Seraphine was just about to clear the castle gates and make her descent into the bustling town below when the firm, commanding voice of her Sire echoed out behind her:
"Seraphine, do you have a moment to speak with me in the study?"
The young heir let out a heavy sigh through her nose. It appeared that her plans to meet with Marta Reiss and violently leverage the peasant’s local connections to accelerate the agricultural revolution would have to wait.
Maintaining a dignified, measured pace, Seraphine turned and strode toward the Baroness's wing.
As she settled into the heavy oak chair across from the massive desk, Adelgarde Karsfeld was already pinning her with a deeply calculating, appraising stare.
The collar of the Baroness's tunic was left casually unbuttoned, exposing a generous stretch of deeply tanned cleavage and the brutal, thick structure of collarbones forged by a lifetime of bearing full plate armor.
Seraphine recognized that intensely measuring gaze entirely too well. But before she could utter a single word of protest, Adelgarde let out a heavy sigh - one that mirrored her firstborn’s frustration from just moments ago with uncanny precision.
"Seraphine, you have reached twenty years of age, and you still remain entirely without a betrothal. I fully understood the justifications in the past, however, with each passing day, genuine color and a healthy vitality are returning to your cheeks. Whatever regime you have subjected yourself to is clearly fortifying your body. Since your innate frailty is finally abandoning you, it is high time you focused your efforts on securing a wife and providing this bloodline with heirs."
Seraphine rested her chin on a clenched fist, while the fingers of her other hand began to drum a steady, rhythmic cadence against the carved armrest of the chair - an ingrained nervous habit carried over from the former life of Evelyn Weiss, one that always flared up whenever she was frantically calculating strategic vectors.
The heavy, hollow thud of her nails against the oak was the only sound echoing in the suffocating quiet of the study.
Her mind was firing on all cylinders, desperately hunting for a tactical avenue to punt this entire subject down the road. She had absolutely zero mental bandwidth for aristocratic matchmaking right now.
She was staring down a titanic mountain of industrial and agrarian reform; getting bogged down in toxic courtly courtship and fawning over some powdered noblewoman would incinerate her precious time. But she couldn't simply lay those raw calculations out on the desk - her grand designs were already dangerously toeing the line of usurping the Baroness's absolute feudal prerogative.
Adelgarde possessed a vain weakness for high fashion, but she was unequivocally not a stupid woman. She clearly recognized that Seraphine was harboring terrifyingly bold concepts in her head, but in the Baroness's worldview, the time to execute those ambitions would arrive when the heir actually seized the throne.
For the present moment, her absolute duty was to sire offspring and forge ironclad political alliances to cement the dynasty's standing.
Seraphine operated purely on the cold, calculated mentality of a 21st-century woman. In her previous life, she had fully intended to wait until her thirties to settle down - only after her career and financial independence were utterly unassailable.
In this brutal reality, dragging Karsfeld into the industrial era was going to take years of relentless, agonizing labor. One of her most crushing logistical nightmares was the grim reality that despite the staggering natural wealth buried in the Karsfeld valleys, the local population was small, entirely illiterate, and utterly unskilled - the overwhelming majority of them breaking their backs in the mud just to survive.
Without Adelgarde’s explicit authorization, Seraphine couldn't touch the treasury funds required to establish universal elementary education, which was the absolute, non-negotiable bedrock of any modern industrial society.
The relentless drumming of Seraphine’s fingers began visibly grating on the Baroness’s nerves. Adelgarde’s brow furrowed, preparing to ruthlessly dress her daughter down for a lack of composure, when the heir finally shattered the silence, her voice dripping with calculated resignation:
"Whom exactly did you have in mind, Sire?"
A fiercely triumphant smirk bloomed across Adelgarde's harsh lips. Her daughter was finally stepping up to shoulder the brutal realities of her station.
"You remember your cousin Rosalie, do you not? The third daughter of my sister Margarethe, the Countess von Rosenfeld of the Greifenmark."
