Chapter 4 -Three Years of Ashes

POV: Kira

Three years later the cottage still smells of damp wood and boiled cabbage.

I wake before the first light because the floorboards under my thin blanket have already grown cold enough to bite.

 My body knows the routine better than my mind does. Rise. Fold the blanket. Empty the ash bucket. Fetch water from the well before anyone else stirs. Fail any of those steps and the day turns sharper.

Bridget’s footsteps sound on the stairs. I keep my head down and my hands busy. Alexia follows a minute later, yawning, hair perfect even at this hour. She never carries the water. She never sweeps. She only watches.

“You’re slower this morning,” Bridget says without looking at me. Her voice is flat, the way a knife is flat before it cuts.

 “The market opens early. I want the eggs sold before the sun climbs. And the mending finished by midday. Alexia needs her blue dress ready for the evening gathering.”

I nod. Words waste time and invite more instructions.

Outside the air is thin and gray. The well rope burns my palms. I haul the bucket up, carry it back, pour half into the kitchen basin, half into the washing tub. My shoulders ache from yesterday’s loads. They always ache. Pain has become the only constant that never lies. It lives in the joints of my fingers, in the soles of my feet, in the quiet places behind my eyes where hope used to sit.

Alexia appears in the doorway holding a scrap of lace. “This is torn. Fix it. And don’t leave your filthy fingerprints on it this time.”

I took the lace without meeting her eyes. Three years of the same exchanges have taught me the value of silence. Silence keeps the bruises smaller. I learned that lesson the hard way, the first winter after Father died, when every protest only sharpened Bridget’s attention.

By mid-morning the eggs are sold, the coins counted into Bridget’s palm, and the blue dress lies across my lap as I stitch. The needle slips once and pricks my finger. A single drop of blood lands on the fabric. I freeze.

Alexia sees it instantly. 

“Mother!”

Bridget turns. Her mouth tightens. She does not raise her voice. She simply takes the dress, examines the tiny stain, and then looks at me the way she looks at a tool that has finally broken beyond repair.

“Wash it again. By hand. Cold water. Until every trace is gone. Then start the evening meal. And if the stain remains, you will wear the dress to the dance yourself so everyone can see what clumsy hands produce.”

I scrub until my knuckles split. The stain fades. The skin on my hands does not.

The day folds into the next the way all the days have folded for three long years. Wake. Work. Endure. Sleep on the kitchen floor. Repeat. 

Whatever the woods took from me that distant night stays locked behind my ribs. Opening the memory changes nothing.

 The cottage still needs sweeping. Bridget still needs someone to blame. Alexia still needs someone smaller to stand on. The locked box remains closed because some doors, once opened, never shut again.

I have stopped counting the beatings. They blur into one long ache. What remains is the shape of the days themselves: narrow, gray, and endless, each one a smaller cage than the last.

Until the knock.

It comes in the late afternoon while I am peeling turnips. Three hard raps on the door. Bridget wipes her hands on her apron and opens it.

A man in dark travel clothes stands on the threshold. He carries a sealed parchment and the kind of posture that belongs to someone who answers only to higher walls than ours.

“Message from the Lycan Palace,” he says. His eyes flick over Bridget, then past her to me, then back. “Recruitment for palace maids. Compensation is offered to any household that supplies a suitable girl. Healthy. Obedient. Unclaimed.”

Bridget’s face changes so fast I almost miss it. The usual hardness softens into something hungrier. She steps aside and gestures to him in.

I keep peeling. The knife moves on its own.

The man sets the parchment on the table and breaks the seal with a practiced thumb. He reads the terms aloud in a dry voice. Board and uniform provided. Duties begin immediately upon arrival.

 Payment to the girl’s current guardian is substantial.more coin than this cottage has seen in a year of egg sales and mending.

Alexia leans forward, eyes bright. “A palace maid? That sounds grand. Do they get to wear nice clothes?”

The messenger glances at her once and looks away. His attention returns to Bridget. “The offer stands for seven days. After that the quota will be filled from other border households.”

Bridget asks questions I only half hear. Age limits. Travel arrangements. Whether the girl can be sent back if she proves unsatisfactory. 

The answers are clipped and official. No returns. Once the payment is accepted and the girl crosses the palace gates, the transaction is final.

I feel Bridget’s gaze land on me like a weight I have carried for years but never named until this exact second.

She does not speak my name. She does not need to. The calculation is already finished behind her eyes. I am the extra mouth. The slow pair of hands. The living reminder of a husband who once preferred another woman’s child over the one standing in front of him now. I am also, suddenly, worth more sold than kept. The arithmetic is simple and brutal.

