She woke into a room she already knew, and that was the strangest part. The ceiling was low and coffered; its beams were dark with age and beeswax polish. Painted between the wood were fading botanical motifs, pomegranates, wheat sheaves, curling vines, symbols of lineage and endurance rather than ornament. Sunlight entered through narrow leaded windows set deep into thick stone walls, softened by layers of handwoven linen curtains stitched with restrained red-and-black embroidery. The air carried the scent of tallow, dried herbs, and cold river stone.
Her bed was carved from heavy oak; its frame etched with protective symbols older than the estate itself. Wool blankets, thick and undyed, were layered with an embroidered coverlet bordered in thread-of-gold that had dulled into something warmer, more honest. At the foot of the bed rested a cedar trunk bound with iron bands and secured by a weathered lock whose teeth had been reset many times. Against the eastern wall hung icons in darkened silver frames; saints rendered in solemn gaze, their votive lamps long extinguished yet faintly perfumed with old incense. Beneath them stood a narrow prayer stand scarred by years of kneeling. A writing table rested near the window, rougher in finish than fashion elsewhere might allow, practical and endured. Beside it, shelves held stitched-bound ledgers and a few leather-covered books that smelled faintly of smoke and travel. Nothing in the room glittered. Everything endured.
She lifted her hands and found them small, pale, unmarked. Her breath grew uneven at the sight of them. A floating sensation passed through her, neither falling nor rising, as if her mind hovered between two shores and had not yet chosen where to settle. Thought arrived slowly, wading rather than stepping. Yevhen Bashkirtseff. The name emerged without resistance. Eleven years old. Betrothed. The knowledge came without panic and without confusion; it settled with the dull certainty of a truth long memorized. It was not discovery. It was recollection without ownership.
Beyond the bed, the room remained in practiced order. The space was not meant to reflect a child. It was meant to contain one. This was a noble bedroom. This was her bedroom. Memory did not arrive with continuity. First came structure without context; a ballroom seen from a raised balcony, cold stone corridors where heat vanished into silence, fur-lined cloaks brushing past narrow shoulders, a man's back broad and unmoving, a ring too heavy for the hand assigned to it. Then came relation. The Earl, her father. The Countess, her stepmother. Two older siblings. And herself, the youngest daughter. She was not cherished and not rejected. She was observed. A presence meant to be arranged.
A knock sounded with controlled restraint, and the door opened with measured care. Ivan entered and halted upon seeing her eyes already open. His steps stopped too precisely for innocence. His arms were held close to his torso beneath the folds of his petticoat, and the fabric shifted faintly as though something lived beneath it. Recognition surfaced inside her without effort. Ivan, her second older brother, kind and unmanageable, the one she had called Ibahko. He stepped closer only after confirming that no servants followed behind him. From beneath the fabric he revealed a tiny grey kitten that trembled in his hands, its eyes barely open, its breath shallow but stubborn, and he placed it gently into her lap.
He stated quietly that he had found it behind the wine racks and that it did not cry properly. Then he added, with plain restraint, that it was the runt and that the cellar servant would cull it before dusk. The words were neither cruel nor softened. They were procedural. The kitten's warmth pressed faintly through her blanket, anchoring something her body could not reconcile. Her vision tilted. She leaned sharply to the side of the bed and vomited onto the stone below, the sound abrupt and humiliating. Ivan recoiled at once, his expression fracturing between guilt and alarm, and fled the room without hesitation.
Footsteps returned with hurried order. The nursemaid entered first, composed and deliberate, already drawing cloth from her apron. The healer followed her, older and wrapped in dark wool, his gaze measuring rather than startled. It was stated that she had woken without summons and that the sickness had struck immediately. The healer examined her wrist with two fingers and noted the elevation of her pulse without fever. The nursemaid cleaned her mouth with practiced gentleness and asked whether she saw clearly. Yevhen did not answer. It was observed that shock often preceded language. The kitten was removed from her lap without commentary, and the room settled again into constrained order.
Then the second life broke fully through the first, not in fragments this time, but in force. Lessons, etiquette, surveillance, measured silence, and the constant weight of being placed rather than chosen flooded through her. The name Levski surfaced with reverence and quiet calculation. The knowledge that her engagement was older than most of her current memories and heavier than all of them combined pressed into her awareness. This body had been awaiting her. This life had not paused. She looked down again at her hands, at the slight wrists and narrow knees beneath the blanket. This was not a dream chamber and not a threshold. It was an inheritance, and it was irrevocable.
