Liona was not particularly fond of the woods. She never had been, even when she had spent time on the Island, and she had always been secretly relieved to live where she did. Beinn was not precisely ugly, but trees were not abundant there. She loved the smell of the surf and the wet rocks, the way that everything seemed to be crumbling after so long, proof that men were full of folly to believe that they could ever build something near to the sea and not have it destroyed by that very sea. Mortal men had built it, surely, for Gifted one's would've put their magic into the stones and it would not have weathered as it did. People were not allowed into her rooms - her mother's old ones - for that very reason. The rest of the castle showed bits of wear or damp as one in its location should, but Liona's rooms did not. Magic was to thank for that, magic she was not willing to share with many.
She suspected magic had something to do with why she was out here. It had started when she went to the market to look for some very specific ingredients for a poison she was brewing to present to Nevina as a gift, a little known one she believed her mother had invented since she had found the recipe nowhere but her journal, when she had realized that she was hearing voices that did not belong to the people around her.
Curiosity was what she would blame for the start, and now she was just lost. When had she wandered into the woods? Where had she done so? If it came down to it, she would resort to a spell, but surely if she was hearing the animals - and that was what it was, squirrels were shockingly annoying - then they could hear her. "Listen-" she began to a robin, stopping when she realized there was a woman and a horse in the clearing. A commoner. Commoners did have their uses. "Hello?" Liona called, stopping with plenty of distance. "Could you perhaps help me?"