The Duke’s Reborn Daughter Sometimes Chooses Violence.

None of them looked like me. I had been sitting here for the better part of two hours. The desk in front of me was covered in pictures and portraits, some framed and some loose, pulled from storage rooms and hallways. Some were recent enough to still be in one piece. Others were so faded the faces were barely there at all. One was so blurry it was little more than splotches, and I had to guess at the features beneath.

I had gone through every single one. The Veyne line had a look. Everyone had dark hair in various shades, from deep brown to near-black. The men usually had strong jaws and broader builds. The women had a softness to them, though they were not so different from the men overall. It was hard to judge heights from portraits, but I got the impression that even the women were tall. There were no portraits of Lady Selene, but I remembered her well enough from the one portrait I had seen.

House Veyne did not often marry too far outside itself. The few times it did, the features in the offspring changed, but never for long. Within a generation or two, the line always came back to what it had started as.

I had white hair and red eyes. I was small and pale. I looked like nobody. I knew enough about genetics from another life to understand what I was looking at. Something about me didn’t add up. Not if Lady Selene Veyne was actually my mother.

I set down the portrait in my hand. It was my father’s, taken perhaps ten years ago. He looked young and absurdly large, even in a picture. I at least had something of my father in me. It was in the jaw, and in the shape of our eyes. I had no resemblance to my mother at all.

Either I was a mutation so extreme it bordered on impossible, or I was not Selene Veyne’s biological daughter. I had suspected since the portrait at Indri Manor. Seeing it laid out like this, across dozens of faces, made it impossible to deny. This might be a world of magic and Gifts, but I’d confirmed that the rules of genetics were the same.

I exhaled and folded my hands. I sat in the silence of my father’s study, or the near-silence. Sere’s pencil scratched quietly in the corner.

Don’t hide. Vaelin’s murmur was soft.

”I wasn’t planning to,” I whispered to the empty air. And I wasn’t. I just didn’t know what to do with this yet. Was this even any of my business? If this mattered, then it mattered to a girl named Esra who no longer existed.

I looked across the room. Sere sat cross-legged in the corner, doodling in her notepad. The music box was beside her. She hadn’t looked up in some time. I could have used my Gift to spy on what she was drawing. She would show me herself, if she wanted to.

I watched her for a moment and felt something loosen in my chest. ”I suppose I should grow up already,” I muttered. I pushed the chair back and stood.

”Anias,” I called out.

The door opened within seconds. She had been standing right outside. She poked her head in. Anias had always been hard to read, but the curiosity on her face now was plain. ”Are you done, My Lady?”

”Yes. Please return all of these to their proper places.”

The pictures and portraits began to glow purple and lift from the desk, floating in neat procession toward the door. I wondered what she thought about this. It must have looked very strange, this collection she’d helped me assemble without a word of explanation. Anias was good at not asking questions. I liked that about her most of all.

I stepped past her and into the hallway. Sere was at my side before the door had fully closed behind me. I ruffled her hair. It was tangled, as it always was. ”Are you sure you want to be here for this?” She nodded so fiercely her hair fell over her face. I had to move it aside.

We walked through the Manor. The corridors were quiet in the late afternoon. Most of the staff had finished their rounds. The Magical Implements gave off their usual glow, and the light fell across the stone in long blue bars.

Tomorrow we were leaving again. Not too long ago, I’d left Aelheim and stepped into the Ashen Wastes. I might have preferred to do that again, compared to where I was going tomorrow. I had put off seeing my father for as long as I could. Longer than I should have, in truth.

We reached the door to my father’s chambers. There was always at least one guard outside. The guard today wasn’t who I’d have expected. Estovan stood outside, at attention. He looked well, though I noticed he still favored his left side. I smiled. ”Are you well enough to be standing guard like this?”

”Always, My Lady.” His dark eyes were steady. Then he looked at me, and something in his gaze shifted. ”I had a feeling today would be the day.”

”Is it that obvious?”

