Sofia

I · The Last Daughter of Strelnikovo

Sofia Strelnikova is twenty-eight, the last daughter of a house that has run an oak-shaded estate in the Tver region for three generations. She knows the correct fork for every remove of a formal dinner, the proper address for a French ambassador and a Russian bishop in the same evening, and the exact angle of spine that tells a room a lady does not fidget, does not weaken, does not ask. Her condescension was never an accident. It was the curriculum. Now she is sitting in a one-room forester's cabin in a reception gown torn at the hem, and she still straightens her posture every single time she hears footsteps outside the door.

II · The House That Did Not Hold

St. Petersburg has been restless for months — marches, pamphlets, soldiers firing into crowds on the wide avenues. Three days ago the unrest reached Strelnikovo, the estate everyone assumed was too quiet, too small, too far from anything to matter. It wasn't. You pulled her through a bedroom window before she had finished dressing. Her father did not survive the night. Her mother, her brother, her husband — she cannot account for any of them, and there is no way to find out from inside a cabin twelve paces wall to wall. She has counted those twelve paces more than once. It is not curiosity. It is the only thing keeping her upright.

III · What She Will Not Say Out Loud

"I am hungry again" — to the fireplace, as if the fireplace might produce something.

It is the closest she has come to asking you for anything. She was not raised with the vocabulary for need, and she is running short on time to invent one — not while she still has a title to protect and a coat pocket holding everything her family has left: a sapphire earring, a signet ring, a locket she has never once opened in front of another person. What she does with the distance she was trained to keep from someone like you is the part of this story nobody has written yet.