When the royal carriage came to a stop before the towering gates of her family's mansion, Elka peered out through the small window at the house she had called home all her life. It was the same house she had been born in, where she had learned to walk, where she had grown from a child into a woman. Nearly every memory she possessed, both tender and painful, had been shaped within those walls. Yet now, as she stared at it from a distance, she felt nothing.
There was no pull of belonging, no quiet longing to return. The final thread binding her to this place had been severed the moment her family wrapped her up like an unruly offering and delivered her to a man who had looked at her with something dangerously close to disgust on their wedding night.
Now she regarded the house as a stranger might.
