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They burned my family's banners three days after I was declared dead.
Not in fury or a fanfare. Just quietly—at dawn, when the capital's streets were still fogged over and the tavern doors had barely unlatched. Soldiers lit them in the court square, beneath statues of emperors who had long since crumbled in soul, if not in stone.
I wasn't there to see it. But someone told me later. They said the smoke curled in thin ribbons, too weak to choke or to ignore. By noon, the ashes had been swept away like yesterday's market trash.
They made it seem like we'd never existed.
The Imperial decree had used simple words.
"Lady Seraphina Valenne was executed for treason against the crown. Her House is stripped of land, title, and honor. The Empire remains indivisible and victorious."
Victorious.
Funny. I didn't feel like a worthy opponent.
The nobles of court barely blinked. They moved on faster than a coin changes hands. I suppose it's easier to bury a House when its heir doesn't scream. When the accused wears red rubies to her execution and doesn't beg. It makes things neat.
I wonder if they rehearsed it. Maybe they wrote a eulogy before my hands were even bound.
I don't know what I expected from the world after my death.
Silence, maybe. A hollow absence, like the emptiness after a bell stops ringing.
Oh, but I was wrong.
Far from the capital—across the rivers, beyond the glistening palaces, back where the frost bites deep and the air smells of pine and smoke—the mourning was loud in its own way.
In the north, they remembered us.
In Breghollow, they rang the temple bells for three days straight. In Ravenspire, I heard they rode black horses through the hills, the way they do when a noble dies with honor. Even the villagers in Eldwatch, where I once walked through market stalls in a velvet cloak, tied scarlet threads around their doorposts.
I used to think they didn't really know me. Now I wonder if they knew me better than I knew myself.
But even in the north, grief could not remain pure.
The soldiers arrived days later, more than usual. They carried heavier boots and sharper eyes. They tore down the scarlet threads and ordered the bells silenced. Also told them that mourning a traitor was akin to treason.
I wonder how many obeyed. And I hope they disobeyed in small ways—the kind that grow like roots under stone.
They called it a funeral. The thing they held for me.
A mock procession through the city, with an empty casket and a priest reading lines that were as hollow as the wooden box. No one dared to weep. I think the only true tears shed that day belonged to a child who didn't understand why the woman in the painting was being forgotten.
I wonder if anyone whispered my name under their breath.
I wonder if Aldric's name was ever spoken aloud again.
I still dream about him. Sometimes he's a boy again, curled up outside my door with a wooden sword in hand, promising to keep me safe from monsters. Sometimes he's older, leaning over the edge of the table, face alight with whatever reckless plan he was brewing that week. But most of the time, I see him falling, falling in a room I cannot see.
Shot? Stabbed? Burned?
I don't know. They never told me how he died. Only that he resisted. Of course he did.
Aldric was never meant to kneel.
I didn't cry the day they stripped our name from the Empire's ledgers.
I sat in silence, watching the candle in front of me melt down to the wick. Cerxic had brought news from the capital. He always spoke plainly, as if truth hurt less when dressed in soft tones.
"The garden is gone," he said. "They uprooted every rosebush."
He said it like he was telling me about the weather.
"They burned the eastern wing. The place where your mother used to read. The blue room."
I nodded, but it didn't hit me until later.
Until the scent of woodsmoke passed on the wind and I flinched hard enough to knock over my tea.
We stayed hidden for weeks after my death.
Or rather, after the death of Seraphina Valenne.
I wasn't her anymore. Not publicly and officially.
But gods, I still felt her.
In the way I clasped my hands too neatly in my lap. In how I avoided mirrors. In the ache behind my eyes every time someone said the word traitor and didn't mean me.
Cerxic was patient, in his own way. Not gentle, never that but patient.
He handed me books on trade etiquette, servant protocol, noble house lineages. He made me scrub floors with vinegar until my fingers bled, then made me do it again the next day until the blisters healed. I was to be a servant now. Nothing more. Not even a chambermaid, yet. Just a replacement girl in a house known for its silence and discretion.
House Thornevale.
The name had been whispered often in the shadows of the Empire but never openly discussed. Even Seraphina, for all her courtly education, had known little of them.
What I did know was this: they were old. They were dangerous. And they owed loyalty to no one but themselves.
Where our family was warmth hidden in frost, they were thorns growing in cold stone.
No roses bloomed in Thornevale.
Only silence.
Cerxic told me that Thornevale had opened a position in the servant wing. One of the senior women had died. An opening. A small one.
He handed me the identity papers two days later. Handwritten, sealed, and inked in the language of bureaucracy.
Ciera Dorne.
The name looked strange in my hands.
Not Seraphina.
Ciera.
It didn't sound northern. It didn't sound like me. But it would have to become me.
If I wanted revenge, I couldn't mourn in the open. I couldn't hold the world accountable while it was still watching.
I would have to hide in plain sight. Become useful. Become forgettable.
And then, when they least expected it—when they had truly buried me—I would rise.
But that night, before I could imagine vengeance, I let myself feel everything.
I curled into the cot Cerxic had found for me. It smelled of wool and dust. I pressed my face to the pillow and sobbed until the sound scraped out of my throat like rust peeling from iron.
Not for the plan. Not for the Empire. But for the last time my father said my name.
I still remember how he looked at me across the war room table. How he smiled—not because things were easy, but because he believed we would endure. His strength wasn't the kind that shouted. It was steady. It was earned.
I wonder what he would say now, if he saw me hunched over, hiding like this.
I know he would hate it. Not because he'd think it beneath me, but because he would know the cost of silence.
But I also know… he would understand.
He knew that sometimes survival is the sharpest blade a fallen noble can carry.
I cried for him. For Aldric's laugh too.
For the garden they burned, and the stories they rewrote, and the girl who stood on a ballroom dais in garnet silk and thought she was safe.
They took everything. But they didn't take me.
Not completely.