The messenger leaves the parchment and a small advance token on the table. He will return in three days for the answer.

When the door closes, the cottage feels smaller.

Alexia snatches the parchment and reads it again, lips moving. 

“They pay this much? Just for a maid? Mother, if I went”

“You will not,” 

Bridget says. The softness is gone. In its place is pure decision. 

“You are my daughter. You stay. She goes.”

The words land without ceremony. No raised voice. No long speech. Just the simple, irreversible fact of my future rearranged in a single sentence while the turnip peels still sit between us like evidence of a life about to end.

I set the knife down. Turnip peels curl across the table like pale ribbons.

Bridget turns to me fully for the first time in hours.

 “Pack what you have.”

 The messenger returns in three days. You will be ready. Clean. Quiet. And grateful.

 “This is more kindness than you deserve.”

Alexia smiles, slow and satisfied. “Finally. The cottage will smell better without her.”

I do not answer. My throat has closed around every possible word. Three years of swallowing protests have left the muscle weak and useless. Even if I found the strength to speak, the decision has already been made without me.

That night I lie on the kitchen floor and stare at the same rafters I have memorized. The advance token sits on the mantel like a small, cold star that has fallen into the wrong house. 

Bridget has already spent half of it in her mind. new fabric for Alexia, a better lock for the shed, perhaps a bottle of something stronger than the cheap wine she drinks when the days grow long and the silence grows heavier.

I try to picture the palace. High walls that block the sky. Endless corridors that swallow footsteps. 

Rules I will not know until I break them and pay the price. Strangers who will look through me the same way Bridget does, as if I am furniture that happens to breathe. 

The work will be harder, the days longer, the punishments more inventive than any switch. None of that matters at this moment.

 What matters is the door that is about to open in front of me and the one that is about to close forever behind my back.

I press my palm flat against the floorboards. The wood is familiar. It has held my weight through every season of this quiet war. Tomorrow I will scrub it one last time. The day after that I will leave it.

Sleep does not come. Only the slow turning of hours and the cold knowledge that my life has already been sold while I was still peeling vegetables in the kitchen of a house that never wanted me.

In the morning Bridget is almost cheerful. She lists tasks in a brighter tone than usual. Wash the spare shift. Mend the only pair of shoes that still have soles. Comb the tangles from my hair so I do not look like something dragged from a ditch.

 Alexia watches every instruction with open delight, offering helpful suggestions about how I might be less of an embarrassment when the palace servants see me.

I move through the motions. My hands know the work the way a body knows how to bleed. My mind stays elsewhere, floating above the cottage like a bird that has finally noticed the cage door is unlocked and does not yet trust the open sky waiting beyond it.

Two days pass in a blur of forced preparation that feels both endless and far too short. Bridget inspects me each evening the way a merchant inspects livestock before market day. 

“Too thin. Too quiet. Shoulders too narrow.”

 But the payment is the same regardless of appearance, so she settles for clean and presentable and stops looking for further faults.

On the third morning the messenger returns.

He stands in the doorway again, the same dark clothes, the same official calm. Bridget hands him the signed acceptance without hesitation. 

He counts the remaining coin onto the table one piece at a time. The sound of metal on wood is final and absolute.

Alexia hugs her mother. Bridget does not hug me. She only points at the small bundle I have tied with twine.

one spare dress, a wooden comb, the shoes that still hold together.

“Go,” she says. Her voice carries no warmth, only finality.

 “And do not shame this house more than you already have. The palace will not be as patient as I have been.”

I step outside. The air tastes different, sharper, colder, as if the world itself has noticed the change. 

The path that leads away from the cottage has never looked so long or so narrow. Every stone seems to watch me leave.

The messenger gestures for me to walk ahead of him. I do. Each step carries me farther from the only walls I have known since childhood and closer to whatever waits behind the palace gates.

Behind me I hear Alexia’s laughter float through the open door, bright and free now that the extra weight has been lifted from their lives. The sound follows me down the path like a farewell I never asked for.

I never looked back

The road stretches forward, and somewhere at the end of it a pair of gates will open to swallow me whole. I do not know the name of the king who rules those halls.

 I do not know the shape of the work that will fill my days.

 I only know that the cottage is already becoming a place I used to live, and the girl who slept on its floor is already becoming someone else. someone the palace will shape or break according to rules I have not yet learned.

The messenger’s boots keep steady time behind me on the dirt road. He does not speak. Neither do I. There is nothing left to say.

By the time the first high walls of the palace appear in the distance, rising like a second set of teeth against the sky, my old life is already ash in the wind.

And the new one has not yet shown its teeth.

But it will.

Sooner than I am ready for.

The high palace gates wait for me in the distance, already open.