THE SICKNESS.

The effect

The way life works is that everything that exists is the result of cause and effect. If the birth of the capitol had created an upper class to be waited on while they thought for and ruled over the people, it had equally necessitated the creation of the slave farms where abandoned children were trained for years to care for every petty need of these ruling classes. When Lucille begun to feel the effects of her state of mind on her health, she immediately understood the sequence of events that had caused it. At the beginning of winter, when it became impossible for Lucille to look out of her frosted windows at the  gardens she loved so much, her health suddenly failed her. Nilou came into her young mistress's rooms one morning to wake her and discovered the sole heir of house D'avencourt could not be roused no matter how much she shook her. Nilou's heart slowed dramatically until each of her heartbeats echoed loudly in the hollow of her ears. The situation as it seemed in that moment held various implications for Nilou, the most serious of these being that the capitols tradition tied a handmaid to her mistress both in life and in death. She pulled back the covers and lay a tentative hand on Lucille's forehead and found that the other girl's skin was as cold as the frost outside and yet a thin layer of sweat covered the clammy surface.  Nilou rushed to sound the alarm.

The family's doctor was summoned and before an hour was up, he had examined Lucille's unresponsive form and eased several of Nilou's concerns. Mrs D'avencourt had attended the examination and though her beautiful face remained as stoic and calm as it always was, Nilou could not help but notice even from all the way across the room that the great lady's hands had an unusually tight grip on the armrests of the chair in which she sat.
Though she'd die before she expressed as much, Nilou pitied the great lady. It was a ridiculous notion really, that a servant slave who had nothing and no one to her name felt any pity in her heart for this esteemed noble woman who had been born into the  privilege that denied Nilou her freedom. But pity is what she felt as her eyes, trained carefully on the carpets of Lucille's room, stole glances at Adelaide D'avencourt. It was easy to learn things about your master when you were a servant. All one had to do was listen to the whispers of the other servants within the house and piece the many colored cuttings of conversation together over a period of time until the entirety of the story lay before one's mind like a tapestry.
Two years before Nilou had come into employment at house D'avencourt, it's master Lord Ayan D'avencourt and his esteemed mother Lady Amandine D'avencourt had died within months of each other. The sickness that had taken them had no name and left no evidence of its presence in the corpses of the diseased. A month after the two deaths, the only son of house D'avencourt had similarly been discovered dead in his dormitory at the Academy for royal sons. The doctors had said grief is what left his body defenseless to the illness. His name has been Adrienne and he had been Lucille's only sibling. These tragedies had left Adelaide D'avencourt a cold and distant woman who hid her intense misery and loneliness behind a flawless facade of control. This was an open secret amongst the staff of the house, some of whom had worked in the employ of the great family for multiple generations even before the name D'avencourt was Nobilis. They all felt an inexplicable loyalty not just towards the name D'avencourt, but also to their lovely, lonely mistress and her only remaining child. After all, they were treated well for servants and paid handsomely and regularly, so they took great care to maintain the comfort of the two women and every breath the two ladies took was listened for with growing anxiety by their servants. Many of the older women servants also recognized that beneath Lady Adelaide's apparent dismissal of Lucille's existence, lay a mother's desperate fear of losing her only child. She kept away to protect herself and Lucille from her own growing terror that whatever illness had ravaged her family, lay dormant within Lucille's delicate body and was waiting for just the right moment to completely shatter her soul.
When the doctor left, his instructions were relayed to Nilou by the Lady and she was given strict instructions not to leave Lucille's bedside.
"As I'm sure you are aware, your life only has purpose as it is attached to hers. Her breath must be your breath and any change in her being, however slight, must be monitored and reported to myself or Rayna. This time, I will be merciful. If your negligence costs this house it's heir, I will not be so kind."
Nilou had bowed when the great lady had spoken and after offering the apologies expected of her, she'd taken her seat beside Lucille's bed and begun the wait until her young mistress would awaken. Lady D'avencourt and her handmaid Rayna left the rooms without looking back even once. It was so incredibly difficult for Nilou to feel slighted by a threat that had been delivered with so much misery.