The new strategy worked, as far as Theon was concerned, with a thoroughness that almost worried Elsie more than its absence would have. He had not returned to the dispensary in the days since their conversation, had not, as far as she could tell, mentioned her name to anyone within earshot, and the careful, watchful attention she'd felt fixed on her for two weeks seemed, gradually, to have drifted elsewhere — onto some other puzzle, some other piece of the household that warranted his particular brand of methodical curiosity more than a forgettable dispensary girl who occasionally fumbled a stopper and admitted, freely and without prompting, to bad sleep.

It should have felt like an unambiguous victory. It mostly did, except for the small, unwelcome discovery that came tucked inside it.

Looking less than perfectly composed, it turned out, didn't just make her less interesting to a man who noticed things. It made her, in the eyes of nearly everyone else in the dispensary's daily orbit, considerably easier to talk to.

Birdie had grown noticeably more comfortable around her in the past several days, sharing increasingly detailed gossip with the easy assumption of someone who'd decided Elsie was, finally, a person rather than a quietly competent fixture of the room — who'd courted whom in the stable yards, which steward had been caught skimming the wine cellar's stock, the long, involved saga of a footman's broken engagement that Birdie recounted with the relish of someone narrating a particularly good play. Os had started leaving her the trickier compounding tasks without comment, the particular silent compliment of a man who trusted you more once he'd seen you make and correct an honest mistake. Even Hesketh, sharp-eyed and entirely unsentimental, had begun addressing her with a fraction less of the brisk formality she reserved for new hands she hadn't yet decided to trust, occasionally even asking after her opinion on a tincture's proportions before simply issuing the correct answer herself, as though Elsie's input might genuinely be worth a moment's consideration rather than merely tolerated.

It was, Elsie reflected, an entirely predictable outcome of the strategy she'd deliberately chosen, and one she had simply failed to think through to its full conclusion. Forgettable to a suspicious man and approachable to everyone else were not, it turned out, the same condition wearing two names. She had traded one kind of visibility for another, and the second kind, while considerably less dangerous than Theon's attention, came with its own complications — chief among them, as she discovered before the week was out, the renewed interest of Lady Cordelia.

---

Cordelia arrived at the dispensary with the particular brisk entitlement of a woman who had never once in her life needed to consider whether her presence was welcome, and demanded, without preamble, a specific rose-and-amber oil blend that Elsie recognized immediately as both expensive and, this week, entirely unavailable, the last of the amber having been claimed for a noble guest's perfume order three days prior.

"I require it within the hour," Cordelia said, in the tone of someone announcing a fact rather than making a request, glancing around the dispensary with the faint, dismissive air of a woman surveying a room she considered beneath her notice except as a source of inconvenience. "I have an engagement this evening and I do not intend to attend it smelling of whatever common substitute you people keep on hand for emergencies."

Elsie recognized the shape of it immediately — not a genuine errand so much as a small, deliberate trap, the kind designed to produce a failure worth complaining about later, preferably in front of an audience that mattered. Cordelia had not chosen this particular oil by accident. She had chosen it, almost certainly, because someone — Hesketh, most likely, in some unguarded moment of professional pride — had mentioned the new dispensary girl's unusual competence within Cordelia's hearing, and a woman whose entire social strategy depended on appearing perpetually, effortlessly served did not respond well to hearing servants praised for cleverness she hadn't personally witnessed and therefore couldn't claim credit for noticing first.

"The amber's been claimed this week, my lady," Elsie said, with the particular calm, unhurried courtesy she'd spent five years perfecting for exactly this kind of confrontation. "But I can prepare something close enough that I doubt anyone at your engagement will know the difference, if you're willing to give me a quarter hour."

"I didn't ask for *close enough*."

"No, my lady. You asked for the impossible within the hour, and I'm offering you the next best thing within considerably less time than that." Elsie said it lightly, with a small, deferential smile that took most of the edge off the words, the precise tone of someone being genuinely helpful rather than insolent, though she suspected, watching Cordelia's expression flicker, that the distinction had registered as considerably thinner than she'd intended.

---

What followed was, by any honest accounting, one of the more satisfying quarter hours Elsie had spent since arriving at Caldreth. She worked quickly, blending rose oil with a careful undertone of dried bergamot and a single, precious drop of true amber resin scraped from the bottom of an otherwise empty jar — not enough to constitute the genuine article, but more than enough, layered correctly, to convince anyone without a perfumer's trained nose that the genuine article was exactly what they were smelling.

She thought, working, of the dozens of similar small deceptions she'd built in Bren's shop over three years — a customer demanding a remedy that didn't exist for an ailment that didn't quite warrant one, solved not through honesty about the impossibility of the request but through a careful, face-saving substitution that satisfied everyone involved without anyone having to admit the original demand had been unreasonable. It was a skill nobody had ever formally taught her, assembled instead out of necessity and repetition, and she found, blending the oil now, a small, private satisfaction in discovering it transferred so cleanly from a border-town apothecary to the household of the single most powerful man in the kingdom.

