darker outside, she stayed curled around the book for hours, her sight blurring with exhaustion until she fell asleep with her cheek against the back cover, one arm over her head like she was warding something off.
She had not been sleeping well lately.