"Uther, wake up, we're already late!" I said hurriedly, picking my dress up from the wooden floor. I scanned the room for the rest of my clothes. It was an inn room, the typical accommodation that the prince and I shared when we traveled, which was fairly frequent.

  And there they were, below a desk near the door. I quickly retrieved them, mumbling something about Uther's lack of consideration for my clothing. I was half ready when I checked the double-sized bed.

  "Just a few more minutes... I slept late yesterday..." the man below the sheets grunted, as if it had nothing to do with me, and returned to sleep.

  That required escalation.

  "Don't worry, Prince Uther, you can sleep all you want. I'll ask the Caravan Master to wait. I'm sure your mother, the Queen, will be very understanding and forgiving if the victory celebration needs to be postponed because her son overslept."

  "I am awake!" Uther screamed, darting upright.

  "Good morning." I gave him a quick peck on the lips and finished buttoning my bodice. "I'll check with the Caravan Master if everything is in order. You can get ready and join us later."

  I made the final adjustments to my dress, a grey and white one that was the standard for the castle servants, and finally, I got the last item that I needed to get ready: a thick leather choker with a frontal silver tag neatly inscribed with the Dimetres family royal seal.

  My slave collar.

  I fixed it to my neck. It was merely a formal collar, with no locks or magical contingences engraved, but it would be very disrespectful to my master and the royal family of Central for me to be outside without it.

  After refreshing a little and resolving the latest issues with our departure, I went to the market where the caravan was assembling. The city of Ravenwood was a rural village less than one day from the Capital of Central and was famous for its wine and not much else.

  The main reason the Queen decided to procure the food for the victory celebration here is that its fields were only lightly damaged by the monster army invasion, and it was probably the only city near the capital with any spare food that we could purchase.

  The market was morose, with only our two carriages being loaded and few people coming and going.

  I approached a bald middle-aged man with a prominent belly that was overseeing the loading of the carriages.

  “Caravan Master, I am the personal servant of Prince Uther Dimetres of the Central Kingdom. I came to verify if everything is ready for our departure.” I said in a formal tone and my head slightly bowed.

  “Thanks, lass.” The man shook my hand in an excited and casual way. “Everything is ready” he gave me some papers with the complete invoice “the only thing missing is that the Guild said I should wait for a gift or something.”

  “It is me” I said looking at the papers “I am Gift, it is my name.”

  “That is an unusual name. It must cause a lot of confusion.”

  “It surely does … this value over here … what is this value under Security.”

  “Well … We had arranged for the caravan to be escorted by a lance of knights, but there were sights of some monster near the river, and they went to hunt it yesterday. I believe the Guild had not informed them that the prince would be traveling with us.

  “Since we are in a tight schedule, I just offered this unreasonable sum to get the adventurers and mercenaries that I was able to find in such a short notice to be our escort.”

  Traveling without a strong escort the first few months after the battle in the capital was basically suicide, but the bigger packs of monsters had been driven off by the knights or adventurer groups, especially around the main roads, so now it was mostly safe.

  Prince Uther alone would probably be able to deal with regular bandits or a small pack of monsters. The problem would be if we found a big one, and there were some very scary monsters during the battle, but then, having a knight escort would not make much of a difference in this scenario.

  We departed early so we could reach the capital late at night. The mercenaries the Caravan Master hired were probably a ragtag band that was paid to fight small groups of monsters around the farms of Ravenwood. They were five men that used disparate pieces of armor and weapons. Two had horses, the other ones walked around us. Under normal circumstances, we could hire a similar group for a fifth of what we were paying them.

  The trip started without incidents, the farmlands slowly giving way to a forest. There were still visible signs of the battle that happened nearby. Broken weapons, an abandoned cart and even some rotten carcasses that I tried not to think about what they were.

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  “Sorry for delaying our departure, I hoped we would be able to sort that thing in only one day” said Uther riding at the side of the carriage I was traveling.

  Uther was an athletic man of 24 years, with dark grey eyes and black hair. His bear arms showed some minor scars earned by combat, heroics and bad risk management. He never lost that mischievous grim of a boy that caused so much trouble that people just gave up on trying to correct him.

  “There is nothing to excuse, Master. It was unfortunate that we could not uncover any useful information.” I replied with a smile.

  The truth was, we should have left three days ago. However, we stayed after hearing that a general from the Armored Sorcerer’s council had spent a couple of days in this village during the rout of the monster army. There was a chance he might have revealed something about the Armored Sorcerer—or more specifically, the Seal—to someone here.