She presented the finished blend with the same calm courtesy she'd opened with, offering a brief, technically accurate explanation about how the particular combination "brightened the amber's natural depth," which was true in the sense that it described what she'd actually done without admitting that the amber in question had been stretched considerably further than its usual measure. Cordelia tested it on her wrist, inhaled once, twice, and Elsie watched the calculation behind her eyes — the search for a flaw worth complaining about, the failure to find one specific enough to voice without looking foolish.

"Adequate," Cordelia said finally, in the tone of someone awarding a grudging point she clearly hadn't wanted to award, and swept toward the door without further comment.

It should have ended there. Cordelia, however, paused at the threshold, the way a woman accustomed to having the last word generally did, and turned back with an expression considerably sharper than the situation required.

"You're cleverer than you let on, aren't you," she said, not quite a question, with the particular cool, assessing tone Elsie had heard once before, from a very different speaker in a very different conversation. "Pretending to be ordinary. I've met your sort before — always so careful to seem unremarkable, right up until someone actually needs something done well." A small, unpleasant smile. "Must be exhausting, performing modesty all day."

---

Elsie's heart did the precise, unpleasant thing it had done in the corridor outside the east wing — a sudden, cold drop, the specific lurch of hearing a private fear spoken aloud by someone with no idea how accurately they'd hit it. Cordelia had meant the comment as nothing more than ordinary spite, the small, cutting observation of a woman who resented competence in anyone she'd decided was beneath her, with no understanding whatsoever of how precisely her words had landed on top of Theon's, two separate strangers independently noticing the exact same carefully constructed seam in Elsie's performance.

She made herself laugh, lightly, the small, self-deprecating sound she'd practiced specifically for moments like this one. "I wish I were half as clever as you're suggesting, my lady. Mostly I'm just terrified of getting things wrong in front of people who matter." She let the words land with a faint, calculated wobble, the precise texture of nervous flattery rather than genuine confidence. "I'd be grateful for any advice on doing it more convincingly, honestly."

It was, she thought, exactly the right note — humble enough to flatter, foolish enough to disarm, entirely consistent with the ordinary, slightly anxious dispensary girl Cordelia had clearly decided, a moment ago, she might need to worry about. Cordelia's expression shifted, the sharp assessment softening back into the comfortable, familiar shape of contempt, considerably easier for her to hold than suspicion.

"Don't bother trying to be clever," Cordelia said, with the particular satisfied condescension of someone who believed she'd just delivered useful wisdom rather than received a calculated retreat. "It rarely suits people like you." And with that, she was gone, skirts snapping around the doorframe, leaving behind her the particular relieved quiet of a room that had just successfully survived a small, contained disaster.

Elsie stood very still for a moment after she'd left, breathing carefully, and reflected, with the particular grim humor she reserved for victories that didn't feel entirely like victories, that she had just defeated one of the most dangerous women in the household by convincing her that Elsie was exactly as harmless as she'd originally assumed — a strategy that worked precisely because it cost Elsie nothing but a small, manageable swallow of pride.

"You handled that well," Os observed, from across the room, not looking up from his own work, in the mild tone he used for nearly everything regardless of how much weight the words actually carried.

"Practice," Elsie said, which was, by a considerable margin, an understatement she had no intention of explaining further. Five years of customers who'd wanted the impossible delivered with a smile, she thought, had turned out to be excellent preparation for nobility who wanted exactly the same thing, dressed in considerably finer clothes and backed by considerably more power to make her regret a wrong answer.

Birdie, who'd been quietly observing the entire exchange from the far worktable with the rapt attention of someone watching a particularly good performance, let out a low whistle once Cordelia's footsteps had faded entirely down the corridor. "I've seen grown men cry after five minutes with her. You just talked her into a corner and made her think she'd won." She shook her head, grinning. "Remind me never to get on your bad side."

"I don't have a bad side," Elsie said, lightly, "I have an extremely well-organized set of reasonable responses," which made Birdie laugh properly, the kind of laugh that suggested the comment would be repeated, embellished, and retold at least twice more before the week was out — a small, harmless piece of household legend that cost Elsie nothing and, if anything, only reinforced the careful, approachable persona she'd been deliberately cultivating since her conversation with Theon.

---

She left the dispensary not long after, sent on an errand to the main stores that took her past the edge of the great hall, and it was there, crossing the wide gallery that overlooked the hall's entrance, that she caught sight of the gathering preparations — household staff arranging chairs in formal rows, a steward checking a list against the room with visible anxiety, the particular charged, hurried atmosphere of a household preparing for something that mattered considerably more than an ordinary afternoon.

