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“No,” I whisper, watching the workers’ cottages come into view beyond the frost-silvered grass. “It feels like remembering someone else’s nightmare.”

I glance toward the back of the truck, where Eagan sits with Arlo beneath the sheet, and the grief returns so sharply I feel like I can’t breathe.

The farm appears at the top of the road, smaller than it should be, rougher than memory made it. Home, as Arlo called it. The leaning barn, the patched fences, the same main house dull beneath the morning light.

For one terrible moment, I see all of us there again, younger, colder, and hungry, believing this place would be our whole life because no one ever allowed us to imagine more.

The truck slows near the yard, and people are already gathering. Claudia stands near the gate, her arms folded, her face hard with the kind of strength people build when they have spent too long being the only thing holding others together.

Behind her, workers step out from the barn, the kitchen house, the storage sheds, their faces wary at first, then confused. Kylian steps out first and reaches for my hand, but I climb down without taking it, not because I do not want his help, but because this is one step I need to make on my own.

The air smells of hay, damp earth, and smoke. The place that used to be my prison waits in front of me, filled with faces I once feared losing and people I never thought I would see again. I take one breath.

Claudia looks at Kylian first.

Then at me.

Then at the covered shape in the back of the truck.

Kylian moves to the back, and as Eagan passes him Arlo’s covered body, whatever strength Claudia was holding in her face fractures.

“Who?” she asks.

My throat closes when I try to speak. Kylian stops beside me, Arlo cradled in his arms.

“Where’s Marian,” I ask, and Gerald collapses to his knees. He knows who I’ve brought home—they all do. Claudia lifts one trembling hand to her mouth, and her eyes shine with tears.

“Oh, lad,” she whispers.

I look past her, searching for the person I am most afraid to face.

“She’s in her cabin,” Claudia says. “With Angie. She’s not well.”

“And Mr. Crawly?” I ask, because his absence feels strange. He was always the first on the porch when people arrived.

Claudia’s expression hardens in a way that would have made me afraid once.

“Dead,” she says. “Flu took him four days ago.”

I stare at her, feeling nothing for the man, but I nod once to acknowledge the grief and exhaustion she tries to hide. He wasn’t a good man, but that doesn’t mean his wife doesn’t feel his absence.

“And now?” Kylian asks, his voice low.

Claudia looks at him then, and I see the old fear flicker through her, the fear any human feels when a king stands close enough to decide their fate.

“Now I run things until the Crown sends someone to claim the land,” she says.

“But you’re his wife,” I state, and she shrugs.

“I was his family’s servant first. We were just kids back then, and I loved him more than his father ever could, but I think he only took a fancy to me out of spite, because he didn’t want his father to have me. He never stopped treating me like a servant, though.”

She wipes the tears from her eyes, taking a moment to pull herself together.

“Loving him was the biggest mistake of my life. Marriage didn’t set me free or erase my debt, it just changed the name on my papers.”

“Wait, you had a debt contract?” I ask.

“I did. His father bought me to be his new bride when I was younger than Sable, but Thomas saw me as the only thing he could take from his father.”