The first thing they saw of Vanhart territory was not its manor.
It was its hunger.
Fields that should have been white with even snow and sleeping crops were instead a patchwork of neglect—fences broken, soil exposed like raw, dark flesh between half-hearted furrows. Trees stood in thin, uneven lines, not from careful cultivation, but from having been felled where desperation demanded.
A crow cawed once from a crooked post, its wings ragged, as if even scavengers found little here.
Reina's grip tightened around her spear.
Landon's eyes swept the barren land, expression unchanged, but his brows drew the faintest fraction inward.
Sera walked in silence.
Her boots crushed thin frost, each step a quiet violation against memories of a different Vanhart she knew—of banners, busy roads, flushed-cheeked workers shouting over one another under clear sky.
Now—
a dull, pale haze hung over the territory like a weary sigh.
Caravan traffic had dwindled. Houses scattered across the fields wore fatigue—their timbers warped, their roofs half-repaired with mismatched planks, smoke rising in coughs instead of steady streams.
Kel said nothing.
But his eyes recorded everything.
Every collapsed tool-shed.
Every abandoned wagon with a broken axle left to sink into mud and ice.
Every person they passed.
A woman bending over a small fire, cloak patched in too many places. A child peeking from behind a door, cheeks sunken, eyes too large. An old man dragging firewood that was clearly not enough.
Their gazes slid over the four travelers with a mixture of dull curiosity and ingrained caution.
No one bowed.
Vanhart territory did not have the strength for formality.
Sera's jaw tightened as they walked.
Her fingers brushed the edge of her cloak, pressing there as if she could press back the sight.
No one told me…
No letter had reached the barbarian lands.
No messenger had been sent.
She had imagined Vanhart frozen in time.
Instead, she found it rotting on its feet.
Kel's voice, when it came, was very quiet.
"Your house took the blow," he said.
Not as speculation.
As fact.
Sera's eyes remained forward.
"…So it seems."
"Sanctions," Landon murmured. "Loss of alliance. Probably cuts to trade."
Reina looked at the shattered stone of a wayside shrine—its symbol defaced, its offerings long gone.
"Or punishment," she said softly. "For what they believed happened to you."
The viscount's daughter.
Her father's friend.
Two houses bound in trust.
One heir disappeared.
One crippled.
The echo was too obvious to ignore.
Kel exhaled once.
Not in surprise.
In confirmation.
So that's the cost you tried to shoulder alone.
Sairen's presence flickered faintly at the edge of his awareness, tasting the quiet despair steeped into the land.
This place has drowned slowly, she whispered. No one saw the waves.
Kel didn't answer.
His eyes were on the structure rising at the end of the frost-bitten road.
The Vanhart estate.
It should have stood proud upon a small rise, overlooking its fields like a guardian.
It stood.
But pride had long since drained from its stone.
The manor loomed at the end of the worn road, walls marked with age, the outer coating of pale stone stained with damp streaks and hairline cracks. One of the watchtowers bore a scaffolding that looked half-finished—repairs stalled midway, abandoned.
The Vanhart crest—a stylized chimera with wings half-spread—hung over the main gate, its paint faded, its metal rusting at the edges.
Two guards flanked the gate.
Leather armor, not plate. Spears with dents. Their posture was disciplined, but their eyes carried a tired acuity that came only from long-standing strain.
As Kel, Reina, Landon, and Sera approached, the guards' hands tightened around their weapons.
Then one of them really looked.
Not at Kel.
Not at the strangers.
At the hooded figure walking between them.
Sera's steps slowed.
She reached up.
Fingers steady—
She lowered her hood.
The guards went still.
For a moment, they did not seem to breathe.
Their eyes widened.
One dropped his spear with a dull clatter against the stone.
"L–Lady…" he whispered hoarsely. "Lady… Sera…?"
The other guard's jaw moved soundlessly, throat working.
They did not shout.
They did not question.
They did not cry out in alarm.
They simply looked at her as though something long buried beneath frost had just pushed its way back through the earth.
The one who dropped his spear stumbled forward.
Then caught himself.
He straightened—
and without a word, he turned and pushed the gate inward.
The doors groaned, complaining at the sudden movement.
The other guard spun on his heel and ran.
Not walked.
Not hurried.
Ran.
Across the courtyard, past the cracked stone fountain, through the half-open arch that led into the main wing.
Sera watched him go.
Her face did not change.
But the fingers at her sides had curled so tightly that her knuckles paled.
Kel glanced at her once.
"They recognized you," he said softly.