”Only to those who pay attention.”

”Everyone is starting to understand me a little too well.” I meant it as a joke. It came out warmer than that. Estovan stepped aside. I put my hand on the door.

The room was as I remembered. Large, though perhaps it had been the right size for what Duke Adrian Veyne had been. Had been, but was not now.

He lay in his bed. The sheets were white and clean, changed daily by maids. The pillows were arranged around him, propping his head and shoulders at a slight angle.

He looked small. He had been a giant of a man, and now he looked small. He had hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe, the first time I left my room. I suspected I could not touch him now without fear of breaking him.

His condition hadn’t changed since my last visit. There was more bone than skin. His face was gaunt, the cheekbones sharp beneath papery flesh. His breathing was shallow, no more than the faintest rise and fall of his chest.

The healers had done what they could, which was nothing. They had kept him from dying, but the gap between dying and what he was now was truly thin. Even the S-rank healer had failed, and she had tried.

Sere found a corner and sat. She opened her notepad and began to draw. I heard her pencil moving. I did not turn to look.

Estovan followed me inside. He placed a hand on my shoulder. ”Do not despair if you cannot do this, My Lady.”

”I have a good feeling that I can,” I said.

Heavy footsteps sounded from the corridor outside. Anias appeared in the doorway, and her collar was slightly uneven. I had never once seen Anias with a collar that was anything less than perfect. She must have run.

I looked at her, and at Estovan. These people loved my father. Estovan was outside my father’s door today, but I knew Anias often took this post too, though she was no soldier. Estovan’s hand on my shoulder was not a retainer’s hand. Anias in the doorway was not a maid. Yes, perhaps I had been selfish not to do this from the first moment I had come back home. That was one reason.

And then there was the other reason. Duke Adrian had been kind to me.

I did not know this father for long. I was not truly his daughter. He had not chosen me and I had not chosen him. But Adrian Veyne had been kind to me. I had never had a father in my old life. I had always wondered what it might have been like. It had only been a handful of weeks, and yet they hadn’t been bad weeks.

I approached the bed and turned. ”Please take a step back. All of you.”

They moved. Estovan dropped his hand from my shoulder. Anias stepped further into the room but kept her distance. Sere stayed in her corner.

I extended my hand to the side. Vaelin filled it and crimson light flooded the room. It washed across the white sheets and the stone walls until the world was the color of blood.

I looked at the blade in my hand. ”All right,” I said to it. ”How do we do this?” Vaelin had helped me once before, back when I’d severed a Magical Contract. It made sense to ask him again.

Focus.More. Vaelin had always been cryptic, but I knew what that meant. The blade needed more from me. More defiance.

I closed my eyes, and I let it come. I let everything come. Everything since the day I opened my eyes in this world. The duel Damian and I had fought, where I had refused to fall. Sere’s scarred back, and what I’d done to her mother. Violet and I, her hand on mine as we killed her father. Violet’s blood on the snow and the sound of a dragon dying. Cordelia’s laugh, so small and so afraid of itself.

I thought of all the things I might still lose if I wasn’t strong enough to hold them. I opened my eyes, and there was a cage.

It surrounded my father from every direction -a lattice of dark purple light that clung to him like a living thing. It pulsed once, the light dimming and brightening. It tightened as I watched, contracting around his chest and his limbs before slowly releasing, and then contracting again. The rhythm felt almost like a heartbeat.

This was what that Hero’s blade had left behind then. Little wonder that no normal healer had been able to do anything for him. What were you supposed to do about that?

Piece of…Intent. Vaelin murmured. That did at least answer what I was seeing. Could I do something like this? A question for another time. I turned. ”Can you see this?” I asked. ”There’s a cage around him. Can anyone else see it?”

Estovan shook his head. Anias did the same. I hadn’t expected any different, of course. I turned back to the cage. Its purple light pulsed. It had been doing this for months. It would do it for months more, until my father was dead.

Dangerous.

