Richard’s brow furrowed. “Annabel.”

“Why not?” I asked, and my smile lost its manners. “Why should I marry a man who speaks to my hair and not my face? Why should I smile while strangers appraise me like horseflesh with better posture? Why can I not ride, or read the wrong books, or eat grapes on balconies until I become a family embarrassment and a local legend?”

Mother laid her embroidery hoop carefully on the cushion beside her. “Because legends are not safe,” she said. “And I want you safe.”

There it was again. Safe, like a prayer. Safe, like a cage lined with velvet. Safe, like a life chosen for you by people who would swear they were loving you while they did it.

Father’s face gentled, but did not soften. “You cannot live unmoored,” he said. “Marriage brings security. Respect. Protection.”

“Or captivity,” I muttered.

The word might have gone unnoticed in another room. In this one, it landed like a dropped glass.

Étienne studied me with renewed interest, his smile thinning into something almost thoughtful. “Our Annabel speaks,” he said, “like she’s tasted more wine than water.”

I met his gaze. “Perhaps you should marry first, Brother.”

That made something flicker in his face, but then a smile. Not disbelief. Not agreement either. Recognition, perhaps, of a line delivered too cleanly to be meaningless.

Before anyone could answer, Isolde spoke.

“It will be my debut too.”

Her voice was small, but it changed the air anyway.

All of us turned toward her. She flushed instantly, fingers twisting together in her lap.

“I…” She swallowed. “I am not like Annabel. No one will look at me.”

The room seemed to contract around that sentence.

My heart lurched so hard it hurt.

Because she was fifteen. Because somewhere in another life, or this one, or both, girls had been taught to measure themselves by whether men’s eyes paused on them.

I moved before I thought. My hand found hers.

“Isolde,” I said, and the gentleness in my voice came entirely from Anna, who had once been seventeen and scared and too aware of the world. “Don’t be foolish. You are prettier than I’ll ever be. Softer, gentler, more naturally lady-like in ways I will never manage. Every young man there will look at you and thank the saints for arranging their eyesight.”

Her eyes widened. “You mean it?”

“Of course I mean it.” I squeezed her fingers lightly. “But don’t be in a hurry. Fifteen is still so young. Let them wait. Let them wonder. Let them chase. You should have time to enjoy being yourself before the world decides to name you something else.”

Her mouth trembled between relief and disbelief.

Then Mother, very quietly, cut the moment in half.

“Fifteen is not too young to be engaged.”

I turned so fast the silk at my sleeves whispered.

“She’s still a child.”

“She is a lady,” Mother corrected. “And ladies do not wait forever. The world does not wait for us.”

That’s rigth. The world hurries girls and calls it destiny.

Isolde’s gaze dropped to her lap, shame folding her inward like paper.

I tightened my hold on her hand and leaned just enough that only she could hear me.

“You will always be enough on your own,” I whispered. “Remember that.”

She blinked up at me as though I had handed her something forbidden and precious. A sentence she did not know she was allowed to keep.

Richard cleared his throat.

The sound was soft. Final.

“Then it is settled,” he said. “The party will be held here at Vervaux. Invitations will be dispatched within the week.”

Étienne spread his arms as if he had personally negotiated the moon.

“Excellent,” he said. “I shall bully the hothouse into producing violets that do not naturally exist. If God objects, He may present His complaint directly.”

Father actually smiled at that—tiredly, unwillingly.

“You will make chaos,” he said.

“I will make atmosphere,” Étienne corrected.

Then, just like that, the room shifted. The conversation moved on, because that is what powerful families do. They continue. They plan. They layer logistics over feeling until feeling can no longer interrupt the machinery.

Mother resumed stitching, though her needle bit the linen harder now. Father began discussing invitations and guest lists. Richard sorted names by rank and danger. Étienne proposed musicians, flowers, wines, lantern placements, and three ways to make a bishop jealous without technically insulting him.

But I barely heard them.

My focus stayed on Isolde’s hand in mine.

Small. Cool. Trusting.

She held on as though I were a railing and she were crossing something narrow and high.

And for the first time since these dreams began, the ache in my chest was not for freedom. It was for witness.

The room began to blur at the edges.