Sera's lips trembled—barely.
"This is still my house," she answered, her voice low.
"I am… not sure for how much longer."
They stepped through the gates.
Kel's boots rang faintly on the stone. Reina's cloak brushed against aged flagstones stained by old weather. Landon's presence filled the space like a quiet bulwark. Sera's footsteps were the softest—
but in the eyes of the watching servants emerging from doorways and side passages…
Hers were the only ones that mattered.
Faces appeared like ghosts.
Old stewards, maids in simple grey, stableboys now grown taller. They stared as if seeing a specter.
Eyes widened.
Hands flew to mouths.
Some dropped what they carried.
No one spoke her name aloud.
Fear clung to everything unsaid.
Sera kept walking.
Her back straight.
Her chin level.
Her pace neither slowed nor rushed.
Kel walked half a step behind her, left side.
Reina shadowed his flank.
Landon followed as the back line, gaze sweeping the gallery, measuring risk in every trembling presence.
A hush spread before them as more eyes turned.
The guard who had run vanished into the inner hall.
For a breathless span—
nothing moved.
Then a door deeper within the manor burst open.
Footsteps.
Not measured, noble tread.
Not the heavy march of an officer.
Desperate steps.
The kind that have forgotten dignity.
A man appeared at the top of the short stair that led down into the receiving courtyard.
His hair was more grey than Sera remembered.
His shoulders less square.
His once-immaculate attire hung with the exhaustion of too many un-slept nights and too many burdens borne alone.
But his eyes—
His eyes were the same.
Sharp.
Kind.
And now wide with disbelief so raw it stripped years from his face.
"...Sera?"
Her heart slammed against her ribs, once.
She hadn't prepared for how his voice would sound.
How it would still echo the same way it did when he called her in the garden to come inside before the winter wind turned cruel.
She swallowed.
"Father," she said.
That single word—
loosed something in him.
The Count of Vanhart—who had bowed before dukes, petitioned before councils, stood firm before creditors and predators alike—
stumbled as he descended the stairs.
Not with age.
With urgency.
"Sa… Sera…"
He crossed the distance between them like a man crossing ice over rushing water, afraid the surface would crack and swallow what he saw.
Sera did not move.
It was as if the entire world had tightened around her spine, holding her in place.
His hands reached her shoulders.
Stopped.
Shook.
Then he pulled her in.
And embraced her.
Without grace.
Without formality.
Just a father who had lost a child finding that the nightmare had not been the losing—
but the years believing it was permanent.
"Sera… Sera…" His voice broke on her name. "You… you—"
He clutched her fiercely, fingers digging into the fur of her cloak, as if she would vanish if he loosened his grip.
There was no decorum.
No noble distance.
People watched from the edges of the courtyard, eyes wide and faces openly stunned, as their Count—the man who had held this crumbling estate together with teeth and will—
simply sobbed into his daughter's shoulder.
Tears froze at the corners of his lashes.
His arms trembled.
"I—" his words were shuddering, broken. "I thought—I thought you… Sera, why…? Why did you leave—?"
His breath hitched.
"Why did you leave your father alone?"
Sera did not return the embrace.
At first.
Her hands remained at her sides, fingers curled inward.
It would have been easier to push him away.
To keep armor between them.
To keep guilt at a safe, known distance.
Instead—
her fingers rose.
Slowly.
As if weighted with chains.
She placed her hands on his back.
Gently.
They leaned into the embrace.
Not as chieftain and count.
As a girl who ran.
And a man who watched her vanish.
Her eyes did not spill tears.
But her voice, when it came, cracked as if something inside had given way instead.
"...Forgive me, Father."
The words left her like confession.
A piece of herself she had been repeating silently for years.
Now thrown into the open air between them.
He pulled back just enough to see her face.
His own was wet.
Red around the eyes.
A line had been carved between his brows more deeply than age alone could justify.
"There is nothing," he said hoarsely, "nothing for me to forgive you for."
His fingers cupped her face.
He searched her expression as if expecting it to shatter.
"They branded you a curse," he whispered. "They blamed you. They blamed me. We… paid for it."
His jaw tightened.
"But there is nothing to forgive," he repeated, as if by saying it enough times he could rewrite every court record, every whisper, every damning glance.
Sera looked at him.
She did not break.
She did not crumble.
But the tension in her brows eased, barely.
"…I still ask it," she said.
He swallowed.
"Then I will give it," he breathed, voice almost fierce. "As many times as you ask. Until you grow tired of hearing it."
He pulled her close again.
