EIGHT YEARS LATER

  Plink. Plink… Plink…

  Each, a drop less of me.

  Already it slows, and tension builds with every lengthening silence between drops of liquid gold.

  “Recite our mantra, Aubrey,” Clara says, her sharp-edged voice a slicing echo in this hollow chamber.

  Another steady drip—leaked rainwater from the roof—pings a bucket in the far corner, out of cadence with the ever-slowing drip, drip, drip beneath my table. A draft blows in from the fireplace, rustling the drape of my mousy brown hair across the table. Goosebumps pucker across my naked skin. I just have to endure a little longer and I’ll get my sliver of freedom.

  “Composure. Commitment. Conviction,” I recite as I stare at the ceiling with my own personal challenge: to not blink. I count in my head the duration I can go without blinking. The hard oak table I lay on bites into my spine and scarred shoulder blades. Sometimes I count how long I can hold my breath, anything to distract. To not react.

  Lilianna yanks a hair from my left ankle, and I blink. Damnit. She swipes a smear of moisturizing ointment over the offending location as a silent apology—the only kindness my stepsister can bestow upon me in Clara’s presence.

  I know it kills her to be reduced to the role of a handmaiden, but Clara won’t risk anyone else’s presence in this room. The buying and selling of gold has long been banned for our own safety, as the wyvern attacks have nearly ceased entirely since its abolition—and the gold blood trade is even more forbidden.

  “Elaborate,” Clara says, her pin-straight, black hair tickling my arm. She pinches the flesh of my hip and tsks under her breath.

  I do not flinch, nor do I allow my breath to catch. Naked and exposed, I know she’s watching for any slip, any imperfection, and I refuse to fail. “One must maintain composure at all times. One must commit in entirety to the task. One must always act with conviction.”

  The mantra is the only gift Clara has ever given me. The only thing we will ever agree on. Today, I use it to remind myself that, just maybe, this season will be the one. Maybe my opportunity for escape really will arise. I’d grip that hope in my fist if I were allowed to move.

  The dripping stops—from my wrist, not the roof, which continues—and Clara lifts my arm, turning it over to inspect the freshly closed wound. It glows an odd pink beside the prior bloodletting scars hardly visible in the twisted, puckered flesh of my old, healed burns. And all of it an incongruous patch of gold from my palm to my elbow now.

  “I’ve much to buy today,” Clara says as she withdraws the jar from its slot under the table and counts the level of glistening gold blood inside with finger widths. Only three.

  Clara sighs and tucks the jar back under the table. She makes a dramatic show of ticking off her fingers, as if she’d not already decided the sum she wants of me long before stepping into this room. “I’ll need at least four fingers. Silk prices have gone up again—pity the most important events of the season happen with the trade routes still blocked by snows. The knife, Liliana.”

  Liliana sets down the ointment and hurries to fetch the dagger from the wall. She dutifully presents the blade in its ornately decorated golden sheath. Of all my father’s possessions Clara has sold away, it still ices me to see his dagger kept for this. Perhaps she keeps it because it was a gift from the King in honor of my father’s service as High Guard, but I suspect it’s because she knows it hurts me.

  I send my mind away as the familiar slide of steel against gilded sheath rings out, let myself drift back to that fateful day. To the images forever imprinted in my mind: the Wyvern’s massive iridescent green-gold wings. The flare of its nostrils as it breathed in the scent of me and Maurus and our charred flesh. The tilt of its boulder-sized head and those spectacularly gold eyes that stared into my soul. That beast is the reason I lay here today. The reason everything went wrong. A memory I grip every time my fortitude falters. I did this. I sought that majestic, beautiful terror. I got myself burned. I got my father killed.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  I swallow down the bitter reminder, my resolution steeling. Pain is only pain, after all.

  The blade bites into my wrist, and I do not flinch. I do not so much as catch my breath. I am perfect. An ache throbs at my wrist and up into my forearm as the steady golden flow resumes.

  Clara’s eyebrow twitches, her only tell of surprise and my heart leaps in triumph. She strokes her hand over the gold of my shoulder with a demure curve of her lips and lays my wrist back down on the table over the depression that drains into the jar below. The lines around the woman’s eyes, cheeks, and mouth have grown deeper and longer these past eight years of running this homestead on her own. “Very good.”

  Treacherous warmth trickles into my veins and I hate that a sliver of her praise can make me feel anything at all. “Thank you, stepmother.”

