Chapter 2: The Arrival at Castle Valdrake
The road climbed for most of the day, winding higher into hills I had never traveled before, past farms I didn't recognize and forests that grew thicker and older the further we went. I watched it all pass through the carriage window, my mother's pendant turning over and over between my fingers, the small stone warm from my own skin now instead of hers.
By the time evening came, the trees fell away, and I saw the castle for the first time.
I had imagined something grand, in the vague way a village boy imagines things he has never seen. Nothing I imagined came close. Castle Valdrake rose out of the mountainside itself, dark stone walls climbing higher than any building I had ever stood beneath, towers cutting into a sky already going purple with dusk. I pressed my hand to the glass without meaning to and felt, for the first time since leaving the village, something other than grief move through my chest.
The gate opened before we reached it, as though the castle itself had been waiting. Dragon guards saluted as Lord Raevor passed between them. Human servants lined the courtyard, bowing low, and I felt my own back bend instinctively before I remembered no one had told me to.
An older man in a spotless black coat approached the carriage and offered his hand to help me down.
"Madam Avery," he said. "I am Sebastian. Welcome to Castle Valdrake."
I stood frozen for a moment, certain I had misheard him.
"I— I think you've mistaken me for someone," I said, my face going hot. "It's Avery. Just Avery."
Something passed briefly behind Sebastian's eyes — not mockery, nothing so cruel as that, but a kind of careful patience, as though he had been told exactly what to expect from this moment and had prepared himself for it. "Forgive me," he said, in a tone that suggested no forgiveness was actually required, and did not correct himself again. "If you'll follow me."
I looked toward Lord Raevor, hoping for some explanation, some sign that this had been an error to be quietly fixed. He was already walking away, toward another entrance entirely, and offered nothing but the faintest incline of his head before he disappeared from view.
---
A woman waited just inside the great hall, flanked by three younger women in matching gray dresses.
"Madam Avery," she said, dipping into a small bow. "I am Helena. I oversee the household staff. This is Lily, Nina, and Clara. We will be caring for you during your time here."
I opened my mouth to correct her too, and found I didn't have the strength for it a second time.
They led me up a wide staircase into a room larger than the entire house I had grown up in. A bed big enough for four people, its posts carved with climbing vines. A fireplace already lit. A wardrobe taller than Sebastian, its doors closed, though I noticed Clara's eyes flick toward it once, quick and knowing, in a way I didn't yet understand.
"There is a washroom through that door," Helena said. "I imagine you'd like to bathe before dinner."
I had never bathed in anything but a tin basin in the corner of our kitchen. The washroom here held a basin carved from pale stone, large enough to sit in fully, steam already rising from water someone had prepared before I'd even arrived.
"I can manage on my own," I said quickly, when Lily moved to help me with the laces of my traveling shirt.
"I'm afraid Lord Raevor has asked that we attend you properly," Helena said, gently but without room for argument. "It won't take long."
I stood very still while Lily and Nina worked the laces free, my face burning the entire time. I caught my own reflection in the mirror before I stepped into the water and stood there a moment longer than I meant to. My shoulders were narrow, narrower than Finn's had ever been even as boys. My waist curved in above my hips in a way no amount of field work had managed to straighten. My skin, without the dirt and sun of the village on it, looked pale and smooth in the firelight.
The water was warmer than anything I'd bathed in before. Lily washed my hair with something that smelled of lavender, her hands quick and gentle at my scalp, while Nina laid out towels warmed near the fire.
---
When I emerged, the clothes laid out on the bed were not what I expected.
A gown, pale green, soft as water, cut close through the waist and falling loose from the hip. Undergarments finer than anything I'd ever owned. A pair of slippers instead of boots. I stood staring at it all for a long moment, feeling something cold settle low in my stomach that hadn't been there a moment before.
"I think there's been some mistake," I said.
"There's no mistake, Madam Avery," Clara said, already moving to help me into the underthings before I could protest further. "These are your clothes now. All of them are."
