Chapter 8

Clara's POV

Becoming a nobleman's "daughter" hadn't bought me a single inch of freedom.

Anna and Elsa, those two maids, shadowed me everywhere. When I wanted to walk in the garden, they followed. When I wanted to read in the study, they stood guard at the door. At night, they slept in my room. The castle gates were heavily manned, and without Lord Hugh's written order, not even a fly could get out.

I was a bird in a gilded cage — fed, dressed, and waiting to be pushed onto some stage I hadn't chosen.

Three days passed like that.

During those three days, I played the part of a perfect noblewoman. I studied etiquette, learned how to dine, practiced how to smile. I never tried to escape. I never asked about the world outside. The tutors crammed protocol and customs into my head at a brutal pace, and nobody seemed troubled by the fact that I couldn't read — they simply had people recite everything aloud to me, day and night, until my head swam with rules and forms of address. Some days it felt worse than sleeping on the street.

Something was deeply wrong. No one who genuinely wanted to adopt a child would arrange things with this kind of urgency. I could feel it — something was coming. I had to find a way out.

And then there was the badge. It sat like a ticking bomb among the spare buttons I used for sewing practice, hidden in plain sight, but barely.

On the fourth evening, my chance arrived.

It was Lady Isabel's birthday, and the castle had organized a small banquet. The war had forced them to keep it modest, but modest still meant chaos — servants rushing, orders overlapping, no one quite where they were supposed to be. Anna and Elsa were both pulled away to help serve food and wine. They took turns leaving, making sure one of them was always stationed in my room.

That night, it was Anna's watch.

I chose to move during her shift for a reason. She was younger than Elsa, simpler in her thinking, and over the past few days we'd gotten along well enough that her guard had dropped. She sat by the fireplace with her head nodding, losing her fight against sleep one slow dip at a time.

I lay in bed with my eyes closed and waited. When her breathing finally deepened and steadied, I sat up without a sound.

Barefoot on the soft rug, I crossed the room and positioned myself behind her chair.

I'm sorry, Anna.

I picked up the heavy silver candlestick from the table and brought it down hard against the back of her head. A single dull crack. She slumped without making a sound.

My hands were shaking, but I forced myself to keep moving. I stripped her uniform and pulled it on over my own clothes, then dragged her to the space beneath the bed and arranged the blankets on top to suggest a sleeping figure. Then I opened the door, lowered my head, and walked out at a steady pace.

The corridor was empty except for a few oil lamps guttering in the draft.

I didn't go toward the main gate — that would have been suicide. Instead, I headed for the servants' quarters. In my time at Greyhaven, I had learned that the best intelligence in any noble household wasn't found in the study or the banquet hall. It lived in the servants' rooms, where gossip moved freely and no one thought to post a proper guard.

I slipped through the kitchen during a moment of confusion, tucked a scrap of bread inside my clothes, and followed the back staircase down to the basement.

The air down there was thick with cheap tobacco, sweat, and the sour smell of damp wood. A cluster of maids sat around a table missing one leg, knitting stockings and keeping their voices low.

I found a corner piled with soiled laundry, folded myself into the shadow, and listened.

"This godforsaken winter," a maid named Martha muttered, her fingers red to the knuckle, "and now the coal is running out again. The lords upstairs sit warm by their fires while we freeze in the wash house like dogs."

"At least we're eating," an older woman replied with a sigh. "Word is the refugee camps outside the walls have people chewing bark."

I held still in the shadow and listened past the complaints. I knew from experience that patience was the only real tool I had. Sooner or later, the conversation would shift.

It did.

"Did any of you hear?" Martha's voice dropped, sharpened with the particular pleasure of someone carrying news. "Robin — the clerk — they've sent him away."

"Robin Dale?" The older maid looked up. "The one who was with Miss Cecily—"

"Keep your voice down," Martha hissed, glancing around. "Unless you want to follow him. Yes, that one. His lordship had him dragged out through the back gate in the middle of the night. Straight to the mines on the outer estate."

The name landed on me like cold water. Robin Dale — quiet, head always down, the kind of young man you forgot as soon as he left the room.

"I always knew it would come to this," Martha said, mouth twisting. "Miss Cecily can't hide it much longer. I saw her in her room a few days ago, sick as anything — that's not illness, that's a baby. His lordship's been telling everyone she has lung sickness and can't receive visitors. The truth is he doesn't want anyone seeing her belly."

I pressed my hand over my mouth. Cecily — the youngest daughter of the Karrow family. I hadn't laid eyes on her once since I arrived. They'd said she was too ill to be disturbed.

"What happens to the betrothal?" another maid cut in. "House Calder has been pressing hard. If Miss Cecily can't go through with the marriage, we lose the fleet. They won't send ships for nothing."

"That," Martha said, with a slow smile that carried no warmth at all, "is the most interesting part. His lordship and her ladyship have found themselves a solution. You've seen the new ward they brought in?"

My heart lurched.

"That filthy little thing they dragged in off the street?"

"Cleaned up, she's quite pretty," Martha said. "More to the point — her build is almost identical to Miss Cecily's. The profile especially. You wouldn't know the difference unless you looked hard. And the hair is the same shade of dark brown."

A cold that had nothing to do with the basement air moved through me, starting at the soles of my feet and rising.

"You mean they're going to—"

"That's exactly what I mean." Martha's voice fell to barely above a whisper. "His lordship intends to send her in Miss Cecily's place. She'll marry Thomas Calder of House Calder."

The name detonated in my skull.

House Calder. The most powerful warlord family in the North, their territory pressing south to the Ice Sea and separated from the Skeld Compact's lands by nothing more than a narrow belt of forest. That family had survived in those conditions for over a hundred years and stood as one of the oldest houses in the River Valley Kingdom.

The Karrows meant to send me there.

"But does the girl even know? Does she agree?"

Martha let out a short, hard laugh. "Agree? She thinks she's come somewhere to be taken care of. She has no idea she's already sitting in a coach pointed straight at hell. Once she's in the North, she belongs to House Calder — whether she lives or dies afterward is none of the Karrows' concern. And as long as she gives Calder an heir, the Karrows get their fleet and keep their lands."

"And Miss Cecily?"

"Miss Cecily," Martha said, her voice going flat, "will pass away from her illness. People die of lung sickness in winter all the time. It's perfectly natural."