Sabine turned back to the table.
“Bring me Grandmother Rhivelle’s proofs,” she said. “The maternal descent copies, the abbey record, the old seal attestations. And my parents’ original marriage settlement, not the summary.”
Junor bowed. “Yes, my lady.”
Mirelle did something Sabine had not expected. She sat down abruptly, as if her knees had failed her for one unguarded moment. That shook Sabine more than shouting would have done.
Cassian stared at Sabine as though he no longer recognized the line she had crossed. “You are not even grieving.”
Sabine gathered the debt papers back into order. “I am beyond the stage where grief alters procedure.”
“That is a hideous thing to say.”
“It is a hideous house to inherit.”
Mirelle’s voice came low. “You sound like your grandfather when the tenants failed him.”
Sabine looked at her mother. That was meant to wound, and it did.
Her grandfather had been exacting, proud, and remembered by half the district with fear rather than warmth. Sabine had inherited from him the habits no one praised in women until the house was already burning.
“Then perhaps one practical Corvyr was overdue,” she said.
Cassian shoved away from the chair. “I cannot sit here and hear this.”
“No,” Sabine said. “You can only live inside it.”
He swore at her then, not loudly, but with enough feeling to make Mirelle flinch. He looked ashamed of it at once and more angry for being ashamed.
Sabine closed the portfolio.
The conversation had begun to circle. Same fear. Same refusal. Same cost, renamed.
She did not intend to keep walking around it until dusk.
“I am done for now,” she said.
Mirelle lifted her head. “You do not leave this room with that settled.”
“It was settled before breakfast.”
“Sabine.”
But Sabine had already turned.
She left the sitting room without haste. That mattered. Running would have made the decision look emotional. She wanted it to look like what it was: chosen.
The gallery beyond lay pale with weak morning light. Somewhere below, a maid was shaking ash into the yard. The sound came up faintly through an open service door. Sabine walked past the study, past the folded screen hiding the east corridor, and into the older part of the house.
If she meant to put a price on her own body for Corvyr, she would at least look directly at what she was buying time for.
The nursery stood at the end of a short side passage beneath the east stairs. The door remained unlocked out of habit though no child had slept there since Cassian outgrew it and no second child ever came to replace him. Sabine pushed it open.
Cold met her first.
The room had been shut long enough that the air held stillness and linen dust. One narrow bed remained under a white coverlet. The carved rocking horse by the hearth had lost one ear. A faded border of painted birds ran along the wall near theceiling, interrupted where damp had blistered the plaster and been scraped back years ago. Near the window sat a small chest with brass corners, half open, showing a stack of wooden blocks and a blue wool rabbit with one eye missing.
Cassian had slept here through fevers, storms, and those first frightened months after their father’s health began to fail. Sabine remembered sitting in the chair by the bed with a candle stub and a book because Mirelle had been too tired to take the midnight turn. She remembered, too, the quiet after they understood no younger child would follow him into the room. The nursery had stayed ready for one year, then two. After that, readiness itself had become a kind of embarrassment.
