Elara's pov
They gave me a room two corridors away, smaller, with guards posted at every entrance. Someone brought tea I didn't drink. Someone else brought a shawl I didn't put on. I sat on the edge of an unfamiliar bed and stared at the wall and listened to the sounds of people moving quickly through the corridor outside, searching, questioning, trying to understand how someone had walked into the queen's private chambers in the middle of the afternoon and left a dangerous note.
The room was cold. Not in temperature, there was a fire burning in the small heart, but in feeling. It wasn't my space. Nothing in it was mine. The bed was too hard, the walls were too bare, the window looked out on a part of the palace I didn't recognize. I felt like a guest in my own home, displaced by someone else's cruelty.
