EPISODE 3

The night wind pressed against the castle windows, carrying with it the scent of rain and distant pine. Rubella sat alone in her chamber, a single candle throwing restless shadows across the walls. Below, the palace buzzed with preparations for the next council session, but she let the sounds blur into silence. Her mind had wandered backward, as it often did when the world grew quiet—back to the years when her stepmother still haunted these halls.

Queen Agusta.

Even the name tasted bitter.

Rubella had been only six when her father remarried. She remembered the wedding vividly: the gilded banners, the heavy perfume of lilies, the tightness of her father’s jaw as he stood beside the beautiful stranger who would become her stepmother. Agusta’s beauty had been legendary—hair like polished ebony, eyes the pale gray of winter skies—but her smile never reached those eyes. From the moment Rubella first looked up at her, the child sensed something sharp behind the softness.

The new queen was clever in ways that made children uneasy and adults cautious. She never raised her voice. She never struck. Instead she wielded silence like a blade and courtesy like a chain. Rubella had learned that lesson the first week Agusta arrived.

“You will call me Mother,” Agusta had said in a voice smooth as glass. “It will make your father happy.”

Rubella, still grieving her real mother, had whispered a hesitant “yes,” though every syllable tasted like betrayal. Agusta’s faint smile carried no warmth—only triumph.

From that day forward, every interaction was a quiet test. Agusta insisted Rubella attend the royal dinners but corrected her posture with a single raised eyebrow. She demanded the girl speak when spoken to, then ridiculed the plainness of her voice with words disguised as concern. “Such a shy child,” she would murmur to the courtiers, her hand resting lightly on Rubella’s shoulder, the gesture soft enough to fool onlookers but firm enough to warn: stay silent.

There were no overt cruelties, no punishments anyone could name. Instead Agusta shaped the palace itself into an instrument of pressure. Servants reported every childish misstep. Lessons with the tutors grew harsher; mistakes were met with long, icy looks. When Rubella lingered in the gardens, Agusta would appear without sound, her presence a chill that made the roses seem suddenly less bright.

It was a kind of warfare that left no scars, only doubt.

Was she imagining the malice?

Was she too sensitive?

Even her father, blinded by his need for order and a queen’s alliance, never questioned it.

One winter evening remained etched in Rubella’s memory. Snow had fallen all day, muffling the world into a hushed white. Agusta summoned her to the solar, where a fire burned low. The queen sat beside the hearth, a book in her lap.

“Sit,” Agusta said, without looking up.

Rubella obeyed.

“You are the king’s eldest daughter,” Agusta began. “One day you may be called to represent this family. But a crown is not given to the weak. It is earned.”

She closed the book and met Rubella’s gaze—those winter-gray eyes holding no trace of affection.

“You must learn to hide every feeling. Joy. Fear. Anger. A face that reveals nothing cannot be broken.”

Rubella remembered nodding, though inside she wanted to cry.

That was the night she realized her stepmother was teaching her something—something cruel, yet undeniably useful. From then on, Rubella practiced stillness. She mastered the art of the unreadable expression, the slow breath, the quiet retreat.

Years passed. Agusta’s influence only deepened. Courtiers treated the queen with reverence, oblivious to the tension she wove around the child. When Rubella entered a room, conversation slowed. Not because of her rank, but because Agusta’s shadow followed close behind, an unspoken warning that every word might be reported, twisted, used.

There were moments, brief and disorienting, when Agusta seemed almost kind. A hand adjusting Rubella’s cloak before a public appearance. A rare compliment on her handwriting. But each gesture felt calculated, a lure to draw her deeper into a web of control. Rubella learned to accept these moments with polite gratitude while keeping her heart guarded.

The final memory was the sharpest. Agusta had fallen ill suddenly, a fever that consumed her in less than a week. The palace mourned; King Morven’s face hardened into its familiar mask of discipline. But Rubella, thirteen at the time, felt only confusion. She stood at the queen’s bedside on the last night, watching Agusta’s chest rise and fall with painful effort.

“Remember,” Agusta whispered, her voice a rasp barely louder than the wind against the windows. “Power belongs to those who wait… and endure.”

Those were her last words.

After Agusta’s death, the palace grew quieter, but the lessons remained like scars beneath the skin. Rubella discovered that the habits she had learned—silence, composure, the ability to hide every flicker of emotion—were now her armor. They protected her not just from her father’s indifference, but from the venom of her stepsisters, Eva and Emma, who had inherited their mother’s talent for quiet cruelty.

Back in the present, Rubella touched the candle flame with a fingertip, testing the sting. She pulled away before it burned, a small reminder that pain could be controlled. Agusta would have approved. The thought startled her.

Despite the years and the queen’s death, Agusta’s voice still lingered in the corners of Rubella’s mind, a whisper urging discipline, patience, calculation. It was a legacy of steel disguised as motherly instruction. And though Rubella despised the memory, she could not deny the strength it had given her.

She stood and crossed to the window. The courtyard below glowed with torchlight, guards moving like dark specters across the stones. Somewhere in the deeper halls, her father would be finalizing another decree, his heart as unreachable as ever. Eva and Emma would be scheming in their lavish chambers, their laughter sharp as broken glass. And Rubella—shaped by a stepmother’s cold hand—stood apart from them all, alone but unbroken.

The candle sputtered as a draft crept through the room. Rubella whispered into the silence, not quite sure whether it was a vow or a confession.

“I endured.”

The words felt heavier than she expected.

“I am still enduring.”

Outside, thunder rumbled across the mountains, a slow, distant growl. Rubella did not flinch. She had been trained for storms.

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