This time—
her hands moved on their own.
And held on.
Kel watched.
There was a hollowness in his chest he did not name.
This was not his story.
Nor his reconciliation to claim.
He overheard snippets of quickened whispers at the edges of the courtyard.
"Lady Sera…"
"Isn't she—?"
"They said she…"
"But then why…"
He let them wash past, irrelevant.
His gaze remained on Sera and the Count.
Before the lake, before Sairen, before contracts…
Sera had fled to protect this man.
Now, the man looked more broken than she did.
So this is what your absence bought him, Kel thought.
Debt.
Political isolation.
Sanctions.
A bleeding territory.
A daughter shaped by exile.
Sairen's quiet presence ran against his senses.
You are measuring again, she murmured.
Always, he replied inwardly.
_I hope you measure more than their value to your path,* she said.
Kel's lips curved with the hint of something bitter, humorless.
I'm not stupid enough to dismiss allies whose existence rewrites cause and effect.
She didn't answer.
But he felt her gaze.
Not disapproving.
Not approving.
Simply watching—
to see which way he would lean when choice demanded more than utilitarian decisions.
It took time for the Count to remember that others existed.
When he did, he straightened, reluctantly letting Sera go, though his hand remained on her shoulder as if he refused to lose physical proof.
He wiped his face quickly with his sleeve, blinking away wetness.
His voice, when he turned to the three standing behind Sera, carried the rough edge of someone forced to remember his title.
"Sera," he managed, "these are…?"
Sera stepped slightly aside, allowing her companions to come into full view.
Her voice recovered a measure of the calm she had used as chief.
"Father," she said. "These are the people who walked with me to the lake and back."
She turned first to Kel.
"This is Kel," she said. "Eldest son of Duke Arcturus von Rosenfeld."
The courtyard, which had been murmuring, went abruptly silent.
The Count's eyes sharpened.
Whatever exhaustion weighed his shoulders, his spine straightened painfully fast.
He stepped forward—
Then, in a motion that would have shocked half the nobles in the Empire had they seen it—
Count Vanhart bowed.
Not shallowly.
Not a token dip of the head.
A full, formal bow at the waist.
To a boy in simple travel clothes whose only obvious mark of status was the way the air refused to treat him as ordinary.
"Lord Kel," he said, voice low but clear, echoing slightly off the stone walls. "Eldest son of His Grace Duke Arcturus. Vanhart greets you."
Kel regarded him with a calm that would have been arrogance on anyone else.
He did not reach to stop the bow.
He did not rush to pull the man up.
He simply watched.
To see the measure of the man Sera had once tried to protect.
Then he inclined his head.
No more, no less.
"Count Vanhart," he replied quietly. "Kel von Rosenfeld… greets you in turn."
Their eyes met.
In that instant, a quiet understanding passed between them.
The Count saw not just a noble heir, but the boy who had walked his daughter back from death and curse and exile.
Kel saw not just a weakened lord, but a man who had borne the slow ruin of his lands rather than abandon his name, even when everyone else assumed his daughter dead, and his line with her.
The Count exhaled slowly.
"Whatever this house still possesses," he said, lifting himself upright again, "it owes you—"
Kel cut him off gently.
"No."
The single word hung there.
Kel's gaze remained level.
"Vanhart owes me nothing," he said. "You can thank me—if you must—after it's standing again."
A faint, flickering spark lit the older man's eyes.
Not hope.
Not yet.
But something like the memory of it.
Sera watched both of them—
and for the first time since she stepped onto Vanhart soil, the bitter taste in her mouth lessened.
"Then," Count Vanhart said, voice steadier, "won't you and your companions… enter my home?"
Kel stepped aside, gesturing softly toward Reina and Landon.
Reina bowed with practiced precision—simple, clean.
"Reina Asheville," she introduced herself. "Spear at Kel's side."
Landon bowed his head, one fist over his chest.
"Landon," he said. "Sword behind him."
The Count's lips quirked, despite himself.
"Then today," he murmured, "my ruined house is graced not only by my daughter's return… but by winter's most unlikely guests."
He turned, gesturing toward the open doors of the main hall.
"Come," he said. "Let Vanhart offer what welcome it still can."
They walked forward.
Sera at the front now, her father's hand still resting on her shoulder.
Kel followed.
Eyes open.
Steps sure.
And somewhere, far behind his calm gaze, a status window that no one else could see quietly adjusted variables—
as the boy who refused fate crossed the threshold of a house that had paid for someone else's sin…
and decided whether he would let it fall,
or teach it to stand.