Selina might have been a trained spy and a blooded killer, but she was still a woman, and her next days were dark. She wept, a thing she had not done in years; she neglected her duties, and found excuses to be elsewhere in the mornings when the Lady Talia required a maid's assistance to dress and do her hair. A mere lady's-maid might have worried that the chambermaid who took her place would find favor over her, but Selina was... rather more than a mere lady's-maid, and all she feared was that Talia would call her absence strange.
At last the sorrow and heartbreak cooled in her breast, and she determined that if Talia meant to be her foe, she would need to gather a defense. So to this end she began to spy in earnest, not merely slipping information to Alfred and Auld Fox, but spying on her own initiative and tucking away her knowledge to be used as blackmail should she ever need it.
It was from this resolution that she began to make real headway in discovering Talia's secrets- the fire-spells in her boudoir, through which she spoke to her father face-to-face, and her plot to poison Commander Gordon after the new year, with a concurrent scheme to discredit him as an honest man- and at last she saw Talia enter her boudoir in the same gown she had worn before, which Selina had found soiled.
This time Selina cracked the boudoir door and peered within, and caught a glimpse of motion and the grating sound of wood sliding over oiled wood.
She risked a further look, and found the room empty; the sound had come from a corner, and Selina slipped inside and laid her hands upon the panels, pressing and exploring with deft hands until a section of panel gave, revealing a crack. Beyond it echoed faint footsteps, descending far below.
And yet, however she pushed, the panel would not move; Selina worked herself to sweating, pulling and grappling the door, and searched for further catches to release, all with no success. At last she placed her eye flat against the wood to see if she could peer through the crack, and there her nose picked up the astringent tingle of magic, recognized from Talia's witch-fire communications with her father.
There would be no moving this door.
When Talia came back, merely half an hour later, she stripped out of her gown in the boudoir and washed herself in the basin before she opened the door; Selina heard her splashing, and knew why she washed, and felt sick to her stomach. She had thought, perhaps, that Talia was dallying with a nobleman, or a soldier; but nothing lay beneath them except dungeons, and there had been no time to creep all the way to the barracks and back, or to the courtiers' suites. Perhaps Talia was meeting her... her partnerin this deception, and the thought made Selina's bile rise... at a halfway point? Or perhaps she was making her way to the dungeons...
The thought struck her blind with fear and certainty: Bruce must be alive. There could be no argument of bastardy, if the child had his eyes; certainly the child would be born late, but a long convalescence and a 'sickly' infant would cover that nicely, and it hardly lay outside the plan to begin with. Only two months had elapsed since that tragic wedding; Talia must be growing desperate, visiting whatever cell she kept him in frequently.
He could not be participating willingly. Did she keep him drugged? Was he chained down when Talia went to him, rode him against his will? Had she promised him his freedom, once he had given her an heir? Did he know that she would slit his throat without a moment's twinge of conscience once she had his seed fast in her womb?
She must be drugging him, or bespelling him. Gods, the poor man- how could Talia, who had labored under threat of rape for a decade in the Pit, visit such horrors upon any other person? How could she do this, and expect Selina to love her, and pretend to love Selina in return?
Talia moved through her chambers, pouring wine and heaping cheese and cakes upon a platter, then climbing still-nude under her duvet to devour her foodstuffs; Selina, feigning sleep in her maid's chambers, lay awake with her throat tight and her belly quivering as Talia completed her repast and lowered the lamp.
"Selina," called Talia, softly; she was not, it seemed, willing to wake her maid if she were sleeping, a strange note of thoughtfulness that nearly reassured Selina for a few moments- surely, whoever she had taken as a lover, Talia would have her child from a bed of consent.
Then she heard a faint shuffling of sheets, a low moan, and she knew the longing quaver in that voice, knew the ache of swollen and battered unfulfillment and the soft lifting intakes of breath and the flickering rhythm of Talia's pleasure, and despite herself Selina closed her hand tight over her own mound- her body would always respond to Talia's, always kindle at the knowledge of Talia's shudders and moans, even when she thought her mistress a monster. And yet she could not bring herself to participate in this, in the aftermath of some stranger's thrusting within the tight hungry space where Selina's own mouth and fingers were meant to be, and when she heard the long helpless fluttering sigh of her mistress's release she lifted her hand from the pounding flesh between her own thighs, unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, to tuck both hands beneath her pillow and lie awake in conflict while her mistress slept.