The sun began to climb, baking the mud of the Aethelgard slums into a cracked, dusty crust. Inside the shack, the air was thick with the scent of boiled cabbage and the damp musk of the earth floor. Marianne's mother, Elara, had returned from her morning shift at the laundry pits, her arms red and raw from the lye.
When she rounded the corner and saw a tall, golden-haired young man standing in her doorway, she nearly dropped her bundle of wet linens.
"Marianne!" Elara shrieked, her voice a mix of horror and sudden, frantic hope. She dropped the laundry and began frantically smoothing her hair, her eyes darting between her daughter and the handsome stranger. "Who is... why is there a lordling in our kitchen?"
"He's not a lord, Mother," Marianne sighed, rubbing her temples. "This is Gerald. He's from... a neighboring village. I found him by the river. He was hurt, and he insisted on carrying the water."
Elara's eyes widened, scanning Gerald from his muddy boots to his aristocratic brow. She didn't see the rags; she saw the straightness of his back and the way he looked at Marianne with a terrifyingly gentle curiosity. To a woman who had spent her life in the dirt, Gerald looked like a ticket out of the gutter.
"A suitor!" Elara whispered loudly, clasping her hands together. "Oh, Marianne, you've finally shown some sense! He's a bit thin, but those shoulders... he looks like he could plow a field and write a poem at the same time."
"Mother, stop it," Marianne hissed, her face burning.
"Nonsense!" Elara pushed past her, offering Gerald a toothless, beaming smile. "Welcome, Master Gerald. Please, sit. We don't have much, but what we have is yours. Marianne, get the good bowl—the one without the crack! Maya, move your pebbles so the gentleman can sit!"
The dinner that followed was the most agonizing hour of Marianne's two lives combined. They sat around a low, wobbling wooden crate. Elara had served a watery broth with a few lonely chunks of turnip, presenting it as if it were a royal feast.
"So, Gerald," Elara leaned in, her eyes twinkling with interrogation. "Your family... do they have land? Many sheep? You have the hands of someone who doesn't spend much time in the muck."
Gerald paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth. He glanced at Marianne, who was staring intensely at her broth, wishing she could vanish.
"My family... travels quite a bit, Ma'am," Gerald said smoothly, his voice like silk even in these cramped quarters. "We deal in... trade. Import and export. But I've decided to stay a while. I find the company in this village to be far more interesting than the city."
He looked directly at Marianne as he said it. Elara let out a delighted cackle. "Did you hear that, Marianne? Interesting! Oh, he's a charmer, this one. You'd better hold onto him before the Miller's daughter tries to snatch him up."
Marianne felt a lump in her throat. In her first life, her mother had died of exhaustion and illness long before Marianne became a General. Seeing her now—lively, scheming, and hopeful—was a cruel mercy.
As the afternoon heat peaked, Gerald didn't leave. Instead, he stripped off his outer tunic, revealing a lean, muscular frame that made the village girls walking by trip over their own feet.
"That roof is a hazard, Marianne," he said, squinting up at the sagging thatch and the rotting support beams. "One good rain and this whole side will collapse on Maya's bed."
"We can't afford a carpenter, Gerald," Marianne said, standing in the yard with her arms crossed. "Just go home. Your 'trade' family must be worried about you."
But Gerald was already climbing a rickety ladder he'd borrowed from a confused neighbor. "I don't need a carpenter. I need a hammer and some fresh straw. And maybe a bit of help from a girl who knows how to tie a sturdy knot."
Marianne watched him, her heart thudding a strange, rhythmic beat. She stayed below, passing him bundles of dried reeds and sturdy twine.
This is wrong, she whispered to herself, her eyes tracking his movements. In the first life, I lived in this shack until I was eighteen. Every winter, the roof leaked. Every winter, Maya coughed until her lungs bled because of the damp. I remember the night the north corner gave way—it took me three days to patch it with mud and broken boards. It stayed broken until the day I joined the army and never looked back.
She watched Gerald's tan hands—hands that she knew would one day command legions—clipping away the rot and reinforcing the timber. He worked with a quiet intensity, his brow furrowed in concentration. He wasn't just fixing a roof; he was building a sanctuary.
"The script," she murmured, her fingers brushing against a bundle of straw. "It's gone. It's completely gone."
In her first life, she had been a patriot of Aethelgard because she had nothing else. She had joined the army to escape this poverty, to give Maya a better life, and she had ended up serving a prince who killed her. But here was the Prince of the enemy, sweating under the Aethelgard sun, fixing a peasant's roof with a smile on his face.
"Marianne!" Gerald called down, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. He looked down at her, his gray eyes bright and clear. "Come up here! I need you to hold this beam in place while I lash it. I can't do this alone."
She climbed the ladder, her movements hesitant. As she reached the top, she stood mere inches from him on the narrow ledge. The scent of him—cedar, rain, and the faint metallic tang of his healing blood—enveloped her.
"There," he said, placing her hand on the rough wood. His hand lingered over hers for a second too long. "See? If we brace it like this, it'll last twenty years."
Marianne looked out over the village from the height of the roof. She saw the smoking chimneys, the distant spires of the capital where Alaric was likely lounging in silk, and the winding river where she had found her destiny.
She wasn't a warrior yet. She was just a girl on a roof with a boy who didn't know his fate. And for the first time, the future didn't look like a battlefield—it looked like a choice.