When her mother died, Guenievre Baudin, it had been shoving Gwenaëlle down as an archer loosed the arrow that would lodge in her throat, and to this day it is the clearest memory she has of the woman: her eyes huge, her grip tight, gurgling blood as after all that had been taken from her she was robbed even of last words.

It had been so hard, for such a long time, not to feel that every subsequent hour of her life has been an insult to three women she has only been able to claim as her family in their deaths.

“There was an elven mage,” she says, soft, “when I was barely more than a girl. Him and his sister, they were apostates. For a time they worked our estate, and Pietro and I...it was the most innocent thing I've ever had. He loved me and it— frightened me half to death. In Halamshiral, I thought of that, that artist and his mistress, making a life for themselves that they're happy with, or happy enough, and I had...”

Her brows pinch together as she makes a face, exhales.

“I humiliated him, Stephen. I was so afraid of doing to him what had been done to my mother that I hurt him so badly, I wanted to tear myself out of the part of his heart that loved me and salt it, and it was just this...there are so many bricks like that. In that wall. In what I built of myself. And Pietro, he knew them better than I'll ever have a chance to, now. I wasted all of that time terrorising everyone around me and for what? I'm not la Comtesse de Vauquelin. I never married a Duc. I will not dance attendance, a courtier. Two women gave up their lives for me to be inheritrix Vauquelin and I fumbled it so fucking badly at every turn,”

and that shadow still lingers at the edges of what she's built for herself instead. For what?

For her to thrive, but not as they had dreamed, and how dare she not be what they had dreamed.