"Ilya…" the Duke said. It had been quiet for several minutes and so he spoke into it. She responded softly.
"Yes?"
He hummed.
"Tell me about your childhood. Start from birth. I want to know you."
She gave a soft chuckle. He wanted to know her? She was still understanding herself....but she supposed she could give him an overview.
"You have asked me similar questions before…but very well, my lord. I will summarize, and worry not. I will not be insulted should you drift off to rest."
Elias looked at her as though to say he would not sleep and so she cleared her throat.
"Right. Well…according to my mother, I was born-"
_________________
Ilya Valenpor was born at the end of summer, just as the first breath of autumn swept down from the mountains of Stillmore. The keep was wrapped in amber light and golden fields, and the midwives whispered that the child was marked by the season—quiet, watchful, and touched by the shifting winds.
Her mother, Countess Lynnora, labored for nearly three days. It was a slow and punishing birth, marked by long hours of silence and worry. When Ilya finally emerged, she did not cry, forcing the head nurse to rub her back and clear her airways gently, coaxing breath into her lungs by while mages utilized their magic to bring out her activity. Her first gasp was shallow but certain, and she opened her eyes far sooner than expected—calm, unblinking, and the color of a mountain spring.
Count Oxwell Valenpor, her father, held her that night beneath the firelit rafters of the eastern solar. He was a broad-shouldered man with a laugh like rolling thunder and hands calloused by war. A knight before a lord, he bore scars like jewelry and pride like armor. Yet when he looked at his daughter, his voice turned soft as velvet. "Little wolf," he called her. "Eyes sharp and silent. You'll guard more than lands one day, I think."
Her earliest memories were bright with warmth—apple blossoms drifting like snow across the courtyard, her father lifting her onto a horse for the first time, her mother singing lullabies in a voice sweet as lyre strings. She remembered trailing behind Oxwell in the training yard, her small wooden sword clutched like a relic, mimicking his steps as he sparred with knights twice his size. He taught her not how to fight—but how to stand. How to speak. How to listen.
Kyrnin was born when she was almost two, a loud and hungry bundle of limbs who clung to her like ivy. Two years later came Anne, a pale and gentle child with a laugh like bells. Ilya loved them both fiercely. She read to them in the window alcove, invented games in the tunnels beneath the keep, shielded them when arguments between adults grew too sharp to ignore. Though only a few years separated them in total, she took her role seriously.
Their keep, if one could call it that, was modest but proud, nestled in a valley cut by rivers and guarded by pine. The lands were fertile, the people loyal, and the winters cruel. But inside the keep itself, they had fire. They had love.
Until they didn't.
It began with a summons.
Oxwell, ever the loyal bannerman to the crown, was called south to suppress a border rebellion. He kissed Ilya's brow before he left, promised her a new pair of riding gloves from the capital. "Look after your mother," he said. "And your little pack."
She never did get those gloves.
The news came three weeks later—delivered by a courier in gold-and-crimson livery, the royal seal cracked in wax. A skirmish gone wrong. An ambush in the highlands. He died with his sword drawn, boots on and without fear and surrounded by fallen enemies. It was meant as comfort.
It comforted nothing.
The keep changed overnight. Rooms that had once echoed with laughter grew still. The Countess, always graceful and poised, became something more fragile—beautiful in her grief, but unreachable. She stopped singing. She walked the halls like a ghost, holding her rosary until her fingers bled.
The bannermen sent condolences. The court sent silence.
And then he came.
Lucien.
He was Oxwells distant cousin, a minor noble with thin blood and an oily smile. His claim to the keep and the title was legal—if only barely. With Oxwells death and no male heir, he was next in line.
Within two months, he had married Lynnora.
The wedding was quiet. The household whispered.
Lucien brought with him new men. New stewards. New rules.
The old staff—nurses who had cradled Ilya, maids who knew her favorite meals, the master-at-arms who taught her how to hold a blade—all dismissed summarily. In their place came strangers with crooked smiles. Men with pinched eyes and heavy hands. Women who spoke only when spoken to.
The warm hearth turned cold and before long, was sold off in favor of lands near the capital. Much smaller, putting immense coin in Lucien's pockets and returning their longstanding territory to the crown.
Lucien was not cruel with fists, not at first. But cruelty has many forms. He dismissed Ilya from council meetings where she once observed beside her father. He mocked her opinions, belittled her intellect. He drank in the evenings, and when he drank his voice turned sharp. If she cried, he called her dramatic. If she raised her voice, he called her hysterical. And when the drink got deep enough, his hands might find perch on her cheek. Still rare. It still happened.
Her mother said nothing.
Perhaps she couldn't. She tried only to alleviate her new husbands ire in whatever way she could but if he was adamant, she turned to the darkness and the drink.
Ilya began to vanish from the common rooms. She learned which corridors creaked and which doors didn't latch. She found corners in the library to hide in, scraps of parchment to draw on, journals to fill with thoughts no one would read. She watched her siblings grow, their brightness dimming beneath the weight of Lucien's rule.
They were not beaten. Not starved.
But neglect has a hunger of its own.
Once, when she was ten, a noblewoman from the neighboring province came to visit. She commented on Ilya's height, her eyes. "A pity she's not married off already," the woman said.
"Though I suppose without a dowry…"
Lucien laughed.
He laughed. She was only ten.
That night, Ilya tore the ribbons from her hair and buried them beneath a floorboard. She vowed she would never be pretty for someone else again.
Not for them.
Not for him.
One winter, she found the old sword her father had given her in a locked chest beneath the stables. The blade was dull, the hilt worn. She took it anyway, hiding it beneath the floorboards of her chamber. Sometimes, after the household slept, she practiced forms in silence—movements she remembered from watching the knights and her father long ago. No one taught her. No one praised her.
She did it anyway.
Because remembering hurt less than forgetting.
By the time she was sixteen, she had learned how to disappear in plain sight. How to smile without showing her teeth. How to listen without appearing curious. How to obey without surrendering. Her tutors still came, but they taught her what Lucien permitted: etiquette, sewing, the history of House Valenpor—rewritten to favor the man who now ruled it.
When she asked about her father, the steward told her not to speak of ghosts.
So she made one of herself.
At night, she would tell her brother and sister stories—tales their mother no longer told. She would curl beside them and whisper the names of places their father loved: the orchard, the river bend, the tower with the cracked stones. She would say them aloud so they would not be forgotten.
And when Kyrnin cried for their father, Ilya held him until his tears stopped.
"You're not our mother," he once said.
"No," she replied. "I'm your sister. That's better- you can tell me things you'd never want mother to know and I won't tell a soul."
In the years that followed, her beauty became harder to hide. And Lucien noticed too.
He didn't touch her, not in that way.
But she felt his eyes sometimes, lingering too long.
She began wearing plainer dresses. Braiding her hair tightly. Making herself small.
At eighteen, she asked to be sent to court, to serve as a lady-in-waiting. Lucien refused. "You belong here," he said. "Where you can be useful."
She didn't ask again.
By nineteen, she had stopped believing she would ever leave this strange new house at the edge of a city she could barely feel.
Until that day when Lucien came home, happier than any drink had made him. He'd won.
An alliance.
A marriage.
To Lord Elias Wylt, Archduke of the North. With any luck, that ogre would be dead soon, from wounds taken in battle. Then he too would own the North....at least that is what Ilya assumed.
Her mother said it was an opportunity. A blessing.
Lucien said it was a convenience and a boon.
Ilya said nothing.
She packed, with only one thing in mind.
Freedom.