The smell reached her before anything else did.
Stone, cold and damp and very old, with underneath it the sour residue of tallow and the ghost of some meat that had been cooked too long ago to identify. She knew, in the way one knows things in the suspended moment before full waking, that this was not her room. Her room smelled of dried lavender and the particular mustiness of Longbourn's linen press, and it was warm, and the ceiling did not loom at her from four inches above her nose.
She opened her eyes.
Grey stone. A corridor, narrow enough that she could have touched both walls at once if she had cared to try. A torch bracket, empty, fifteen feet ahead. Pale light from somewhere to her left — a window, or the memory of one, admitting the cold grey of what might have been early morning or late afternoon in an entirely overcast country. A sound: distant, enormous, the kind of sound that a city makes when it is breathing.
Elizabeth Bennet sat up on the cold stone floor, took stock of herself with the methodical speed of a woman who has always been quicker in her head than her circumstances, and identified the following:
She was wearing wool. Heavy, unadorned, the color of storm clouds.
She was not in Hertfordshire.
She was not in England.
She had no memory of ceasing to be in England, which was, she decided immediately, a problem she would table for later, because there was a serving woman forty feet down the corridor watching her with the wide eyes of someone who has not yet decided whether to run.
Elizabeth stood. Her legs were steady, which surprised her, and longer than she remembered, which surprised her more. She looked down at her hands — broader in the knuckle than she was accustomed to, with a small scar along the left thumb she had no history of acquiring — and understood in that moment, with the clean, nauseating clarity of someone who has been dropped without warning into a very cold lake, that the body she was wearing was not precisely her own.
She breathed.
She was good at breathing through things. Her mother had made her excellent at it.
The serving woman had not run, which meant she was either loyal or stupid, and in Elizabeth's experience those were not mutually exclusive. She smoothed her dress — the grey wool, which was well-made beneath its modesty, she noticed, good quality for something designed to disappear — and produced from somewhere deep in herself a look of composed composure, which was different from actual composure but served its function adequately.
"Good morning," she said.
Her voice came out wrong. Not dramatically wrong — not a stranger's voice — but a fraction lower, rougher at the edges, with an accent she didn't recognize from the inside. The woman's expression shifted from alarm to relief, which told Elizabeth that whatever she had sounded like, it was familiar enough to pass.
"My lady," the woman said. "You — we've been — Lord Crewe said you'd been taken ill, that you were resting, but —"
"I was," Elizabeth said. "I'm not, now. What time is it?"
"Past the third bell of morning, my lady. Near to four."
Four in the morning. Cold stone. A city breathing outside an unseen window.
Elizabeth looked at the torch bracket, the grey light, the retreating angles of the corridor, and let the pieces she had been holding at arm's length settle into their proper arrangement with the terrible finality of a sentence completing itself.
The Red Keep. King's Landing. The Seven Kingdoms.
She was inside a story she had read — not a story, she corrected herself immediately, a future. A history. A world that was going to do specific and documented things to specific people, several of whom were presumably somewhere in this building, and she was —
She stopped that line of thought before it became a kind of drowning.
"Is Lord Crewe awake?" she asked.
The woman blinked. "I — no, my lady, I shouldn't think so, not at this hour —"
"Then we needn't disturb him. Can you take me to my chambers?"
The woman — girl, really, perhaps sixteen, with the round anxious face of someone accustomed to blame — nodded and turned, and Elizabeth followed her through a series of corridors that smelled of cold and age and the particular staleness of rooms that housed a great many people who were not quite comfortable. She walked carefully, cataloguing everything and revealing nothing, which was a habit of sufficient antiquity that it required no conscious decision.
The halls of the Red Keep were not, she observed, what songs made them. They were stone and shadow and the smell of a thousand fires filtered through a thousand years of accumulated soot. Tapestries caught the draft along the walls — scenes of hunts and battles in colors that had been vivid once and were now the dim cousins of vivid. Torches in iron brackets, the tallow ones, cheap, giving off as much smell as light. The grandeur was there, but it was a grandeur that had been lived in hard, and living hard had taken the shine off it. Two guards at a turning, armored in gold and crimson, watched her pass with the blank professional disinterest of men who had long since sorted the court's inhabitants into relevant and irrelevant and were entirely certain of which category she occupied.
She filed that away. Irrelevant was safe. Irrelevant could look.
Her chambers were small and tidy, positioned off a larger corridor in a way that communicated, architecturally, the precise status of Lady Elspeth of Wren: present but unimportant, housed but not accommodated. There was a bed with a coverlet in grey and white, a writing desk, a single brazier doing its sincere but insufficient best against the cold, and a narrow window that looked out over a courtyard where three torches fought the dark and were losing.
The serving girl — her name, Elizabeth had gathered from two syllables of almost-introduction, was Mira — lit the brazier with the practice of long habit and asked if my lady wanted anything.
"I need a moment," Elizabeth said. "Thank you. That will be all."
The girl curtsied and went, and Elizabeth stood in the center of a room that was not hers in a body that was not quite hers in a world that was not hers and did not move for the count of thirty heartbeats, which was the length of time she allowed herself.
Then she sat down at the writing desk, located in its drawer a piece of paper and a pot of ink and a pen that was adequate if not fine, and began to write. Not a letter. A list.
What she knew. What she did not know. What she needed to know before she could act on any of it.
She had always been a maker of lists when frightened, though she had always disguised them as something else — a catalogue of books read, a record of calls to be paid — because in Hertfordshire, being frightened had been its own small humiliation, a private weakness she could not afford to let her mother or her sisters see. Here, she suspected, it would be a different kind of humiliation altogether, and so she let herself be methodical and precise and did not apologize for it.