The room no longer felt unfamiliar. It felt exact.
Two weeks passed in a blur of fevered quiet and controlled restraint. The healers called it convalescence; Yevhen understood it as negotiation. Her body fought to stabilize while her mind struggled to accept that it had been installed into a vessel already in motion. Each day she rose with marginally more clarity and marginally less cohesion. Her father, who governed with patience and precision in equal measure, allowed her the full span of those days without pressure. On the fifteenth morning, he informed her with gentle firmness that the ducal family would dine that evening and that her presence was required.
She did not resist. Resistance implied panic. What she felt instead was preparation.
In the water warmed for her washing, she rehearsed the necessary identities. Thankfully there were only two she was expected to retain with emotional fidelity: the Duke and the boy to whom she was bound. The rest of the household she could navigate by echo. Her body remembered the Duke's manner with clarity disproportionate to its age, and it remembered her fiancé with an uncomplicated warmth that existed entirely outside her present self. The boy had been her playmate; that affection remained in the body as a simple fact, not yet overwritten by the consciousness now occupying it. Her adult interior observed the phenomenon with detachment and summarized it as a mug of hot milk left to cool on a sill. The warmth lingered. The shape remained. The temperature no longer obeyed the origin.
The maids treated her with visible care edged by fatigue. They concealed the shadows beneath her eyes with light-powdered pigments and pinned back the errant fall of her hair with hands that trembled between reverence and pity. They whispered apologies each time her patience thinned at being handled as though she were smaller than she felt. She absorbed their concern without anger and their touch without resentment. It was neither kindness nor cruelty that unsettled her; it was the accuracy with which they managed a person they no longer fully recognized.
By the time she stood ready, wrapped in ceremonial layers that weighed too much for a body still reacquainting itself with gravity, she felt emptied of all reaction but vigilance.
The ducal party arrived before night had fully claimed the sky. Her family assembled in the receiving chamber with the practiced symmetry of long observance, her parents at the fore, her brothers flanking with ritual obedience that barely concealed restrained impatience. Yevhen stood between them with deliberate stillness. The first to enter were the Duke's knight and the boy's appointed companion, both moving with disciplined deference. Yurii followed shortly after with the restless energy of a child straining against ceremony, his starlight dark hair escaping restraint at the nape as his attention roamed the room with bright familiarity. He greeted her brothers with barely contained enthusiasm and Yevhen with a hesitant warmth that fell just short of former confidence. She returned his greeting with politeness rather than affection, and he did not seem to notice the difference.
Her attention was already elsewhere.
The Duke arrived moments later.
Symon entered without haste and without spectacle. His height imposed gravity upon the threshold before his presence fully occupied it. His beard traced his jaw in a faded chin strap that emphasized the clean diamond lines of his face. His copper-gold hair was bound neatly at the nape, its brightness subdued by order. The deep green of his eyes passed over the room with measured instinct. His sword had already been placed in the guest vault according to protocol, yet even unarmed the marks of war were impossible to ignore. A scar climbed from his collar toward his throat with quiet insistence, and the heavy lattice of old injuries mapped his hands with the proof of survival. His greeting to the women of the house was conducted with a gentleness so exact it seemed learned from loss rather than instruction.
The absence of the Duchess remained unspoken, present only in the space where another greeting should have been.
Yevhen stood unmoving until the instant she registered him fully.
The shift within her was immediate and beyond her control.
Her father began to speak, likely to prompt the formal greeting, but he did not finish the sentence. Yevhen moved before permission could be formed. She crossed the space between them with small, certain steps and bowed with slow, unmistakable precision. When she rose, her eyes were bright in a way they had not been for weeks.
The Duke's expression softened without deliberation. He inclined his head, meeting her intent with his own. Something unfamiliar and unburdened stirred in Yevhen's chest and lifted the pressure from her lungs. For a moment that did not resemble convalescence, she felt well.
Dinner commenced beneath that fragile reprieve.
The Earl observed the redirection of her attention with quiet amusement. The Countess received it with patient acceptance. The Duke did not misinterpret it; he allowed it. When Yevhen lingered closer to his end of the table rather than beside Yurii, he simply remarked that he had brought gifts and confectionaries for her. Gratitude moved across the table with appropriate ceremony, the Earl and Countess accepting with measured warmth.