  Liliana ducks her head, long dark curls shadowing her face as she pretends not to care. I know better. I know she hates this as much as I do, and I can’t blame her. Why Clara forces her daughter to watch this every week, I’ll never understand. Pure cruelty, perhaps.

  I, the half-noble mutt, get every shard of Clara’s attention and nearly all of her coin. My dresses, my ointments, my tutoring—all expenses my father’s languishing estate cannot afford. I doubt Lilianna truly wants to trade places with me. I suspect she does, however, wish her lack of gold markings didn’t render her invisible and barely above a peasant to her own mother.

  “Recite our possibilities.” Clara passes my father’s blade back to Lilianna to clean and put away. What would he think if he knew what she uses it for today? Would he tear her from limb to limb as I long to?

  “Rael, Venon, and Privett,” I recite. The dripping is already slowing again, my wrist prickling with the familiar sensation of healing.

  “Go on,” Clara says.

  “Lord Rael has had no romantic relations or notions and thus is a possible, but unlikely, candidate. Heir Privett is out of the Kingdom until likely midsummer. He’s made no mention of marriage intent but is of age and has promising potential upon his return. And Heir Venon,” my voice catches, blast it, but I force myself on, “though second in line to the Lordship, is eligible and seeking.”

  Fresh goosebumps crawl up my arms like insects, raising the tiny hairs up the back of my neck. Skies above, I cannot react over that slime, not after everything he did. Hopefully Clara will assume it’s the early spring morning draft from the hearth.

  Clara slaps a hand on my bare thigh, and I flinch. She slaps again for the reaction. “You’ve forgotten one.”

  I rack my head for who I’ve missed, trying to ignore the stinging throb at my thigh. Who…? “Heir Vale—but he’s engaged.”

  “We do not discount agreements not yet forged.” Clara snatches up the bowl. She dips two fingers and massages slick, cold ointment into the gold patch at my temple. “Recite to me the Prince’s relations, with age and degrees of separation.”

  I begin, my voice steady and both soft and crisply enunciated, as my many tutors taught me. Clara rubs the salve into the gold mark at my collarbone that, in the past six months, has crept up my throat to peek from even the highest-collared gowns.

  My bleeding slows to a near stop again and Clara rechecks the jar. “Ah, yes, this ought to get you looking as you ought. You’ll need not only a new dress for High Court tomorrow, but I have it on good authority that this is the season. And you know what that means, Aubrey. You’ll need a lot more than just one more dress.”

  My pulse ignites and it takes everything in me to not show it. It shouldn’t be such a struggle; I’ve heard as much before. Every season for the past three years she’s said this and with each my youth slips away without an announcement of the Prince’s intent to marry. And, despite all of Clara’s posturing about this Founder Lord’s eligibility or that, we both know she has her sights set on the palace, the crown, luxury for the rest of her life.

  As do I.

  Lilianna catches my eye from the far corner of the room. She slides her hand into the pocket of her dress—one of my old dresses she’s tailored. She draws it out again and dips it back in.

  I fight back a smile and blink once, slightly longer than a normal blink, to indicate I’ve understood.

  Clara screws a lid on the jar of gold blood. “Very well, dress and study the Hymns of Helberg and Hoad while I am away. I expect perfect recitation when I return. Come, Liliana.” With that, she traipses out the door.

  Lilianna lingers for only a half-heartbeat in the doorway. Her hand tucks meaningfully in her pocket again. Then she, too, sweeps from the room to accompany her mother into town.

  And I am left, delightfully, behind.

  I swing my legs off the table, careful not to slip on my freshly greased feet, and hurry to my housedress hanging at the bare wall—my father’s study no more, every valuable item has long since been sold—and jam my hand into the dress pocket.

  I withdraw a note dotted with Lilianna’s hasty scroll. A smile curves my lips—one I don’t have to guard against since I am blissfully alone. She wants three more romance novels and... I snort. A book on embroidery needlework, with several notes about the topics it must contain.

  Oh Lily, I’ll do my best.

  I burn the note in the flame of one of the wall candelabras. I’ll never risk her a lashing by keeping it. Clara will lose her hat if she discovers it’s Lilianna who’s been tailoring all my dresses to fit her.

  Still naked, I turn to the empty fireplace and rub an old piece of charcoal over the gold patch at my brow.

  Then I duck into the narrow, cramped firewood tunnel to my brief, gloriously forbidden respite of freedom—and to borrow a few books.