Prologue
AUREN
Ten years ago
The sky doesn’t sing here.
It doesn’t dance or play, it doesn’t sink against my skin with a sweet perfume, or breeze through my hair with a fresh kiss.
Not like it did in Annwyn.
The rain weeps down, and water floods the ground, but even that doesn’t sweep away the stench of this place. The sun dips and the moon crests, but there is no harmony with the goddesses slumbering in their eggshell stars. This horizon is tepid and lacking.
Nothing feels as alive here as it did at home. But then, maybe those are just the make-believe memories of a little girl. Maybe Annwyn wasn’t like that at all, and I’ve forgotten.
If I have, I’d rather keep pretending. I like the way it is in my mind—overflowing with a vivaciousness that saturated my every sense.
Here, my senses are saturated too, but not in a good way.
Derfort Harbor is still drenched from this morning’s showers. Everything here is always waterlogged from either the sea or the sky. Sometimes both. There isn’t a single wood-pitched roof that isn’t sodden or a weathered door that isn’t peeling from the oppressive moisture.
The clouds often pull in storms from the ocean and toss them here. There’s nothing cleansing about the rain, though. It simply dumps back into the sea that fed it, reeking of fish while it floods the muddy streets.
The air is claggy today with a humidity that soaks through my dress and weighs down my lungs. I’ll be lucky if my clothes dry once I hang them up tonight, lucky if my hair is anything other than damp and frizzed.
But no one looks at my hair or clothes anyway. Greedy eyes always fall against my gold-pinched cheeks, roam over my skin that’s ten shades too gleaming to be real. That’s why I’m known as the painted girl. The golden orphan of Derfort Harbor. No matter what rags I wear, there’s absurd richness that sits beneath my sodden clothes. A worthless wealth of my skin that does nothing, yet has caused everything.
All along the market street, the vendor tarps are still dark, burlap sacks saturated, carts covered and dripping. I close my eyes and breathe, trying to pretend that I’m not smelling the sharp iron from the anchor maker. I’m not smelling the drenched wooden planks on the moored ships. I’m not smelling the crates of flailing fish mixed with the brined sand from the shore.
My imagination isn’t quite enough to stave off the stench.
Of course, the air would probably smell a little better if I weren’t sitting on top of the pub’s refuse bin. As terrible as the scent of old ale is, this spot is one of the driest and most shadowed, making it valuable real estate.
I shift my weight on the metal lid as I lean against the building at my back, gaze scanning the market alley. I shouldn’t be here. I should keep moving, but even that’s a major risk. Zakir has too many eyes in the city. It’s just a matter of time before I’m caught, whether I stay in one spot or not. I’m hiding from him, from the duties he’s placed upon me. I’m hiding from his thugs who roam the streets, keeping watch on the beggar children—not for their safety, but to make sure no one else encroaches on Zakir’s territory or steals from his thieves.
I’m hiding in a place where there is no hope of staying hidden.
Like a tug against my eyes, my gaze lifts, going between two vendor tents to see the ocean beyond. I watch the sails of the docked ships, their shapes like tethered clouds that try to pull toward the sky. My stomach squeezes at the sight of them, at their taunt of escape. A bobbing temptation of freedom that’s right there on the horizon.
It’s a lie.
Stowaways are punished severely in Derfort, and I’d be a fool to try it. More than a handful of kids at Zakir’s have tried it, and didn’t live to tell the tale. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way the gulls pecked at their flayed flesh from where they hung, their bodies left to sway in the tidal breeze and pucker beneath salted rain.
That smell, above all others, is by far the worst.
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
I flinch so badly that I scrape my arm on the rough limestone bricks at my back as Zakir appears in my shadowed spot, looming over me like a threat.