Politics followed as they always did. The Earl and Duke spoke of border adjustments and the slow rotation of influence along the trade rivers. The Countess listened, interjecting only when governance turned toward human cost. At the lower end of the table, Yevhen's brothers animated Yurii with academy anecdotes and magical instruction delivered with careless pride. They spoke of mishandled incantations, singed banners, and a professor who allegedly aged ten years in one term. Yurii laughed so hard at one account that he nearly dropped his knife; the elder brother caught it with a neat flick of his fingers and said that only half the story was exaggerated, which meant he could not be blamed for the rest.
"Do not frighten our future guest," the Earl remarked mildly, glancing down the table.
"We are educating him, Father," the younger brother replied. "It is unfair to send him into the academy without proof that it survives us."
The Earl took a sip of his drink before answering. "The academy survives in spite of you," he said, his tone even. "It is the distinction that keeps our name welcome there."
Laughter moved through the younger end of the table and dissolved the moment without disrespect.
Yevhen struggled to eat. The smells, the texture, the shared expectation of appetite tugged at a body still resistant to nourishment. Her fork hovered more than it moved. She could feel her brothers noticing and choosing, for now, not to remark on it.
The brother nearest her at last requested permission to finish dinner early in order to take Yurii to the yard to demonstrate new spellwork they had learned in class. His phrasing was courteous enough to pass for restraint; his eyes betrayed urgency. Both fathers consented without delay. The boys exited with formal bows that collapsed into stampeding, booted thunder the moment the doors closed behind them. The Earl's mouth thinned in a familiar line of resignation.
"You have my apologies," he said, turning slightly toward the Duke. "Their energy is loyal, if not decorous."
The Duke's eyes followed the vanished line of their path. "An heir who appears perfect without disruption is a more fragile investment," he replied. "Your sons are performing essential maintenance."
"I do not recall authorizing them as maintenance workers," the Earl murmured.
"They authorized themselves," the Duke said. "It is often the most reliable appointment."
The Countess and Earl resumed their discussion of winter stores and the necessity of contracting a water mage. The Countess outlined her intentions for a charitable tea at the Duke's estate, her voice shifting into thoughtful consideration as she described themes that might attract noble houses beyond the usual circuit: displays of rural craft, an emphasis on practical piety, the promise that attendance would be recorded and remembered.
The Duke listened without impatience. "Send me the projected cost and your preferred guest list," he said.
"My steward will handle the rest. If you require musicians, draw from my household; they are already trained to play at volumes that permit conversation."
While the adults arranged futures in measured sentences, the present remained in front of Yevhen as an unfinished plate.
The Duke noticed her pushing her food rather than consuming it.
He signaled the head maid with the slightest movement.
The cake arrived.
The scent of spice and sugar reached her before the silverware shifted. Her body betrayed her before her mind could prepare. The growl that rose from her stomach was loud enough to cut through the low conversation and silence the room. Even the Duke paused, eyebrows lifting a fraction. Her parents stared as if she had spoken in another language.
The Duke cut into his own portion with faultless restraint. The contrast between his rough, scarred hands and the refinement of his movements struck her with precise clarity. She mirrored the gesture, then lost all measure. The first bite was relief; the second was proof; the third was surrender. She ate with a speed she would have found undignified in anyone else, aware and yet unable to resist the urgency of a body that had been starving quietly for weeks.
When she finished, tears slipped down her face without announcement.
The Countess leaned in at once. "You may have another," she said softly. "There is no shortage tonight."
Yevhen bowed her head toward the Duke. "Thank you, Your Grace," she said. The words were simple, but the sincerity in them unsettled him more than any elaborate courtesy might have.
He studied her with a faint crease between his brows. "You have been denying yourself," he said.
"I have not known how to accept," she answered.
The Countess reached for a cloth and began cleaning the frosting that clung stubbornly to the corner of her daughter's mouth. Her movements were efficient but tender. The Earl watched, then released a breath that shifted his shoulders in a gesture of familiar resignation.
"She is unrecognizable when given sugar," he observed.
"She is honest," the younger brother said from farther down the table, returning just long enough to snatch a leftover crust before fleeing again. "We merely pretend we are not all this way."
"Return the crust," the Earl said, his tone calm.
The boy paused, sighed, and replaced it intact. "Consider it my act of contrition."