"Audience for the northern delegation," a passing maid murmured to no one in particular, hefting an armful of cushions. "Lord Regent's hosting it himself. Whole place has been in a state since this morning."

Elsie slowed without quite meaning to, drawn to the edge of the gallery the way you're drawn to the edge of any spectacle you've been specifically warned to avoid, and found, looking down into the hall below, that a column was already forming near the entrance — household guards, a handful of nobles she didn't recognize, and at the center of it, partially obscured by a stone pillar and the press of bodies around him, a tall, dark figure she couldn't quite see clearly enough to call a face.

She told herself, gripping the gallery rail with rather more force than the moment required, that she had every reason to simply walk on. The errand she'd been sent on did not require watching this particular procession. Nothing about her duties at Caldreth required her to linger at this rail for even a single additional second, and every rule she'd ever written argued, quite reasonably, that she should already be three corridors away by now, headed toward the stores and away from whatever this gathering was about to become.

She did not walk on, not immediately. She stayed long enough to watch the column shift and resettle, long enough to hear a steward call out instructions about seating order, long enough that the small, stubborn part of her she'd been arguing with for days finally won out over the part that knew better.

She heard his title spoken aloud, somewhere below — *the Lord Regent will receive the delegation now* — and felt her own pulse spike with a suddenness that had nothing reasonable behind it, nothing she could have explained to anyone watching, simply the specific, undeniable knowledge that the man at the absolute center of every danger in this story was standing less than fifty feet below her, separated only by a railing and a stone pillar and the particular bad luck of timing that always seemed to place her just close enough to feel his presence and just far enough to avoid actually confirming it.

She did not linger longer than that single moment allowed. She made herself walk on, briskly, toward the stores and the errand that had brought her to this gallery in the first place, and told herself, with considerably less conviction than usual, that the sharp, unsteady flutter in her chest was simple proximity to danger and nothing more complicated than that — the same flutter, surely, that any sensible person would feel standing close to a fire they'd been warned might burn them, regardless of whether the fire itself had done anything yet to deserve the reaction.

---

That night, by candlelight, she opened the notebook to record the day's small accomplishments, the way she'd taught herself to do across five years of careful self-assessment — a habit that usually steadied her, laying victories and near misses out in tidy, manageable rows.

*Cordelia: handled. Won't return for a while, probably, satisfied she's put me in my place. Theon: quiet for nearly a week now. Strategy working. Lord Regent: still not seen properly. Eleven days now since arriving at Caldreth, and I still haven't laid eyes on his actual face.*

She read the last line back, and felt something cold and uncomfortable settle in her stomach at the precise shape of what she'd just written — not *eleven days of successful avoidance*, which was how the sentence should have read, how it would have read a month ago, but *eleven days* counted, tracked, noted with a specificity she usually reserved only for genuine threats. She had never once, in five years, kept a tally of days since she'd last seen a dangerous animal, or a suspicious stranger, or any other ordinary peril. She tracked those the way you track weather — present, relevant, then gone. She had apparently, without quite meaning to, begun tracking this particular danger the way you might count days since you'd last spoken to someone you missed.

She crossed out the line, the way she'd crossed out the paragraph after the voice through the door, and did not write a replacement this time, because she genuinely did not trust herself to write one that wouldn't reveal, in her own careful handwriting, exactly how strange and exactly how unwelcome this particular pattern was becoming.

She thought, instead, of the two victories she'd actually earned that day — Cordelia outmaneuvered, Theon's attention successfully redirected elsewhere — and tried to take the proportionate satisfaction in them that the day's actual achievements deserved. They were, by any reasonable measure, the more important entries. A dangerous noblewoman handled without incident. A suspicious man's curiosity successfully starved of fuel. Either one, five years ago, would have counted as a thoroughly successful week, worth a private, satisfied smile and nothing more complicated than that.

She found, instead, that her mind kept circling back to the single entry she'd crossed out — eleven days, a number she apparently could not stop herself from counting, attached to a man she had not yet properly seen and had every sound, sensible reason to keep avoiding for as long as her remaining time at Caldreth allowed.

She blew out the candle and lay in the dark for a long while afterward, listening to the household settle into its nighttime quiet, and thought, with the specific, unsparing honesty the small hours always seemed to demand of her, that she had survived Cordelia and outlasted Theon and still hadn't managed the one piece of avoidance that should have been, by every rule she'd ever written, the simplest of the three.

Eleven days, she thought again, before she could stop herself, and made herself turn over instead, facing the wall, as though changing the direction of her body might somehow change the direction of her thoughts. It did not, particularly. But it was, at least, something to do with her hands while the rest of her waited for sleep that was slower than usual in arriving.