Seraphine’s blood practically boiled in her veins. She had almost completely forgotten that in this stagnant feudal reality, deliberately cross-breeding cousins to violently consolidate dynastic power was standard operating procedure. Still, she maintained an absolutely flawless mask of stone, bowing to the archaic tradition:
"Little Rosalie von Rosenfeld? I haven't laid eyes on her in years. How old is she now, thirteen?"
Adelgarde nodded with profound satisfaction.
"She turns thirteen this year. The whispers from the court say she is rapidly blossoming into an exceptionally breathtaking young woman."
Seraphine practically had to bite through her own tongue to suppress a violent grimace of pure disgust. She had fully braced herself for an age gap, but this was a literal child!
Evelyn’s modern conscience instantly recoiled in absolute horror. However, her ruthlessly cold, analytical mind immediately hijacked the reaction, pivoting to a far more cynical calculus: officially locking down a betrothal to a child would guarantee her at least three to four years of absolute immunity before the girl reached an age deemed acceptable for marriage.
In that golden window, she could violently forge the barony into an unassailable industrial juggernaut, while the formal, ink-and-parchment contract would permanently silence the suffocating swarm of ambitious matchmakers circling her. And when the time finally came, she could always engineer a diplomatic crisis to shatter the betrothal before anything actually happened.
She tapped her fingers against the armrest one final, decisive time.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"I would naturally require an opportunity to evaluate her with my own eyes and ascertain exactly what kind of lady she is becoming..."
Adelgarde was slightly irritated by the distinct lack of immediate, overwhelming enthusiasm, but the very fact that Seraphine hadn't outright stonewalled the proposal was a massive victory in itself. The Baroness rose from her heavy desk, signaling the end of the summit, and escorted her daughter to the door.
"I shall dispatch a raven to your aunt Margarethe immediately to open the inquiry. We should expect a formal diplomatic response within a fortnight."
Seraphine nodded gracefully. The prospect of facing a formal court summit two or three months down the line granted her the critical time she needed to aggressively pack on muscle mass. Standing before the vicious, predatory gaze of the high aristocracy while still trapped in this painfully emaciated shell would be a catastrophic projection of weakness.
"I leave the logistics entirely in your capable hands, Sire."
***
Her subsequent descent into the town proved to be violently productive.
Marta Reiss had not been sitting idle - not only had she aggressively overhauled her own acreage, but she had ruthlessly infected her neighbors with the doctrine of the four-field rotation.
In a single day, she had successfully bullied three other homesteads into re-drawing their grids to implement the new agricultural cycle.
Marta clearly commanded immense, unshakeable respect among the local peasant women; Seraphine could comfortably delegate the grassroots agitation entirely to her.
For the next thirty days, Seraphine fully intended to lock herself into her grueling physical training and quietly, methodically weave an unbreakable web of loyalty among the common folk.
That evening, as she trudged back into the fortress with the sole intention of collapsing into a scalding bath, she had barely cleared the heavy iron gate when Marielle Karsfeld practically exploded from the shadows and violently threw her arms around Seraphine’s neck.
"Sister! Where did you run off to this time?" the little girl demanded, her face etched with genuine, adorable concern.
Seraphine smiled warmly and gently stroked the child’s soft golden hair.
"I was down in the settlement. It is the absolute duty of an heir to intimately understand the lives of her people."
Marielle instantly beamed, releasing her death grip on Seraphine’s neck.
"Well, you made it back just in time for supper! Let’s go eat!"
She marched proudly toward the dining hall, with Seraphine trailing right behind her. As they navigated the stone corridors, Seraphine distinctly felt that same, freezing prickle ghost across the back of her neck - Cordelia’s amateur espionage network was becoming increasingly clumsy.
She utterly ignored the spy’s presence, though she maintained a razor-sharp peripheral awareness of the shadowed alcoves, ensuring she didn't catch a crossbow bolt between the shoulder blades for her trouble.
When she entered the dining hall, the entire family was already seated at the table.
Historically, Seraphine was notoriously tardy, so her punctuality visibly surprised her parents.
Adelgarde and Isolde offered her warm, approving smiles, while Cordelia Karsfeld shot her a look dripping with pure, concentrated acid.
