An Elegant Ruin

The House of Elperts had squandered its fortune with impeccable grace.

"What did you just say, Noah?"

"I asked you to take me as your lover, madam."

Truly, it was an absurd thing to hear from someone she hadn't seen in so long.

"Why on earth would I?"

"Because you, too, have Elperts blood in your veins."

The Counts of Elperts had been a noble and distinguished house for generations. A pureblood line, descended from the most exalted ancestry — and the decline of the Elperts family had unfolded with all the elegance of their long history.

"Though not at present."

Of course, that elegance bore no resemblance to what commoners imagined by the word. The Elperts had never donated their wealth to coddle the weak, nor gone into trade to grow their holdings. As if to flaunt their detachment from money, they simply spent it. They spent, and gambled, and gambled away their own lands. One would search far and wide to find aristocrats so supremely refined.

"Even beneath a Lamplis."

As the man said it, something unusual flickered in his eyes — and then was gone.

Kasika Elperts had been working as a governess since she was sixteen. Putting a sixteen-year-old to work was, by any clear-eyed standard, child abuse — but she had had no money. She lived in a mansion with soaring ceilings, yet those ceilings held neither chandeliers nor so much as a lamp. If she did not work, she could not even scrape together the black bread for a single meal.

Her grandfather, Count Cesare Elperts, was as proud as his illustrious name suggested — a man who had elegantly ruined the family fortune and still could not bring himself to let go of what remained.

They kept a maid, poor as they were. Poorer than the maid themselves, in fact.

Kasika had suggested they simply sell the Elperts estate, but Cesare Elperts would not hear of it. The house was already mortgaged to the hilt; the moment he died, the banks and the creditors would carve it up between them without ceremony.

And there was the question of how her uncle — a boy of eleven or twelve — was meant to live afterward. That, she could not begin to fathom.

And yet.

In the midst of all this, Cesare Elperts had gone about sowing his seed. The family line must be carried on, he said. Kasika Elperts was a woman, after all — she would leave for another house eventually.

Empty-handed, without a coin of dowry.

As if anyone would take her.

Even the money she scraped together from tutoring went straight to filling Elperts stomachs. At best it bought black bread and thin soup — and Kasika never touched a bite of it herself, all in the name of thrift. Fortunately, the household she taught provided her lunch. Three days a week, she ate one meal like a human being.

A carriage came for her as well, right up to the front gate, so she didn't spend a coin on fares.

Riding in that carriage, Kasika made her way once more to her employer's house. It was another count's family, same as her own — except this one had money in abundance. That was how the landed nobility lived: they paid heavy taxes, but they reaped a great deal more.

The Elperts had once held lands of their own, too. Everyone before Cesare Elperts had gambled them away, piece by piece, until the estate was sold off in fragments.

Part of those scattered lands, word had it, had been bought up by the House of Lambroise. That parcel sat along the coast, and the Lambroise who pioneered its sea lanes supposedly collected several hundred gold a year in trade duties alone. It made her stomach ache. A jealousy rose in her, as though they were enjoying assets that might have been hers — as though something had been stolen out from under her.

And yet it was Lambroise money that fed the Elperts, too.

Kasika worked as a governess at the Lambroise estate, teaching the second of the count's two sons — Noah Lambroise — general etiquette and the fundamentals of law.

When she had first taken the post, Noah had been ten, six years her junior; three years on, he was still only thirteen. Tall for thirteen, admittedly. The elder son, Cayden Lambroise, was tall as well, which meant the younger would likely grow taller still.

Insufferable. The second son of a rich count's family.

To Kasika, eldest granddaughter of a dying count's house, it was the stuff of dreams.

"Tutor?"

Good family, good looks. Absolutely insufferable.

And a man besides, so his life would run smooth as silk from here to the grave.

In truth, Kasika had always believed things would have been different had she been born a son. Cesare Elperts would have done anything, anything at all, for him — just as he now did for her uncle, Cesare the Second.

Even setting that aside, there had been ways to preserve the county. Joining the army, for one. But Cesare Elperts would surely have opposed it — because Kasika's father, in his own attempt to save the family, had entered the military academy as a boy, gone round and round the battlefields, and died young in one of them.

Gazing at his son's body, Cesare Elperts had wept and wailed. You should have left at least one son behind before you went.

The old bastard.

"Tutor?"

"Yes. Go ahead."

"I don't quite understand this part."

If Kasika had grown up so crooked, Cesare Elperts deserved the lion's share of the blame. The boy in front of her, by contrast, was kind and considerate, and capable of thinking of others. Rich, high-born, handsome, and good-natured.

Truly insufferable. And yet — what would it feel like, to be born that way? She genuinely wanted to know.

A boy born holding so much, who had never once belonged to the losing side, who could always afford to keep his footing, who had never known desperation and so had never needed to cultivate a single cruel bone in his body.

Insufferable, all the same.

Wearing her public face, Kasika smiled and looked where Noah was pointing.

"Ah, this part… You have to read it this way."

But even this work was not to last much longer.

Kasika would soon marry and leave the capital. Sold off without a single coin of dowry — "sold" might sound harsh, but that was precisely what it was. To a small margraviate, far from the capital.

That margraviate, having run out of heirs, had adopted a child from a cadet branch; that branch, having also failed to produce an heir, had cast about for a branch of a branch, and when even they bore no sons, had dug up the nearest living relation and seated him in the margrave's chair.

And he, too, had no children.

By that point, Kasika thought, one rather suspected a problem with the seed itself — but no, it was never their fault, only the women's. And perhaps because of some complex about their bloodline, they coveted only noble-born women. Not that anyone would go to that margraviate willingly.

Kasika Elperts was going.

Because it was one of the few margraviates with money, and it had promised to provide for her uncle — Cesare Elperts the Second.

It was a rotten business, truly. The old man was selling her to another old man. The margrave was seventy-two now.

An ancient relic whose breathing would turn to rattling before long. They said he didn't even have a drop of other blood to call on. Kasika's future stretched before her, bleak and trackless. Sometimes she thought it might be better to have been born a commoner than to live like this.

"Anything else you don't understand?"

At her question, Noah murmured, "Well, there is one thing." Wondering, not for the first time, how few lessons she had left, Kasika asked, "And what would that be?"

"There's a cat I've been trying to catch lately, but it keeps running away. The closer I get, the further it goes."

"A cat…"

What a trifling worry that was. She had told him to ask about the lesson. Kasika looked at the boy. He was gazing back at her, eyes bright.

"Then stop chasing it and try luring it instead. Cats like toys and such, don't they?"

"Lure it…?"

"Give it something to eat."

At that, the boy nodded, beaming. Why did his unguarded smile look so hateful to her? It came down to her own sense of inferiority, every bit of it. At times Kasika found this life of hers repulsive. Even as she caught herself wishing she could see that bright face crack — just once — she buried it and spoke her part.

"You'll do wonderfully at anything, Noah. Even at the Academy."

"The Academy is what worries me. I'd much rather have you, Miss Elperts."

Right. Kind of you to say, at least.

"I wish you would stay with me. Always."

Listen to yourself.

But Kasika said nothing of her circumstances. That was not a conversation to have with a boy so young.

"Shall we end here for today, then?"

"But there's still time—"

"I have a message to deliver to the Countess. I'll stay a little longer at our next lesson."

With that, Kasika rose from her seat. Noah looked openly reluctant, but under the flat cruelty of her manner, he did not press further.

Whether or not she wished to give up her post as governess was not Kasika's decision to make. Every choice belonged to the head of the house.

"A marriage, you say?"