The Crazy Daughter of the Duke's Family - Book One: Pandora

Chapter 9: Trying Hard to Bargain

"Don't worry, they're not poisonous," her maid added as Rowena kept looking at the flower bed while trying to drink her tea and eat her snacks.

'Poisonous? Was that a concern?' But then she remembered. 'Of course, it would be.'

The book had briefly mentioned that the Isidora was a hybrid of two rose varieties, one of which was poisonous. The silver stem was derived from the Anatola, a blood-red blossoming rose, with black spots on the petals, that contained a powerful neurotoxin.

The more black spots they had and the larger those spots were, the more poison they contained. Some were even entirely black.

Rowena's great-grandfather had spent his life creating these special roses in his wife's likeness, yet she passed away before seeing the final result. He had made sure the poison was neutralized when he planted them all over the Nerena Marquisette in her memory. That was the story she knew.

That and the fact that her mother had been the first to be born with those eyes and hair after her, which was why she had been named after the flower in her turn.

She put down her empty cup and stood up. "I'm going back to my room," the noble said, "there's something I want to work on, so I want to be left alone until dinner."

"I understand," Norina replied as she helped the maid next to her clean up and watched her lady leave the conservatory.

When Rowena entered her room, however, she first went to her desk, opened a drawer, and reached for her correspondence paper. But as she did so, she paused for a moment. Something felt wrong, though she didn't know what it was.

Again she had to close her eyes and shift her weight to stand up straight. There were two different ways to distribute Mana, this was one of them. She had done it before, a while ago, so it was easier now.

It still used more Mana than the direct distribution method, where Mana was infused into an object by letting it flow naturally through contact with the palm. Channeling Mana to leave the body like a second entity, also called a "Vector", and moving it separately through the atmosphere, against the natural Mana inside of that atmosphere, consumed quite a bit of energy in and of itself.

It was a good thing she still had dinner to look forward to, considering her plans for the evening.

Her Mana left her body like smoke rising from a piece of timber slowly heating up on embers before catching fire. Normally, it wasn't necessary to send out Mana to sense fluctuations, but when the residuals were very small, it wasn't enough to just feel the movement as before.

Her own Mana moved around her desk. This time, when the energy around her knocked on her door, she invited it in without a second thought. She could feel human Mana that was not entirely familiar to her.

It was like a drop of something in her tea, that she couldn't see, that she couldn't smell, but on her tongue she could feel. There was no notable difference just by looking at it or probing it, but she knew by using her own Mana and taking it back, sensing that it wasn't quite hers anymore; it wasn't quite clean.

And since she had Norina and Ava around her all day, she would know their signature very well by now, it almost felt normal, so it was neither of them. And no one else should have been at her desk since she had arrived.

"Who am I kidding?" she muttered to herself. 'There's a pile of that shit right outside my door.' Of course, she knew who it was from.

She might not have a particular sense of him yet, but it certainly wasn't Logan Randall who had booby-trapped her bedroom entrance.

Who else, if not Colin van Varnhagen, would have gotten his hands on her things while she was out having tea? She should have been more careful when she went out.