The body of Lady Elspeth of Wren, she wrote, and then below it, in the tightest hand she could manage:
House Wren. Minor. Northern. No significant alliances. No fortune of note. A daughter, therefore decorative, therefore positioned in the queen's household, therefore present in the most dangerous room in the country with exactly no protection and exactly no political capital.
She paused. Thought. Added:
Also, therefore, invisible.
She looked at that for a moment, then drew a careful, deliberate circle around it.
Invisible was not safety, she knew. But it was adjacent to safety in the way that standing very still in high grass was adjacent to not being found by the thing moving through it. It required, unlike Bennet family dinners, the absolute and continuous suppression of the impulse to say the true thing at the wrong moment. It required, in other words, more discipline than she had ever needed to exercise, in a place that would not forgive the lapses she had always, at home, been able to afford.
She thought of Mr. Collins. She thought of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who had once told her that her opinions were impertinent, and she had agreed pleasantly and gone on having them. She thought of the particular satisfaction of a well-placed word, the clean snap of a perfect irony, the way a certain kind of man's face rearranged itself when he realized he had been precisely and publicly measured.
She thought of a king who was not yet dead, a Hand who was, a court that ate clever women for practice.
She crossed out a line that had nothing to do with anything useful.
By the time the city outside had lightened to grey and the sounds of morning had begun to make themselves known — boots on stone, the distant percussion of a kitchen, a horse somewhere, a shout, normal sounds, the sounds of a world that was going about its terrible business without reference to her discomfort — Elizabeth had three pages of small close writing and a clearer head than she had any right to.
She folded the pages and placed them inside the cover of a small prayer book that had been sitting on the desk when she arrived, as though it belonged there. Then she stood, straightened the grey wool, and went to the window.
The courtyard below had come half to life. Servants crossing with purpose or the appearance of it. Two boys chasing something, a dog perhaps, around the far corner. A man in the cloak of a Kingsguard moving along the far wall with the particular deliberate bearing of a person aware of being observed, which meant he had come from somewhere he would prefer not to have been, or was going somewhere he preferred no one to mark.
She watched him until he was gone and then watched the courtyard for a little longer, because the courtyard was where things moved that people thought no one was noting.
She was going to be very good at this.
She was also, she noted, with the honesty she had decided to extend at least to herself, very frightened. The fear sat in her chest with the dense patient quality of a stone, and she did not think it was going to leave anytime soon, and she decided to treat it as she had always treated the conditions of her life that she could not change: as weather. One dressed for it. One did not pretend it was not raining when it was. One simply did not stand in the open and be surprised by the cold.
She turned from the window and began the process of making herself look like someone who had always been here.
It was not, after all, so very different from Meryton. Only the stakes, and the swords, and the particular smile of a queen who could have you gutted on a bad morning for the wrong remark. Small differences. She had managed drawing rooms. She would manage this.
She almost believed it.
Mira came back with water for washing and a dress — another grey wool, she saw, House Wren apparently having committed entirely to the aesthetic of weather — and a look on her face that was trying very hard to be merely attentive and was not entirely succeeding. There was something behind her eyes, some question being rapidly recalculated, and Elizabeth let her be for a moment, watching in her peripheral vision as she washed her hands and face in the cold water, which was bracing in the way that winter was bracing: technically character-building, immediately miserable.
"Mira," she said, not turning. "What are the ladies' duties this morning?"
A small pause. "My lady?"
"The queen's ladies-in-waiting. When do they assemble?"
"Oh." Relief at a question with a clear answer. "After the morning bell, my lady. In Her Grace's antechamber. It's — I think it's more of an attendance than a duty today, there's no formal — but Lady Redhill said they're to be dressed fine, so I think there may be company expected."
Company. Fine dress. The queen's antechamber.
She looked at herself in the small brass mirror beside the washbasin and performed a rapid assessment of Lady Elspeth of Wren: dark hair, the kind of features that were regular without being remarkable, a complexion that had clearly seen some weather, eyes that were — she looked more closely — the particular dark amber that sometimes reads as interesting and sometimes reads as severe, depending on what was going on in them.
She arranged them, the eyes, into something that read as nothing at all.
Passable. Better than passable, if she worked with it. More importantly: forgettable, which was the current ambition.
"The grey," she said, because there was apparently no other option, "and whatever you can do with my hair that is appropriate and unremarkable."
Mira curtsied and went to work, and Elizabeth sat still for the minutes that required, which she used for further cataloguing, and at the end of it she was dressed and pinned and smoothed into a version of Lady Elspeth of Wren that she thought could walk into a queen's antechamber without attracting the kind of attention that got people killed.
She was going to have to learn the names. The faces. The allegiances and the grudges and the specific sore spots of every person in that room, the way a sailor learned the rocks — not by chart alone but by the feel of the water moving differently above them. She was going to have to learn which smiles were genuine and which were hunting. She was going to have to remember, every moment, that she was playing a different game than any she had played before, and that the losing condition was not embarrassment.
The candles were burning lower. Morning, such as it was, had arrived.
Elizabeth of Wren — she was going to have to be Elspeth, she thought, she could not afford the confusion of two names — stood, checked her reflection once more for anything that looked like thought, found nothing objectionable, and opened the door.
The corridor was cold and long and full of the kind of silence that a place accumulates when it contains too many secrets to talk over. Her footsteps were quiet on the stone. She kept her eyes forward and her hands loose and her face arranged in the expression of a woman going somewhere unremarkable for entirely unremarkable reasons.
She made no mistakes and no friends that morning.
It was, she had already understood, precisely the right beginning.