A Court of Truths and Revival

Stowaway

SEREN

Being invisible did nothing to cover the muddy footprints she left behind but the people of Hybern had bigger concerns than a trail of small feet appearing with no trace of their source.

Grubby orphans cried in the winding streets, weeping for parents that had perished on the battlefield. Widows ran food stands and stared blankly ahead, not batting an eye at the fruit hovering away from their stock. There were hardly any males of age, making Seren assume Hybern had pushed all those under his rule into war whether they liked it or not.

From what little she knew of the island that lay West of Prythian, they'd probably scrambled over each other for a chance to get their human slaves back. Seren hadn't lived through the first war, but she'd been born in its aftermath and heard her father prattle on about its atrocities endlessly in her youth. He'd spat about the vengeful cunt who had no business being appointed a General and the cranky King across the sea whose library of old spell books should be burnt to ashes that could be shoved up his ass. His stories both terrified and intrigued Seren until her mother inevitably swooped in and reprimanded her mate for speaking of such things with their young daughter.

She clamped down on those memories quickly before she could fall into the endless hole of how it all ended.

Seren's eyes fluttered as she stood in a dark alley, scoping out her next move.

She needed information. Without being able to speak to anyone, it was going to prove difficult to piece together the state of the world, but from the looks of it, things had ended dismally for Hybern. Deservedly so. She could only hope that equated to Prythian ending victoriously and that whatever remained of her family made it through. They must have. Surely, she'd feel something if they were gone. The intricacies of the King's spells were a mystery, but they wouldn't have stopped her from inheriting the throne if the worst occurred.

That thought alone pushed her from the alley and led her to the nearest establishment. The Drowned Drake was a poor excuse for an inn, being mostly a tavern with a few rooms on a second level available to rent. Seren became instantly grateful for her predicament since it allowed her to avoid those that would seek coin or other forms of payment for her use of the moldy bathing chamber.

Closing herself in, she realized it wasn't the chamber that stank, but her. There were no baths in the dungeons and even if there had been, she wouldn't have gotten an escort to one. On occasion, Brannagh would complain of her smell and bring buckets of cold water to dump on her. She'd hated that shock, but the one time it had been opposite, the water had scalded her skin and left burns that healed achingly slow.

Keeping the bath lukewarm, Seren slipped in after stripping. Gritting as her bare back that had never quite recovered touched the porcelain edge, she finally settled. Within a minute, she was forced to get out and drain the water that had turned black. Again, she repeated the process until finally finding herself in water that didn't disgust her. The bar of soap she found was a disappointment. Unscented and abrasive, it scratched her skin until she was bright red.

At least it was color, she thought with a sigh. Once, she'd had a luxurious tan that matched that of her mother's race, but she'd emerged from the dungeon with the waxy skin of a corpse. A half-broken comb proved her hair unfixable and all she could manage was to move the knots from her scalp down to her shoulders. Numb to the beauty it had once held, Seren took a discarded dagger that had been left in the lone cupboard under the sink to it, severing it at her shoulders. She had no use for hair that fell past her hips anyway—no mother to sit behind her and braid it into beautiful plaits.

With its weight gone, she felt fresher and she was able to stand a little straighter to pretend she was someone else, if only for a second. The stars that had once shone in her eyes were dormant, leaving the violet color dark enough that they could be mistaken for black, though no one would see them anyway. Not yet, at least.