  In the end, it was all for nothing. The general had done little more than threaten the villagers, divulged nothing of importance, and fled as soon as the army from the Capital approached. Unfortunately, it took us three whole days to piece all of this together.

  Uther posture changed, he became sharp, looking fixed at the trees to the left. The horses behaved erratically. Something was wrong.

  The trees started to shake, the sound of sticks and dry leaves being crushed by huge steps made my heart race and my blood run cold.

  “Get the horse and run” ordered Uther as he dismounted and drew his sword without ever taking his eyes off the trees.

  The contours of the shadow in the trees started to give form to the creature as it approached. It was huge, more than double the size of a grown man. It had uncanny long limbs that ended in hands with claws big as swords. The face was elongated, with two preeminent fangs in the lower jaw and pointy ears. The eyes were red, as most creatures tied to the Abyss, and the skin was a greenish black.

  A troll.

  I started to tremble and struggled not to throw up. I had seen up close a troll, much smaller than this one, rip a man in half and bit off the head of another one. It was killed, but took with him four of the seven soldiers that fought it.

  The images and smells of those nightmarish days of the Capital’s siege were still fresh in my mind.

  I used all my willpower to just get down from the carriage and stay upright. I tried to get to the horse, but my trembling legs were not responding. I would at least try to not get in the way of the guards …

  They were running away as fast as they could.

  “That was money well spent,” I mumbled bitterly.

  A troll is not a creature you should fight without preparation. It can regenerate as fast as a regular human can cut. You need fire to stop it from healing, but we had nothing we could use as a weapon.

  Several fighters together could overload its healing capabilities and kill it, but Uther alone …

  He probably was aware of the risk and was just buying time for me to flee, time I was wasting in my paralysis and indecision.

  I could force myself to mount the horse and run, but there was one thing I could try...

  Would it work?

  I never tried with a monster that powerful and was totally aware that I should not do it. The risks were just too great.

  But I did not want Uther to die. I really, really did not want that.

  I forced myself to walk, not to the horse, but in the direction of the troll that was moments away from lunging at Uther.

  “Mister troll…” The words I spoke were unassured and tentative, but there was also a wrongness in my voice, like the vibrations of my vocal cords and the movement of my mouth did not match the sounds I was emitting. “I am sorry if we bothered you. We don’t want to fight; we are just travelling on this road, and we just want to go on our way in peace”.

  The monster stopped and looked at me, unsure. It became upright and came in my direction.

  I wanted to run more than anything in my life, but I was shaking so bad that I just couldn’t.

  It came so close that I could smell its breath.

  And it kneeled, replying in a clear voice with words that only I could understand:

  “As you wish, one that speaks in the name of the Gods.”

  ***

  My earliest memories were from the school.

  I called it school, but it was a training center that purchased children to train, educate and sell later as high value slaves.

  Sometimes a slave woman had a child that her master did not want, sometimes a free family would be in dire economic distress. Slavers would also capture people outside the boundaries of the civilized lands. As for me, I never knew what my origin was.

  I would say that my childhood was mostly happy. There were expectations that I needed to meet and in doing so I would not be punished. I followed the rules and kept my head down, which meant I was treated fairly well. Accepting that others would decide my fate was just the way things were. It was the only life I knew, so I didn't question it.

  It was with surprise that I was chosen by the queen herself to be the second prince's birthday present. A surprise because of all the prospects available to me, this was the best I could ever hope for, and I was not sure if I even deserved it.

  I was pretty, mind you, but I had an ordinary kind of beauty, the one that could be found in a farmer's daughter or a tavern girl. I had pale skin with pink undertone, brown hair, brown eyes, and a well-proportioned body, but I would also fade in a crowd. There was nothing particularly remarkable about me.

  It was a long tradition, dating back from the Old Empire, that a high rank noble man would be accompanied by a personal servant. A personal servant was part maid, part secretary, part concubine. That would be my life, so I embraced it with a sense of purpose.

  Prince Uther was not what I expected.

  The troublemaker of the royal family, always getting involved in problems and emerging victorious by the skin of his teeth.

  It was obvious to anyone that met him that he was destined for great things, like the World wanted to tell a story and had chosen him as the protagonist.

  And I loved him.

  But the same reason that drew us close also created a gap that would never bridge: He was a prince, and I was his slave. One day he would marry a royal woman, by love or by the necessities of his position. That day, I would try to have a good relationship with his wife, so I could stay by his side and help raise his children. I was obedient and aware of my place, so I hoped for nothing more.

  I understood that whatever tales the World would spin, I was just a minor character. But that was fine by me. I was satisfied with the prospect of living a small, quiet life in the background.

  But fate, as things turned out, would have none of it.