The first thing they fitted me into was a narrow band of stiffened cloth, laced up the back, and I understood only once Clara's hands settled at my spine and began to pull that this was not going to be a simple thing.
"Small breath," Clara said, and I obeyed without quite understanding why until the laces drew tight and the air left my chest all at once.
"That's — " I gasped, my hands flying to my own ribs. "I can't breathe properly."
"You'll adjust," Clara said, not unkindly, giving the laces one final tug before tying them off. "Everyone does, in time."
I didn't feel, in that moment, like I would ever adjust to it. Every breath came shallow and careful after that, as though my body had forgotten, all at once, how to do the one thing it had always known how to do without thinking. When I shifted my weight, I felt the boning press firm against my ribs, an unfamiliar pressure that seemed to follow me into every movement, however small.
The gown went on over it, settling over my narrow shoulders and cinching further at my waist, until the shape of my own body was suddenly, unavoidably obvious to me in a way it had never been beneath loose village wool.
"There," Clara said, stepping back to look at her work. "Now let's see you walk in it."
I took my first step toward the door and nearly went down.
The hem caught around my ankles, tangling with a step that had never once needed thinking about before, and I threw a hand out against the bedpost to catch myself, my face going hot before I'd even fully recovered my balance.
"Small steps," Lily said, biting back a smile that told me this happened often enough to be expected. "It takes getting used to. You'll find the rhythm of it."
I did not find the rhythm of it that evening. I caught my slippers on the hem twice more before I reached the door, each time feeling the same lurch of humiliation, the sense that my own body had become a stranger's, one I hadn't yet learned to live inside. By the time I finally stood still again by the doorway, my ribs ached faintly from the laces, my ankles were sore from catching on the hem more times than I wanted to count, and some deeper, quieter part of me ached too, in a way that had nothing to do with cloth or bone at all.
---
Sebastian led me to dinner, and I expected, given everything else that had happened that evening, to be led somewhere separate from Lord Raevor entirely. Instead I was brought to the same small dining room as before, the same long table, Lord Raevor already seated at the head of it.
He looked up when I entered, and I watched his gaze move over me — not unkindly, not with anything I could call hunger, but with a stillness that made me acutely aware of every inch of the gown I now wore. He said nothing about it. Neither did I, though the silence between us felt louder than words might have.
Sitting proved its own small trial. The boning at my ribs did not bend the way I expected it to, and I lowered myself into the chair carefully, aware of Raevor watching, aware of how stiffly I had to hold my spine simply to keep my breath even.
"Did you rest well on the journey?" he asked, once the first course was set before us, as though nothing at all were different from how he might have asked the question yesterday.
"Well enough, my lord," I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to, thinner too, as though even speaking took more air than I currently had to spare.
We ate mostly in silence. When the meal was nearly finished, he set down his glass and looked at me directly for the first time all evening.
"Tomorrow morning," he said, "Cedric and I will explain to you fully what this appointment requires. Tonight, I only ask that you rest, and that you know none of what has happened to you today was meant unkindly."
I wanted to ask him now, wanted to demand an answer before another sleepless night of guessing, but something in the quiet gravity of his voice told me the wait was not cruelty. It was, perhaps, its own kind of mercy — one more night before whatever came next.
---
Lily helped me undress for bed, unlacing the boning at my back with far more ease than it had gone on, and I breathed properly again for the first time in hours, a long, grateful breath that made my head go briefly light.
"Better?" she asked, amused.
"Much," I admitted.
She left me in a nightgown far simpler than the day's gown had been, though even this caught faintly at my ankles when I climbed into the bed, one more small, unfamiliar weight I would apparently need to learn to move around.
I lay awake a long time after the castle had gone quiet, in a bed too large for one person, turning my mother's pendant over and over in my fingers, wondering what tomorrow would finally make clear, and whether, given enough time, I might actually learn to breathe inside this new shape of my own life.