"Consider it my patience," the Earl replied.
The Duke stifled a low laugh and let his gaze return to Yevhen. Her eyes were still bright, her cheeks flushed from emotion and warmth. For the first time since his arrival, she resembled a child because of abundance rather than deficit.
Her heart felt light in a way she had not permitted it to be since waking in this body.
She studied the Duke for a moment, as if remeasuring him now that she could breathe without strain. "Your Grace," she said, "how old are you."
The Countess lifted her hand, the beginnings of a correction already shaping at her lips, but the Duke answered before she could intervene.
"Twenty-five," he said.
Yevhen felt the number strike her with unsettling familiarity, as if it had stepped directly from another life into this one.
She steadied her breath after the last of her tears were brushed away and the sweetness had settled enough for her to sit without trembling. A faint smear of frosting still clung at the edge of her mouth despite the Countess's efforts. The Duke observed her with mild, patient curiosity, his own plate nearly untouched beside her empty one. The warmth at the table no longer pressed against her skin with the same dull overwhelm it once had; for the first time in weeks, her awareness felt pointed rather than scattered.
She folded her napkin once more, too carefully, then lifted her gaze to him. "Your Grace," she said quietly, as though the question had not already been asked and answered. "How old are you."
The repetition landed more deliberately. The Countess's hand paused in its motion toward Yevhen's wrist. The Earl's attention sharpened. Yurii glanced up from his conversation with the returning brothers, unaware that the center of gravity at the table had shifted.
"Yevhen," the Countess said gently, "that is not a mannered inquiry."
The Duke raised one hand in calm permission. "It is allowed," he replied. "I am twenty-five."
The answer settled in her with visible effect. Her brow furrowed, not in confusion but in quiet calculation. Her gaze remained on him, no longer the gaze of a child looking up at a distant figure, but of someone measuring alignment.
"Twenty-five," she repeated.
The Duke observed her response with interest rather than suspicion. "Does this number displease you."
"No," she answered at once. After a heartbeat she added, "It rearranges my expectations."
The Earl's glass stilled against the table. The Countess turned slightly, observing her daughter more directly. Yurii looked between them with a faint, puzzled smile, still too young to understand the weight of deviation.
"Expectations of what," the Duke asked.
Yevhen hesitated. The spoon in her hand traced the rim of her plate once. "Of distance," she said. "Not in years. In pacing."
The Duke did not answer immediately. He watched her with the stillness of a man who had learned to read danger in movements smaller than speech. "Most children of eleven do not concern themselves with pacing," he said.
"I have not felt like most children these past weeks," she replied.
Her tone was neither dramatic nor fragile; it was simply precise.
The Earl did not interrupt. The Countess remained composed, though the set of her shoulders betrayed concern. The Duke leaned forward slightly, forearms resting on the table, altering the air around them without raising his voice.
"And how have you felt," Symon asked.
Yevhen considered him with care. "Like a house whose windows were opened too quickly," she said. "The air is unchanged. The pressure is not."
Silence followed that no one hurried to fill. Yurii shifted in his seat, sensing but not understanding the change. The younger brother hid a quick grin behind his cup and murmured that she sounded like their old rhetoric tutor after too much wine. The Earl replied, without looking away from the Duke, that the tutor at least had the sense to wait until after dinner to unsettle a room.
"You choose your metaphors with care," the Duke said.
"I choose them because I must," she replied.
Something shifted behind his eyes. Recognition arranged itself slowly; not certainty, but a pattern beginning to form.
"And what do you believe you must express," he asked.
"That I am not well," she said simply. "But I am also not ill in the way others believe."
The Countess's fingers tightened around her napkin. "Yevhen, you must rest," she said softly.
"I have rested," Yevhen answered. "Sleep is not always restoration. Sometimes it is only delay."
The Duke did not break eye contact. He took a small portion of cake onto his fork and ate with steady precision. "You speak with control," he said. "Does it exhaust you."
"Yes," she said, without hesitation.
The admission bypassed defense and landed as fact. The Duke inclined his head a fraction. "Yet you persist."
"Yes."
"And why," he asked.
Her gaze flicked briefly toward Yurii, who was whispering eagerly to her brothers about the promised training-yard lesson. She returned her attention to the Duke. "Because this body is young," she said. "And my will cannot afford to be."
The Countess inhaled quietly. The Earl shifted in his seat. The Duke's scarred hand stilled near his plate.
