Chapter 8 - The Sins of the Past
Two days later, the dungeons of Dartmouth Citadel echoed with the dripping of water and the heavy clank of iron chains.
Lord Reginald sat huddled in the darkest corner of the stone cell, his expensive velvet robes torn, his face sunken and gray. The fall of House Sterling had been swift and total; stripped of titles, wealth, and lands, Reginald was now nothing more than a prisoner awaiting judgment.
The heavy iron door swung open with a screech.
Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Reginald shrank back against the damp stone wall, looking up with fearful, watery eyes as a figure stepped into the flickering torchlight.
It wasn't Rowena. It was Beatrice.
Her left arm was still bound in a wooden splint from where Tristan had broken her wrist weeks earlier. Her face was pale, her hair tangled, stripped of the jewels and fine silks that had once defined her arrogance.
"They took everything, Father," Beatrice whispered, her voice cracking as she slid down the wall opposite him. "Our lands, our name, our gold... everything is gone. And she sits upon the throne as if she were born to it."
Reginald buried his face in his hands, trembling. "We made a mistake, Beatrice. We looked at her weakness and forgot what hides beneath the snow. The old blood... it never truly dies; it only waits."
"I hate her," Beatrice hissed, her eyes flashing with a sudden, venomous spark of madness. "I would rather die than bow to the runt we threw into the storm!"
"You already have," a calm, resonant voice echoed from the doorway.
Beatrice and Reginald gasped, turning their heads sharply.
Rowena stood in the stone archway. She wore a simple dark tunic and trousers, her golden hair tied back neatly, but the quiet, unshakable authority radiating from her presence filled the damp cell until the air itself felt heavy.
Reginald scrambled forward on his knees, clutching at the iron bars of his cell. "Rowena! My child! Please—we are of your blood! Have mercy on your own family!"
Rowena looked down at the man who had ordered her execution without a second thought, the man who had watched without a flicker of remorse as she was cast out into the freezing blizzard to die.
"Family?" Rowena’s voice was devastatingly calm. "The night you ripped the wolf crest from my chest and threw me into the snow, House Sterling died. You are no longer my father. You are merely prisoners of a past that no longer exists."
"What will you do with us?" Beatrice spat, her voice trembling with defiant hatred. "Execute us? Hang us from the citadel walls for the ravens?"
Rowena turned her golden-flecked eyes toward her half-sister.
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"No," Rowena said softly. "Execution is too kind for those who only know how to destroy. You will be stripped of your names entirely. You will be sent to the remote farming settlements in the southern valleys—to live as ordinary laborers, working the soil with your own hands, far away from courts, titles, and power. You will learn what it means to survive without crushing others."
Reginald’s eyes widened in horror, realizing that a life of anonymous toil among commoners was a fate far more agonizing to his pride than a swift death. He opened his mouth to wail, but Rowena turned her back on them, walking down the dim stone corridor without looking back once.
