venniie_
They called the church merciful; Anneliese knew better.
Taken from a valley convent at twelve, where the abbess taught her to read, to count, and to distrust anyone who loves God loudly, the foundling Anneliese carries one inheritance: a ledger. Every face measured, every kindness priced, every mercy audited, because she learned young that no god is coming to collect the debts owed to children like her.
Then a tall, weary lord with the lion of the empire's house on his coat lifts her out of a church corridor like a man lifting a thing out of a river, and she is carried into the house of Neuschwanstein: a marchioness who counts her household like a shepherd counting sheep at dusk; four children who have each decided, without telling each other, that this strange, blunt, sun-colored girl is theirs; and a lord who teaches her the empire through a chessboard and hands her the true ledgers of his house with one condition, that she remain what no one has ever paid her to be: unbought, unbound, and all seeing.
Anneliese believes in no god, no good, and no evil. She believes only in accounts, and in the day they come due, even if she must deliver the summons to the pope himself. But the household she has been adopted into is a golden house in a golden age, and golden ages keep their own ledgers too: a lady whose strength is quietly spending itself; a Church whose cardinals smile like wolves; a foreign kingdom in her blood that no one, not even she, has named. And one day a girl of fourteen will arrive at the gates as the marchioness's new wife, carrying no ledger at all, only seven years of memories that have not yet happened.
Two auditors and one house of a fairy tale is about to be balanced. A retelling of A Stepmother's Märchen from the other side of the ledger, where the stepmother story begins years earlier, with the girl who was there first.