"I see," Symon said at last.
It was not accusation and not reassurance. It was acknowledgment.
He glanced toward the Earl. "My lord, may I presume the weeks of illness have attended more than fever."
The Earl answered with care. "She has suffered greatly," he said. "The healer assures us there is no lasting bodily damage."
"But the manner has not returned," the Duke replied.
"No," the Countess said softly. "It has not."
Yevhen remained still. "I have returned," she said. "The manner simply did not accompany me in full."
The Duke regarded her steadily. "Then who has returned," he asked.
She did not speak at once. Her fingers folded more tightly in her lap. "Someone who remembers being older," she said.
The room tightened around the words.
Yurii laughed and tapped the table. "Yevhen is teasing again," he said brightly. "She has talked strangely since she was sick. It is like she learned to speak backwards."
The Duke watched her as her fiancé spoke. Her expression softened with a kind of sorrow that did not belong on a child's face. "He is not wrong," she said. "It feels like backward speech. I answer before I understand why the question was asked."
The Countess reached for her daughter's hand, but Yevhen drew back slightly, not in rejection but in restraint. "Please do not worry," she said. "I am not broken. I am only redistributing."
"Redistributing what," the Duke asked.
"Control," she replied.
The Duke exhaled slowly. "And do you believe that to be safe."
She met his gaze. "No."
The answer held the room in stillness.
Symon leaned back at last. "Yet you pursue it regardless."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because danger is already present," she said. "I merely wish to recognize its shape."
The Duke studied her with increasing gravity. "And what danger do you perceive," he asked.
"My marriage," she answered, unadorned.
The Earl inhaled sharply. Yurii froze mid-motion. The Countess's fingers curled into her sleeve.
The Duke's expression remained composed. "You are not yet married," he said.
"I am bound," she replied. "The difference is medical, not political."
He regarded her for several breaths. "Do you resist this bond."
"No," she said. "I am wary of it. Those are not the same."
The Duke nodded slightly. "That is true."
She tilted her head. "You do not speak as though offended."
"I am a commander," he replied. "Offense is a luxury. Precision is required."
Her lips curved faintly. "Then you and I may understand one another sooner than expected."
His brow rose by a fraction. "That is an ambitious claim."
"I have not survived this transition by accident," she said.
The Countess pressed her napkin to her mouth. "Yevhen, this is not suitable conversation for the table," she said, her tone gentle but strained.
Yevhen inclined her head. "Forgive me," she said. "I forget that others dine for comfort."
The Duke regarded her with open curiosity now instead of cautious interest. "And why do you not dine for comfort," he asked.
"Because comfort assumes continuity," she said. "I am not yet certain which of mine remains intact."
He considered her closely. "You speak as though you have lost something."
"I have," she said. "But I cannot yet name it without losing something else in its place."
The Duke went still again. The warmth he brought to a room remained, but it had settled into something alert and analytical.
Yurii leaned forward eagerly. "Father, she speaks like one of your councilors," he said, half proud, half bewildered.
"That," the Duke said quietly, "is precisely what concerns me."
Yevhen's gaze returned to him. "Does it," she asked.
He did not answer at once. "Yes," he said finally. "But not in the manner you fear."
"Then how," she asked.
He looked at her with measured intensity. "It concerns me because councilors speak after loss," he said.
"Not before it."
Her breath caught. "That is a dangerous distinction," she said.
"Yes," he replied. "It is."
Silence followed, contained rather than brittle.
At last the Duke shifted his fork upon his plate. "You favor truth," he said.
"Yes."
"Then permit me to offer you one," he continued.
She waited.
"You are not the child I was told to expect," he said. "But you are also not unfamiliar."
Her heart gave a sudden, uneven thud. "Explain," she said.
"I have met many who returned from war speaking as you do," he replied. "They were not mad. They were not sick. They were simply reassembled."
The Countess's hand tightened on the tablecloth. "She has not been to war," she said.
The Duke's eyes did not leave Yevhen. "No," he answered. "But the principle remains."
Yevhen spoke before she could stop herself. "And what does one do with someone who has been reassembled without consent."
The Duke considered her with grave seriousness. "One observes," he said. "And one waits."
"And if what returns is not what was agreed upon," she asked.
The answer came without hesitation. "Then one adapts."
Something in her chest loosened, not into comfort, but into recognition.