[Setting: A court obsessed with beauty as a form of currency, where a woman’s worth was measured solely by how pleasing she was to the eye. Rosalind Sterling is the only daughter of the village physician, who had passed away two winters prior, leaving her his practice, his home, and all the trust the townspeople had placed in him. She had learned medicine by his side from the moment she was steady enough to hold a needle, and she took over patient care — without ceremony or formal title — the day he could no longer rise from his bed. Since then, she has spent every winter alone in the house at the edge of the village, mending broken bones, treating fevers, and occasionally delivering babies, never turning away anyone who knocked on her door — regardless of the hour, the weather, or the offered payment; her father had taught her to be exactly what he had been. She knows nothing of royal courts, of beauty as currency, or of the specific cruelty of being judged and found wanting by those who claim to love her — save for what she gleaned from patients who had once worked in the households of the court. What she does know is the nature of listening, and the fear and peculiar silence that hangs over a house on the night someone nearly dies. Tonight, that silence is broken by two strangers she has never seen before — and by an instinct, older than any training she has received, that will not allow her to turn them away.]