She hadn't bothered going down to greet them. Or to open the gate. They only had shackled wrists; she was quite certain they could do it themselves. She spent that evening in her room with the doors and windows locked.
The next morning, she actually found an unshackled Jerico sitting at the kitchen table, nibbling at a bit of stale bread and looking every bit as though he owned the place. Her sudden presence seemed to disrupt him very little as he gave her an uncaring wave and an all too comfortable greeting. "Might the master of the house be in?"
She absolutely could not hide the smirk saturating her voice even as she attempted to remain generally emotionless otherwise. She'd dealt with the type before--but she was older, and a hell of a lot stronger than she'd been in those days. "Not really, no." She then promptly began to walk away.
The sound of the chair scraping quickly against the stone floor was all that alerted her to his darting after her--his footsteps struck her as utterly silent. A killer or a trained boy; she turned before he could put a hand on her arm to stop her. With her cold gaze on him, his usual smooth cadence was lost. "Uh..."
"I didn't ask for your presence." She cut straight to the point. "I do not entertain criminals. If I catch any of you above the second floor, I will paint the walls with blood." With that, she turned and left.
Jerico stayed behind, staring at her back as she disappeared around a corner. That... was a new one for him. And, potentially... quite a challenge.
Instead, he wandered the grounds. Carefully, slowly, always looking around for danger--and then he'd found the gardens. The sheer beauty was... breath-taking. It looked as though it had once been immaculately tended, everything having overgrown their boundaries over a decade or so of neglect. Instead of looking haggard and in need of repair, the plants appeared to be exceedingly healthy; color exploded everywhere in leaves and flowers and fruits, intertwined with one another and thriving on the outskirts of a small pond set in the center.
It was nice, there. Peaceful. Warm and pleasant... and he began to ponder sleeping and living outside.
Architecture, for instance. He was never much of a student in any sense, but he still had his endless curiosity. The castle around him was quite unusual by the standards of anything he'd seen before, each and every wall made of a dark slate-type stone while some of the floors were marble, some wood, and some similar to the walls themselves. High arches and high ceilings, but many low hallways once lit by electric lights. It appeared they'd long since stopped working, as he went so far as to remove one of the dark bulbs to see whether or not it was still intact.
And then there was the occasional painting on the wall. Or at least what he assumed were paintings. They looked as though they'd been warped, marred by age and something else that made them appear as though they'd once been beautiful paintings long since destroyed. When he dared to run his fingers along the very bottom corner of one, however... it was all paint. A little dusty, perhaps, but there it appeared as though the look of the paintings was intended. It was a little too close to insanity, perhaps. He began to give serious thought to just what kind of lord the castle harbored.
"Hey." Brandon cringed at the sudden interruption--Jerico. Of course. He turned to the source of the noise, but said nothing.
Jerico took his reaction in stride, as always. "I just met her."
Brandon couldn't really help the raise of his eyebrow. "Who?"
"Who I take to be the resident of the castle." He responded easily. "But I think it smarter to wait for her to come to us."