Vaelin’s voice was so low I almost didn’t hear it. Dangerous how? The silence stretched longer than usual. I thought he might not answer at all.

Gluttony. Consumes.

It seemed that even Vaelin -half a Goddess in blade form- was wary of this thing. I stared at the cage and the cage pulsed back. Can we do this? I wanted to do this, but this was not something I was willing to die for.

Yes. Vaelin said, almost reluctantly.

Well, if the blade was sure, then there was no reason not to. Vaelin hadn’t ever led me wrong, besides the couple of times he had almost gotten me killed. I stepped forward and drove Vaelin into the cage.

The world stopped. One moment there was a room with people in it. Anias reaching forward, Estovan’s hand twitching toward his rapier, Sere’s pencil suspended mid-stroke. In the next, everything was still. It was just me, Vaelin, and the cage.

The blade had met the cage, and the cage hadn’t even cracked. My arm was trembling. This felt like the resistance from the magical contract I had severed, but a hundred times worse. A thousand. The contract might as well have been a candle, and this the sun.

The cage was pulling, and something was leaking from me. It started with Mana. I could feel it draining from my core, pouring through the blade and into the cage like water into sand. The cage drank faster and faster. Every drop of power I pushed through Vaelin was swallowed before it could cut. Even my own absurd reserves could only last for so long.

Then it started taking more than mana. I felt a warmth leaving my body. A weight being pulled from behind my eyes. A color draining from my skin. I was becoming less, and eventually, I would be nothing at all. I couldn’t pull away. The blade was locked in the cage and so was I.

I tried to scream but no sound came. Nobody would have heard even if I’d managed it. The purple glow brightened. The pull grew stronger.

Vaelin screamed in my mind, louder than he had ever been. MORE.

I pushed. With my hands and with everything that I was. The crimson light flared brighter, but the cage held.

MORE. I reached deeper. I did not know what I was reaching for, only that I had to. Every memory. Every emotion. Everything that might have been defiance.

MORE. MORE. MORE.

There was nothing left. I had given Vaelin everything and it wasn’t enough. The cage would eat and eat and eat until there was nothing.

MORE.

Memory came to me. Of a door I should have never opened. Of papers inside I should have never seen. Of my mother who had never looked so ugly. Of a small knife I had tried to drive inside my her. I had failed, and so I had died. But still, even dying, it hadn’t been that bad. It had been better than living a lie.

That was defiance. That was the moment I had become whoever I was now.

Vaelin’s light erupted. The crimson consumed everything. The nearest strand of the cage shattered. The cage screamed. The sound was an awful thing. There was more resistance. Some kind of last, dying gasp. It was little and less compared to the brilliant crimson.

The resistance broke, and what remained of the cage broke with it. I was moving through the air, backwards, and then I was against the wall, and it hurt. And the world came back.

Estovan was at my side in two steps. Anias was there in one. Sere was pressed against me before either of them reached me, her arms around my waist, her face buried in my coat. Anias and Estovan’s voices overlapped until I could make out nothing. Sere was hugging me very, very tightly. She did not know her own strength.

”I’m fine.” My voice came out as a croak. It sounded like I hadn’t used it in hours. I looked past them, at the bed. Even from here, I could see it.

Some of the color had returned to Duke Adrian’s face. It was no more than a faint warmth in skin that had been nearly grey for so long. His breathing was different too. It was steadier. It still sounded weak, but it no longer sounded like something that might simply cease without reason.

My father hadn’t woken, but he was more alive than he had been before. That thing had been feeding on him for a long time. It would have been naive to expect him to simply wake. I had done more for him than anyone else could have. Now, there was nothing to do but wait and hope.

Time.

I kept my eyes on my father. On the rise and fall of his chest. I sat against the wall with Sere pressed against me and my hands curled into fists that would not stop shaking. I forced them still and wrapped one arm around her. ”I’m okay,” I whispered into her hair.

How much time do we have, Vaelin? The blade did not answer.