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Sorcha stared at the tools. “Thank you.”

Mrs Jacoby waved it off. “The house eats enough blood without asking for more.”

Sorcha unwrapped her bandages and pulled the gloves on carefully before grabbing a bucket of water and returning upstairs. She was cleaning the lintel of a doorway when she heard footsteps behind her, light and quick.

Elsie. Sorcha did not turn right away.

“You’re busy,” Elsie said, voice thinly polite.

“Aye,” Sorcha replied, reaching higher. She had to clean the wood before she could add more Yule green branches.

“Well,” Elsie continued, stepping closer, “best mind yer footing. These floors get slick.”

Sorcha stilled. The tone was wrong—too smooth, too practised—and she shifted her stance before the warning had fully left the girl’s lips.

The nudge came anyway.

The bucket tipped, water sloshing wide across the stone, but Sorcha was ready. She stepped cleanly back, skirts gathered in one hand, the spill missing her by inches. Only a cold splash kissed the edge of her hem. She did not stumble or gasp. She looked at the spreading water, then lifted her gaze to Elsie.

“Was that meant as warning,” Sorcha said, her voice calm but edged with steel, “or something else entirely?”

Elsie blinked. “I-I’m so sorry. I didna see—”

“Enough.” Sorcha’s tone did not rise, but it held firm. The kind of tone that once carried weight in a great hall. “I have walked polished floors and wet stone since before you learned to hold a brush. Do not mistake my circumstances for blindness.” She stepped forward, deliberate now, closing the space between them. “I came here to work,” she continued, quieter, but no less steady. “Not to be toyed with. If there is grievance, you may speak it plainly. If not, mind your footing as well as your manners.”

Elsie’s eyes flicked to her hands and the gloves. To the brush Mrs Jacoby had given her. Something darker, uncertain, now crossed Elsie’s face before she turned and left.

Sorcha stood very still until her pulse slowed. She pressed her gloved hand briefly to her chest, over Destiny’s cross, and let the pain ebb. You will not steal this from me, she thought. Not Yuletide. Not hope.

She finished her work as the last of the light thinned beyond the windows, the house subtly altered by the evergreens and holly, careful order, and her quiet resolve. By evening, the corridors seemed warmer somehow, softened at the edges, less burdened by silence. Almost welcoming. And for the first time since her arrival at Lemlair, Sorcha allowed herself a dangerous thought—if even a wounded house could be coaxed back towards life, then perhaps the hearts dwelling within its walls might yet find healing too.

*

Sorcha was straightening the small table in the lower corridor, fingers careful around the Yule green branches she had tied there, when the sound of hooves carried through the stone like low thunder. Doors opened. Voices shifted. The quiet bent towards motion.

Gavan was home.

Her heart stumbled, then steadied. She was smoothing a ribbon she had salvaged from a drawer, frayed but serviceable, when his boots sounded on the stairs. He stopped, not halfway, not passing through. He stopped directly beneath the bough she had fastened above the arch.

Sorcha held her breath without meaning to.

Gavan lifted his gaze slowly. His expression, always so carefully held, fractured just enough to let something through. Recognition. Perhaps memories of Yuletide.

He reached up, fingers brushing pine needles, and for a heartbeat, he did not move at all. The scent must have reached him then—pine, pitch, cold earth. The kind of smells that belonged to childhood halls and nights lit by fire, not courtrooms and warrants and duty.

He exhaled, long and quietly. “I should have remembered,” he said.

Sorcha’s pulse quickened.

She stepped forward before she could think better of it. “’Tis nearly the season.”

He turned at the sound of her voice. His gaze moved over her, taking in the gloves, the brush at her belt, the faint flush of her cheeks from work, and something in him eased.

“You did this,” he said.

“Aye,” she admitted, suddenly uncertain. “I thought the house might feel warmer.”

“It does,” he said simply.