At first, it was subtle—a softening of the gilt lines on the frames, a thinning in the sunlight, the strange sensation that the air had become too light to hold itself properly. Then the colors loosened, melting at their borders like wet paint. The silver thread in Mother’s embroidery flashed once, twice. Someone was still speaking—Étienne, I thought—but his voice had gone far away, like hearing a party from the end of a corridor.

I looked at Isolde. She was still there. Still real. Still holding my hand.

And the blue salon vanished.

For a moment, I did not move.

But the sensation remained—the ghost of cool fingers, slight and tense, trusting me for reasons I had not earned.

I sat up too quickly. My room tilted. The cheap cotton sheet slipped to my waist. On my desk, a tower of notes threatened collapse. My half-dead plant leaned toward the window in a way that looked judgmental. A hoodie hung from the back of my chair like a sulking roommate.

I had left Isolde there.

The thought was irrational enough that I almost laughed at myself. Left her where? In a dream? In a story my exhausted brain was building out of lectures and books and hormones and stress?

I swung my legs out of bed and stood.

The floor was cold. The room was too warm. My thoughts were louder than either.

By the time I made it to class, my mind still felt split down the middle—half in Seoul, half in the blue salon, still hearing Mother say fifteen is not too young and wanting to overturn something expensive.

The lecture hall was too warm for spring.

Or maybe I was simply too tired to tolerate temperature with dignity.

Sunlight slanted across the rows of desks and computer screens, catching floating dust in the air until even the dust looked academic. Professor Choi stood at the front with one hand resting on the podium and the other clicking through slides with the stern patience of a man who had long ago accepted that students were only intermittently attached to consciousness.

Coffee number three moved inside my veins like a half-hearted prayer.

Around me, notebooks opened. Laptop lids rose. Somebody in the back unwrapped a convenience store sandwich with an amount of noise that should have qualified as sabotage.

Professor Choi adjusted his glasses and began.

“The sixteenth century,” he said, “was a storm disguised as a court dance. France balanced itself between alliances and betrayals, splendor and rot. Power moved not only by swords, but by mothers, mistresses, confessors, and whispers in corridors.”

Soo-ah leaned toward me and stage-whispered, “Sounds exactly like Min-jun’s dating history.”

Min-jun, three seats away, didn’t even look offended. He twirled his pen between his fingers and murmured, “Correction. Mine involves only one sword. But significantly more karaoke.”

I choked on a laugh.

Professor Choi lifted a brow in our direction without interrupting himself, which was somehow worse than calling us out.

“And the Valois princes,” he continued, clicking to the next slide, “offer a particularly useful example of instability dressed in ceremony.”

An oil portrait filled the screen. A blond boy in velvet, all solemn youth and inherited danger. His shoulders were broader than his years warranted, his expression already trying on kingship like a coat too heavy for the weather. His eyes were dark blue and assessing, the sort of eyes that made you feel measured even through paint.

For a strange second, I couldn’t stop staring.

He looked too young.

That was the part history always did so quietly—turned children into symbols before anyone had time to ask whether they’d ever gotten to be children first.

“History remembers him,” Professor Choi said, “for an unexpected ascent. He was not born first in line. And yet when the crown came to him, so did ruin. Guided first by others—his mother, ambitious nobles, rival houses—he was less sovereign than instrument. Until, eventually, instrument became predator.”

The slide changed.

Now a woodcut: bodies thrown in shadow, a tilted crown, flames or banners in the background—it was difficult to tell which, because power likes to resemble fire.

“His later instability reshaped the kingdom,” Professor Choi went on. “Families fell. Fortunes collapsed. Power devoured itself and called the result necessity.”

I wrote instability / manipulation / consolidation through fear in my notes.

But the image of the boy’s face stayed in my head, stubborn as a splinter.

The lecture moved on: bloodlines, court factions, marriages as policy, dynastic instability, the usual cheerful themes of European history.

“Your midterm,” Professor Choi said at last, “will cover these alliances. Focus on causes, not gossip. Remember: history is written by survivors. Sometimes only barely.”

That line stayed with me.

Sometimes only barely.

The class ended in the usual rustle of relief—zippers, chairs scraping, laptops snapping shut with the decisiveness of people pretending they had retained more than they had.

We spilled into the corridor blinking like we’d been kept too long underground.

Hye-jin hooked her arm through mine before I could think too hard. “Library,” she announced. “If I don’t start now, my obituary will say died of procrastination and weak planning.”

“Put me beside you,” I muttered, yawning so hard my jaw clicked.

