The room has recently been occupied. It smells like it, and Maeve is used to that smell but it's not exactly suited to her mindset.
It is the only room with a window that looks out over the oddly-shaped lot behind her building--her building, maintained with her money and sometimes her own hands. The window is narrow and filmed but affords a decent view of the run-down cluster of shops that occupies the lot. While some might scoff at the idea, the Swan is truly one of the few remaining places in this corner of town that are not cobwebbed mockeries of former glory: while it is small and old, it is tidily kept and highly respectable, or at least as respectable as an establishment of its nature can be.
She is holding a journal open against the wall, steadied with her sinewy fingers, and she is comparing the crude sketch on its pages to the aerial view the window affords. Someone knocks at the door, but her eyes do not stray from the page.
"Find another," she says, correcting a line with a decisive stroke of her pencil.
The sketch follows the rough shape of the lot below, but only a skeleton echo of the buildings remains: some gone entirely, most dramatically altered. A few long, narrow structures flanking a central courtyard that is mostly open, with a low-slung stable (or something similar to it) extending along its longest side.
She begins dividing the courtyard into sections.
Riding yard, she pencils in.
It will take money, of course. Time, too, but mostly money. But Maeve has money, and she is persuasive at parting the wealthy from theirs when she needs to be. Some of the Chosen may be the kind of penniless farmhands she's seen recently (damned cocky creature), or smelly, thirteen-year-old goatherds without so much as a pot to piss in, but some of them aren't. She thinks of Obadiah, with his shaking hands and his money. Or more correctly, his father's money. But that's of no concern to her, whose it is now. Only that it will be hers in the future.
Not quite hers. Theirs. The Chosen.
She has already begun buying up deeds, and partly by bullying and partly by charisma the prices she has secured have been remarkably generous--to her. A merchant below is shifting boxes of goods onto the back of a wagon, leaving an empty building behind. She is very close.
Library, she pencils next to a building. Council hall.
No one is taking this seriously. There are clear signs everywhere; the stones are gleaming. They dismiss her as a silly, superstitious old woman while the Guardians move among them. Finnavair, next to her--still small enough to ascend and descend the stairwell but becoming larger and stronger each morning that Maeve wakes to greet her--stamps an angry hoof, feeling her Chosen's frustration.
Archives. Study.
But she won't be caught out. Theirs is a higher calling. And hers is to be prepared.
She scrawls the rough shape of a wolf into the largest section of the courtyard, and underlines its label with a sketch of a spear.
Training grounds, she writes.
It is good to be ready.