Seraphine took her seat directly across from the younger futa, pinning her with a mask of absolute, freezing indifference, when the soft, melodic voice of her mother suddenly shattered the quiet.
Isolde Karsfeld, her heavy cleavage shifting gently beneath the deeply plunging silk corset of her gown, asked with overflowing, maternal affection:
"So, Seraphine... I hear you have officially been betrothed?"
Seraphine nearly inhaled a lungful of wine. She snapped her gaze to her mother in sheer, unadulterated shock.
It had barely been a few hours since her summit in the study!
How in the deepest pits of hell did a non-committal inquiry instantly detonate into an ironclad, finalized contract?!
Did Adelgarde completely orchestrate this entire farce behind my back before I even walked into the room?!
Marielle dropped her silver fork onto her plate with a loud clatter, staring at her elder sister with massive, wide eyes.
"You're getting married?! Who is she? Is she pretty? Do I know her?!"
The little girl peppered the table with a barrage of breathless questions, completely oblivious to the vicious, high-stakes political maneuvering happening over her head.
Across the table, the blood instantly drained from Cordelia’s face, turning her as pale as a corpse. She had been absolutely certain that no sovereign house worth its salt would ever risk polluting their bloodline by marrying the sickly, useless firstborn.
She herself had poured immense resources and political capital into actively conspiring with the Count’s court in Tyravia to violently sever her elder sister from any local alliances.
How is it mathematically possible that a massively powerful dynasty from an entirely different county managed to quietly lock down such a monumental alliance entirely behind my back?!
Seraphine slowly, deliberately forced the violent trembling out of her hands. Her sapphire eyes narrowed into lethal, predatory slits as she drove a purely murderous glare directly into Adelgarde.
She clenched her fists so tightly under the table that her knuckles turned bone-white, desperately throttling the raw fury threatening to explode from her chest.
"What exactly have you done?!"
Adelgarde met her furious stare with the freezing, utterly unyielding gaze of a veteran warlord who brokered absolutely no dissent.
She had tolerated her firstborn’s pathetic weaknesses for far too long; the second the heir had finally demonstrated a shred of political ambition, the Baroness had ruthlessly decided not to waste a single second.
"You appeared amenable to the prospect, so I bypassed the tedious diplomatic theater and immediately dispatched a courier accepting Countess Margarethe von Rosenfeld’s terms in full."
Absolute, blinding rage boiled through Seraphine’s veins.
The terms had already been fully negotiated in advance, and her Sire was merely checking the temperature in the room!
Instead of buying herself years of political maneuverability, she had just been violently shackled to a legally binding, imperial contract in front of the entire continent. Absolutely furious, she ripped the heavy linen napkin from her lap, violently slammed it onto the oak table, and stormed out of the dining hall without another word, slamming the heavy door behind her.
She had entirely lost her appetite.
After scalding herself in a furious hot bath, she threw the deadbolt on her bedchamber door and collapsed onto the mattress. There was absolutely zero tactical value in endlessly agonizing over geopolitical maneuvers she could no longer control.
She simply had to grow more terrifyingly powerful - within a month, her brutal reforms in Karsfeld would begin yielding their first explosive dividends, and when that happened, she would be the one violently dictating the terms of engagement.
Meanwhile, on the exact opposite side of the fortress, in the lavish chambers of Cordelia Karsfeld, the pale, flickering flame of an oil lamp cast frantic, shivering shadows against the stone walls.
The young futa was violently scratching a heavy quill across a sheet of parchment. She was drafting an absolutely desperate plea to her co-conspirators in the capital of Tyravia, begging them to violently accelerate their assassination plots against her elder sister.
If Seraphine actually survived long enough to wed the heir of House von Rosenfeld and successfully sired a futa daughter with her, every single one of Cordelia’s grand ambitions would be permanently ground into dust.
When the very last drop of oil burned away in the lamp, Cordelia tightly rolled the parchment, viciously bound it to the leg of a messenger pigeon, and hurled the bird out into the pitch-black void of the night, aimed straight for the towering spires of Arnsbruck.