Chapter 7

Clara's POV

"Please... don't kill me... I just want to live..."

My sobbing echoed through the quiet tent, each word more wretched than the last.

Several seconds of dead silence followed. Then came a soft, almost imperceptible sigh.

"Enough." Lady Isabel's voice cut through the stillness, and with it, the suffocating killing intent seemed to bleed from the air. "Look at her. Look how she cries. She's only a child."

I lifted my head slightly, peering through the blur of my tears. Lord Hugh Karrow's expression, which had been drawn tight as a bowstring, visibly eased. He raised one hand and waved the soldiers flanking me back toward the tent walls.

"Get up." His tone had shifted—warmer now, carrying the measured patience of an elder addressing someone far younger. "We were simply on edge. You understand, I'm sure. Imperial spies have been slipping through our lines more frequently than we'd like. We can't afford to be careless."

I remained on the ground for a moment, chest heaving, my heart still hammering against my ribs as though it hadn't yet received word that the danger had passed.

"You said you were separated from your sister?" Lady Isabel crossed the space between us and reached into her pocket, producing a handkerchief that smelled faintly of lavender. She held it out to me. "Wipe your face, poor child. You look so much like... like someone I once knew."

I took the handkerchief and pressed it against my face without care for grace or precision. Between unsteady breaths, I began to speak—weaving the story of my life, or rather, the life I needed them to believe. I painted myself as a girl undone by war: father a ferryman, dead before the fighting had even reached its worst; mother taken by illness; my younger sister and I separated in the crush of refugees fleeing a city that no longer existed.

It was half-truth, half-fabrication, and I delivered every word of it as though it cost me something.

"What a world we've made of things." Lord Hugh shook his head slowly, and something that might have been genuine sorrow moved behind his eyes. "Before Greyhaven fell, it was House Karrow's domain. We cannot leave you to fend for yourself in the streets. You lied to us, yes—but you lied to survive, and there's no sin in that."

"Thank you, my lord. Thank you, my lady." I pressed my forehead to the ground in a bow so low it bordered on theatrical.

"Take her," Lady Isabel said to the two maids who had appeared near the entrance. "A hot bath, clean clothes. She shouldn't be suffering the cold any longer."

The maids moved to either side of me and helped me to my feet with practiced gentleness. Their grip was light, but I could feel the underlying strength in their arms—the kind built from years of real work—and I understood without being told that it also constituted a very polite form of restraint.

I let them guide me toward the tent's entrance.

Just as I crossed the threshold, the wind shifted, and the conversation behind me drifted forward like smoke.

"...the resemblance, Isabel. It's uncanny. She could have been cast from the same mold." Lord Hugh's voice was barely above a murmur, but it trembled with barely contained feeling. "This is divine providence. We've searched so long, and now, without even looking..."

"Yes." Lady Isabel's voice broke on the single syllable, and I heard the rustle of fabric that suggested she had stepped into her husband's arms. "As long as she stays... as long as she can become that person... we can hold on to all of it."

I turned my head before I could stop myself.

"Stop looking around, girl. Come along."

The maid on my right gave my arm a firm pull, and whatever I might have learned from watching their faces was lost to me. I was steered deeper into the city, away from the tent and its half-heard revelations. The streets here were quiet and noticeably clean—a stark contrast to the suffering visible beyond the walls, where bodies had been left where they fell. Even so, every door along these streets was shut, every window covered, and the only signs of life were the soldiers who passed through the intersections at irregular intervals, their faces blank beneath their helmets.

At the city's center stood the Karrow castle. I was brought inside and led up a tower staircase—how many flights I lost count of—until we arrived at a room set apart from the rest.

It was finer than anything I had seen in Greyhaven, finer than any inn I had slept in or robbed. A bed with a feather mattress, a fireplace already burning, and a private bath that the maids filled with steaming water while I stood watching. They produced expensive soap and scented oil as though these were ordinary things.

"Please, miss," one of them said—a blonde girl with a practiced smile—"bathe and rest. The lady will send new clothing when you're finished."

"Thank you," I murmured, though my eyes were already moving across the room in a slow, methodical circuit.

The window was nailed shut; through the glass, I could see only the flat gray of the sky. The door stood unlatched, but I had no doubt that someone was positioned on the other side of it. I waited until both maids had withdrawn before pulling back my sleeve and carefully working free the badge I had sewn into the lining—then I set my old clothes in a pile near the door and, after a moment's hesitation that the steaming bath quickly resolved, lowered myself into the water.

The warmth spread through me by degrees, coaxing the tension from muscles that had been braced for hours. My body accepted the relief without reservation. My mind did not.

I was alive, which was more than I had been certain of an hour ago. But the badge was a problem. If what Perrin had told me was even half accurate, I couldn't afford to sit on it—I needed a way to reach the donation box, and I needed one soon. Beyond that, I couldn't make sense of why the Karrows had taken me in at all. There were dozens of girls starving alone outside these walls; I was not special by any measure I could name. And yet they had looked at me with something that went beyond charity.

Whoever they thought I resembled, I was already their piece on the board. The only question was what game they were playing.

When I stepped out of the bath, the maids dressed me in a gown of pale blue silk embroidered with silver thread—cut in the unmistakable style of high nobility. They arranged my hair into an elaborate upswept knot and pinned it in place with pearl-tipped combs. When they guided me to the mirror, I stood there for a long moment and did not recognize the person looking back.

The girl who had crouched in the mud with the eyes of a cornered animal was simply gone. In her place stood someone pale and slight and, by any reasonable standard, striking.

"Beautiful," one of the maids said, with what sounded like sincerity.

I looked at my reflection and felt a tired, hollow kind of irony settle over me. Outside these walls, people were dying of exposure and hunger. And here, the fabric draped over my shoulders was worth more than a family's food for a year.

The following morning, I was brought before Lord Hugh and Lady Isabel again—this time in the dining hall, where the table had been laid with roasted goose, red wine, white bread, and a bowl of fruit that still held its color.

"Sit with us, child." Lady Isabel took my hand and drew me into the chair beside her as though this were something we had always done.

"From this day forward," Lord Hugh said, lifting his wine glass with the gravity of someone reciting a formal oath, "you are our goddaughter. We swear it before God. You will have every advantage we can provide—education, comfort, security. You will not go hungry. You will not be cold."

I stared at him. "Why?" The word came out before I could weigh it. "You don't even know my name."

"Names can be given," Lady Isabel said softly. She reached up and cupped my face in one hand, her thumb brushing my cheekbone. Her eyes held something that I recognized, after a moment, as the look of someone who has placed everything they have on a single bet and is watching the die turn in the air. "What matters is not your name. It is what you are. In these dark times, God has sent you to us—I'm certain of it."

I studied them both—this lord and lady who held the power of life and death over an entire territory—and felt the certainty of my situation settle over me like cold water.

I could not refuse. The moment I refused, the illusion shattered, and I became again what I had been before: a thief whose hands could be taken from her at anyone's convenience.

"Thank you," I said carefully, lowering my eyes. "Father. Mother."

And so, from that day forward, I was Clara Karrow.