Daniel hurried after us, muttering British English vocabulary under his breath like it was some kind of private exorcism.

The library swallowed us whole.

Cooler air. Dust. Ink. The cathedral hush of students trying not to become statistics.

Hye-jin went straight for the medieval section with the terrifying decisiveness of a woman who trusted shelves more than people. Her hand skimmed spines, paused, selected.

When she turned back, she was holding a crimson-covered volume with cracked gold lettering.

Lives of the House of Vervaux.

Every muscle in my body seemed to notice before my mind did.

“That looks cursed,” I said.

She was already carrying it to a table by the window.

The book landed heavily between us. Old paper. Old glue. The smell of dry years and careful hands. It opened with a sigh that sounded uncomfortably like resignation.

Inside: portraits, genealogies, coats of arms, tiny notes in the margins from some past student with better self-control than mine. History arranged into columns, names aligned like headstones pretending to be information.

Hye-jin adjusted her glasses and began reading aloud in the low sharp voice she reserved for facts that mattered.

“Here,” she said, tracing a line with one finger. “The prince who was not meant to reign. Records suggest he was controlled first by his mother, then by court favorites, then by his own paranoia. Executions escalated. Noble houses were purged. Entire branches disappeared.”

Daniel grimaced. “That is… not very Disney.”

“History rarely is,” Hye-jin replied.

She turned another page.

“Here. Families tied to the conflict. Beaufort. Navarret. Saint-Clair. And…” Her finger paused. Her eyes lifted to mine for the briefest second. “…Vervaux.”

The name landed in me like a stone dropped into deep water.

Not loud.

Not survivable either.

“Who?” Min-jun asked, dragging over a chair and collapsing into it backwards.

“A Loire Valley house,” Hye-jin said briskly. “Moderately influential, regionally strategic, apparently doomed. Most members died in the later purges. Only daughters survived, at least temporarily.”

I leaned in before I could stop myself. “Temporarily?”

Hye-jin read.

“Annabel de Vervaux. Reclusive in youth. Reports of frail health. Later presented at her sister’s debut gathering. Shortly thereafter matched to a politically useful husband. Following the marriage, accounts describe her as unstable, melancholic, or disordered depending on the source.” Her mouth tightened. “Eventually declared unfit. Confined. Lived out the rest of her life in isolation.”

For a moment, I could not hear the library.

Not the soft turning of pages. Not the footsteps on carpet. Not the copy machine breathing itself to death in the distance.

Only that sentence.

Presented at her sister’s debut gathering.

Matched.

Declared unstable.

Confined.

The room went strangely thin around the edges.

“That’s…” I heard myself say, aiming for casual and missing by a mile. “Awful.”

Hye-jin nodded, still reading. “Awful is history’s favorite genre.”

Daniel exhaled through his nose. Even Min-jun, usually incapable of respecting silence, didn’t joke right away.

I looked back down at the page.

The words blurred slightly, then steadied.

Annabel de Vervaux.

Not a dream then.

Or not only a dream.

At least the name had existed. The family had existed. Which should have been comforting somehow—proof that my brain had simply grabbed onto fragments from class and embroidered them into emotional damage.

It was not comforting.

Because now the dream had a grave.

Now the house had an ending. And the ending was a locked room. I forced myself to take notes. Not because I wanted to. Because if I stopped moving, I might start shaking.

Debut party. Political marriage. Confinement after marriage. Each phrase looked innocent on the page. Each one felt like a threat.

Hye-jin stretched and shut the book halfway. “Useful for the exam,” she said.

Useful.

I almost laughed.

Instead I nodded and let them gather notes and references and deadlines around me while my mind kept returning, helplessly, to Isolde’s hand in mine. To Mother’s voice. To the word safe. To the knowledge that somewhere in the machinery of that house, a party had already begun becoming inevitable.

By the time we left the library, the sky outside had gone dim and metallic. The evening passed in a smear of study materials, snack wrappers, and overused pens. We ended up in the dormitory common room because no one had the energy to pretend productivity required aesthetics anymore.

I sat cross-legged on the floor with my notebook open and the name Annabel refusing to leave my head. My notes had turned crooked. My coffee had gone cold. The room smelled like paper, sugar, and poor decisions. I stared at the latest alliance chart until the lines began to look less like history and more like warning signs.

Then, to no one at all, I said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep today.”