They were ushered into the chamber and the door closed firmly behind them, leaving only silence inside as Rosalind was already seated and waiting anxiously for their return.
The mont they stepped in, she lifted her head imdiately, her voice carrying urgency that she could not hide. "What did you find?" she asked at once as they all settled around her.
Verity exchanged a brief look with Thalia before speaking, choosing her words carefully as though even the air itself was fragile.
"We went to the old woman at the chapel," she began calmly, "and at first she was very reluctant to say anything at all. Her expression alone made it clear she was hiding sothing, or at least afraid of sothing, and from the way she reacted, we could tell she definitely knows more than she is willing to admit."
Rosalind listened closely, her heart tightening with every word.
Then Verity finally repeated the most important part, lowering her voice slightly as though it still carried weight even now.
"Then he wasn’t a servant to begin with."
The mont those words settled in the room, a chill ran straight through Rosalind’s body.
Her breath caught slightly as her mind tried to reject it, but the thought had already taken root too deeply. If that was true... if Rowan had never actually been what she believed him to be, then everything she had known about him suddenly beca unstable.
Her chest tightened painfully as the realization hit her again and again.
Who exactly had she fallen in love with?
And what part of him had ever truly belonged to her understanding?
Rosalind’s thoughts spiraled so quickly that she barely noticed Verity watching her carefully. "Rosalind," Verity called gently, pulling her back to the mont.
Rosalind blinked and turned toward her, forcing herself to focus even though her mind was still shaken.
Verity continued in a more practical tone, trying to ground the situation, "Even if Rowan has so kind of connection to the royal family, there must be sothing physical to identify it. Royal bloodlines usually carry markings, seals, or so form of recognition. We should start there first."
She paused briefly before asking more directly, "Have you ever seen anything like that on him? Maybe when he changed or when you noticed him without his shirt?"
The question made Rosalind’s face warm slightly at the mory it stirred, but beneath that embarrassnt, her mind began working faster, searching through every mont she had ever shared with Rowan.
Silence filled the room as both Verity and Thalia waited patiently, watching her as she tried to rember.
Slowly, fragnts began to surface in her mind.
She rembered the ti she had gone with him to the infirmary after he had been injured, when the royal physician had treated his wound and he had briefly pulled his shirt aside.
She hadn’t really thought about it at the ti but now that mory sharpened.
"There was... a marking," Rosalind said slowly, her voice uncertain as she tried to recall it clearly. "On his shoulder..."
Verity and Thalia exchanged quick glances, imdiately leaning forward.
"But I don’t know what it ans," Rosalind added quickly, her voice tightening again. "It could just be a tattoo or sothing aningless. We cannot be certain it is anything important."
At those words, the brief hope in the room seed to dim slightly.
Verity let out a soft breath, her shoulders lowering in frustration. Every ti they seed to step closer to an answer, sothing pulled them back into uncertainty again, leaving everything tangled and unclear.
It wasn’t that Rosalind didn’t want the theory to be true at all. In fact, a part of her desperately hoped it was all wrong, because if Rowan truly turned out to be soone entirely different, soone tied to sothing far larger than she could understand, then she wasn’t sure how she would even begin to process it.
All this ti, she had known him only as Rowan the footman. That was the identity she had grown attached to, the person she had allowed herself to love.
And now even that felt like it was slipping away.
"I don’t know anymore," Verity admitted quietly with a sigh, the weight of uncertainty pressing down on all of them.
A heavy silence followed, broken only by the awareness that ti was no longer on their side.
Alaric had still not returned, and that alone made Rosalind’s anxiety worse. She could not tell when he would appear again, or what state he would be in when he did, and every passing mont felt like it was tightening a rope around her fate. More urgently, Rowan’s situation lood over her thoughts like a shadow she could not ignore.
If they were going to do anything, it had to be soon.
Thalia finally spoke, breaking the silence with a thoughtful tone. "If only there was a portrait or sothing official that we could use for comparison," she suggested. "Sothing tied to the royal family that could help us identify whether any of this is real."
"Portrait?" Rosalind repeated softly, as the idea struck her more deeply than expected.
Verity frowned slightly. "You can’t expect to find sothing like that lying around. If it exists, it would be hidden in restricted areas or private chambers."
But Rosalind was no longer fully listening.
Sothing had already sparked in her mory.
"I think... I might know where to look," she said slowly.
Both Verity and Thalia turned toward her imdiately.
Rosalind hesitated for a mont, then continued, her voice steadier now as certainty began to replace confusion... She rembered that one ti she had been inside Alaric’s private gallery, how he collected different valuables and also bizarre items. Among those things, she recalled seeing a portrait.
He had been livid when she had lingered there.
He had said it was a man who wasn’t that important.
But that portrait particularly had stayed in her mind. And strangely, she found herself wanting to check it again... It was like an intuition she couldn’t ignore.
"I’ve seen a portrait in Alaric’s gallery before," she admitted quietly. "And one of them... looked familiar in so kind of way. Now I feel like I need to see it again."
The room fell silent as that possibility settled over them.
Because if Rosalind was right, then the answer they were searching for might not be far away at all.
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