I don't remember what triggered it. I never did. But I remember the crack of my leg giving way, the white-hot agony that swallowed the world, and the sound of my own screams—screams I couldn't hold back, screams that only made her worse. Her big hands, calloused and powerful, had found their target with terrible accuracy. When it was over, I lay on the dirt floor, my leg bent at an angle that made me sick to look at, and my mother stood over me, trembling, her face a mask of horror at what she had done.

  She didn't call the healer. She couldn't. What would she say? How would she explain? So, she splinted my leg herself, badly, and I lay in that hovel for two months while the bone knit crooked and the fever came and went in waves. I survived. I always survived. But I walked with a limp for years afterward, until the King's healing touch—years later, when he finally learned what had happened—straightened what had grown wrong.

  After that day, I learned other things too. I learned how to curl into a ball to protect my vital organs. I learned how to bite down on my own lip until it bled, because crying only made the blows come harder. I learned to read the signs—the way her eyes would go flat, the way her jaw would set, the way her massive shoulders would square—and I would run. When I could.

  When I couldn't, I learned that if I went completely still and completely silent, eventually she would tire. Eventually she would stop. Eventually she would look at what she had done with horror in her eyes before retreating back into the silence or the weeping or whatever came next.

  The old midwife who had delivered me—one of the few women in the village who still spoke to my mother—came to check on me during those months when fever burned through me from my broken leg. I remember her hands, cool and gentle, and her voice, barely a whisper, as she told me truths my mother never would while my mother slept in the corner of our hovel.

  "Your mother was sold to your father's family when she was barely a woman," the midwife said, her old eyes full of a sorrow too deep for tears. "A transaction. A trade for some livestock and a promise of protection. Your father's family was wealthy once, you know. But they fell on hard times, and by the time your mother arrived, there was nothing left but debts and desperate men."

  She told me how my father had been bedridden even then, struck by a mysterious wasting illness shortly after his marriage. How my mother had nursed him for years, watching him decay, knowing she had been traded to a ghost. How his family had eventually vanished one night—fled from their debts, leaving their crippled son and his young wife alone with nothing but a leaking roof and the whispers of the village.

  "And then," the midwife said, her voice dropping even lower, "there was you."

  I was not my father's child. That much became clear as I grew, with my dark hair and my eyes that no one in my mother's family or my father's could claim. The midwife never said it directly—some truths are too dangerous to speak aloud—but she told me enough.

  My father—the man I was meant to call father—lay in that bed, wasting away, staring at the ceiling with eyes that saw nothing. When awake, he would fix his gaze on some invisible point above him, never speaking, never moving, never acknowledging the world around him. When asleep, he would simply close his eyes and retreat further into whatever void had claimed him years before I was born. He was a ghost who happened to still breathe.

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  My mother lived a cold, lifeless existence with this man. No warmth. No conversation. No comfort. Just the endless labour of keeping him alive—feeding him, cleaning him, turning him so the bedsores wouldn't fester—while he stared through her as if she were made of air.

  The midwife, old and tired and too familiar with our family's secrets, told me the rest in hushed fragments over the years.

  My mother had sought warmth elsewhere. Not once, but several times. Desperate, lonely, starved for any human connection, she had opened her door to traveling merchants, wandering craftsmen, men who passed through the village and would not stay. They gave her moments of comfort, of feeling seen, of feeling like a woman instead of a nursemaid to a corpse. And then they left.

  Three times before me, those encounters left her with child. Three times, she carried hope in her belly—hope that this baby, this piece of warmth she had stolen from an uncaring world, might be the thing that saved her.

  Three times, she looked at those infants after they were born, saw the faces of the men who had used her and left her, and could not bear what she had made.

  The midwife's voice dropped to barely a whisper when she told me this part. The first baby, she said, was born sickly. It would have died anyway, probably. But the second—a healthy boy with his father's dark eyes—simply stopped breathing one night, and only the midwife noticed the faint bruising on his tiny neck that no one bothered to question. The third was a girl, born blue and still, and my mother had wept and wept, but the midwife had seen the way her hands trembled, the way she could not meet anyone's eyes.

  "The guilt ate her alive," the midwife said, her old eyes wet with unshed tears. "She killed them because she couldn't bear to look at them—at the proof of her failures, her desperate grabs for love, her shame. And then she had to live with what she'd done."

  I stared at her, my child's mind struggling to comprehend such darkness.

  "But she kept me," I whispered. "Why? Why did she keep me?"

  The midwife shook her head slowly. "I don't know, child. Maybe by the time you came, she had no more strength left for killing. Maybe something in you was different—the way you looked at her, the way you fought to live even when your leg was broken and the fever raged. Or maybe..." She paused, searching for words.

  The midwife reached out and touched my cheek with a hand worn rough by decades of delivering babies and laying out the dead.

  "Your mother is a broken woman, Giana. What was done to her broke her. What she did broke her more. But you—you survived. You keep surviving. And I think, in her own twisted way, she needs you to. You're the only proof left that she was ever more than just a nursemaid to a dead man. You're the only warmth she has left, even if she doesn't know how to show it without burning you."

  I didn't understand then. Not fully. But I carried her words with me, turning them over in the quiet moments, trying to make sense of a love that looked like hate and a mother who destroyed the things she made.

  The guilt had consumed her. That was the only explanation that ever-made sense. The guilt of the affairs, the guilt of the three tiny graves hidden at the edge of the village where no one asked questions, the guilt of knowing her husband lay dying in the next room while she carried other men's babies. It had curdled inside her, turning into something black and poisonous, and by the time I was born, there was nothing left of the woman who had once laughed and sung while she worked.

  Only this shell. Only this sickness. Only me, to bear the weight of it all.

  I never told the King any of this. Not then. The shame was too great, the wounds too fresh, the story too tangled with pain to be shaped into words. I simply climbed the mountain, day after day, and let him be my escape from the truth I couldn't face.