Chapter 103. A Peasant’s Daughter Among Vipers Raised in Silk
She had carried that lesson like a hidden blade against her ribs for the rest of her life. But as she stood there in the golden haze of memory, watching Corwin wipe sweat from his brow with a grunt of approval, a cold realization pierced through her she had forgotten.
Somewhere between the endless training, the political maneuvering, and the horrific trauma of eight years ago, she had forgotten what it meant to simply be.
She had become a weapon, a tool of duty, and a survivor, but she had stopped being the girl who understood the language of her own body.
’I became the debt, Corwin,’ she thought, her inner voice cracking with unspoken grief. ’I stopped paying the debt with discipline and started paying it with my soul...’
The memory began to warp, the warm sunlight stretching and thinning like pulled sugar until it turned sickly and pale. The peaceful sounds of the village faded, replaced by the distant, rhythmic thundering of hooves that sounded less like horses and more like approaching doom.
The royal scouts arrived when she was twelve. That memory came not as a gentle recollection but as a visceral shock, as if she were being shoved backward through time.
She remembered the way the air had changed, the sudden crispness of military authority cutting through the earthy smell of her father’s workshop. They hadn’t come with invitations; they had come with inevitability.
Rumors of an elf child in a common carpenter’s house who moved faster than boys twice her age had spread like wildfire through the kingdom’s intelligence networks, and the crown never left talent untouched.
She remembered the day clearly: the way her father’s hands, those steady, capable hands that could carve delicate filigree from oak, had trembled as he packed her meager belongings. Her mother had wept, a quiet, devastating sound that cut deeper than any training blade.
It was a grief layered with pride, but underneath it lay the raw, unspoken terror of parents who knew they were giving their child away to a machine that would eventually consume her.
"You’re going to be someone important, Catherine," her father had said, his voice thick, refusing to meet her eyes.
"I just want to stay here," she had whispered, the words tasting like ash. "I don’t want to be important..."
"I just want to be me."
But she couldn’t stay. The machine had come for her.
She remembered the morning she left for the academy, the sky a bruised purple as dawn broke.
Her mother had pulled her close, the fabric of her apron rough against Catherine’s cheek, and pressed something small and firm into her palm. It was a carved wooden pendant, warm from her mother’s skin.
"Whatever grand things you become, Catherine... whatever titles they give you... whatever blood you have to spill, never forget where you came from," her mother had whispered, her breath warm against Catherine’s ear. "Never forget the hands that raised you, or the people you were meant to protect..."
"If you forget that, you’ll lose yourself forever."
’And I did...’ Catherine screamed internally, the memory now bleeding into a kaleidoscope of pain. ’I lost myself in the blood...’
’I lost myself in the screams...’
’I lost myself in the dark...’
Yet, as the memory began to dissolve into the blackness of her meditation once more, a flicker of defiance remained. She had kept that promise, in her own twisted, broken way, for a very long time.
She had protected her people, she had protected her academy, and she had protected her secrets. But now, the debt was due.
The masked man was calling, the past was screaming, and Catherine knew that to truly protect anything, she first had to face the monster she had become in the attempt.
...
The golden haze of childhood didn’t fade gently; it shattered. The memories began to accelerate, the sun-drenched yard of her youth dissolving into the cold, unforgiving stone of the Royal Academy.
Years of her life began to compress, each day bleeding into the next as the relentless machinery of military training ground her childhood softness into something tough, sharp, and lethal.
She remembered the ache. Not the pleasant soreness of exercise, but the grinding, bone-deep exhaustion that made her limbs feel like they were made of lead.
She remembered the taste of blood in her mouth from cracked lips, the way her lungs would sear with every ragged breath during midnight drills, and the specific, hollow feeling of pushing past the point of failure only to be told to go again.
’Faster, Catherine...’
’Stronger, Catherine...’
’Don’t let them see you bleed,’ her own mind would whisper, a cruel echo of her instructors.
By her second year, she was already outpacing rivals who had been trained since they could walk. But with that speed came a different kind of pain: a profound, gnawing loneliness.
She was a ghost haunting the training grounds, the elf girl from nowhere who broke every record, who moved like a blur of silver light. Her peers didn’t see a comrade; they saw a threat, a freak, or a prodigy they couldn’t touch.
Intimidation turned into resentment, and resentment turned into a wall of silence that no one dared to breach.
’They think I’m made of marble,’ she thought bitterly. ’They think because I don’t stumble... I don’t feel the weight of every step...’
Then there was the other isolation, the class divide that cut deeper than any blade. The academy was a nest of vipers raised in silk and marble.
Most students carried centuries of noble lineage in their blood, their arrogance as ingrained as their sword forms. They walked as if the world owed them its deference.
Catherine, however, walked with the callused hands of a carpenter’s daughter. She had to fight for every inch of ground she stood on, proving repeatedly that her skill wasn’t some inherited blessing but something forged in sweat and stubbornness.
Still, she wrote home. Every week, without fail.
Those letters were her only lifeline. She wrote about the victories, the successful sparring matches, the commendations from instructors, and the beautiful architecture.
She never wrote about the cold nights spent alone in the barracks, nor the way her stomach would twist when a noble student would sneer at her ’peasant blood.’ She refused to burden her parents with the cost of her sacrifice.
They had already given everything to get her there; she wouldn’t let them pay for her loneliness with their worry.
Then came the day that seemed to validate every ounce of suffering.
She was nineteen, standing in the center of the Royal Court, the sunlight streaming through stained glass to paint patterns of crimson and gold across the marble floor. The air was thick with incense and the oppressive weight of ceremony.
When the announcement came and when she was formally recognized as the youngest Grand Knight candidate in the kingdom’s recorded history, the world seemed to stop breathing.
She remembered looking into the crowd. Her parents were there, looking like strangers in their fine clothes, clothes that had clearly cost them months of savings.
Her father, the man who had always been her steady anchor, was crying openly. His shoulders shook with an unashamed, raw pride that made her own throat constrict.
Her mother’s grip on her hand afterward was so fierce it left bruises, a silent communication that said, ’We see you... We see what you’ve become...’
’I thought that... was the peak,’ Catherine thought, a dark laugh bubbling in her mind. ’I thought that was when the reward began...’
’I didn’t know it was just... the beginning of the slaughter.’
The reward was a command. An experimental unit of five knights handpicked from across the kingdom to serve as the crown’s new shining blade.
The day they were first introduced remains etched in her mind with terrifying clarity, the memory so sharp it felt like a fresh wound. She could still see their faces, still hear their voices—voices she would later hear screaming in agony.
Aldric had been the first to break the tension. A broad-shouldered human man, several years older than her, with the relaxed confidence of someone who had never known true fear.
He was left-handed, a fact he wore like a badge of defiance, and he had approached the gathering with an irreverent smirk that immediately grated against the solemnity of the occasion.
"So," Aldric had said, stepping into her space with an effortless grin that didn’t reach his calculating eyes. "You’re the little prodigy everyone’s whispering about?"
"Don’t worry, princess... Just try not to run so fast until you leave us all behind." He said, extending his left hand rather than his right, watching with open amusement as she automatically reached for it with her own left in unconscious mirroring. "And you already have good instincts..."
"Most people fumble that."