A Dark and Starless Night

Part One - Of Death & Darkness : Chapter One

City guards, dressed in their maroon uniforms, marched in and out of the wooden apartment building. Quite the crowd had gathered, Evelyn Mintarryl and May Estarnele amongst them. Eve used her fan to try and relieve some of the humid heat that clung to her, making her dyed-blonde hair cling to the back of her neck.

There hadn't been a murder in Teryon City in years, but, from what she'd managed to hear from the gossiping crowd, it had been a bloody and gruesome death for the courtesan – a young woman, barely older than Eve herself.

"Oh, gods," May breathed, her fan angling to cover the gasp she made. "It's awful."

Eve agreed, her stomach rolling as they carried out a stretcher, the woman's body covered in a dirty sheet.

"Let's go," she said, touching May's arm lightly. The younger girl nodded, and they headed along the streets, May's entourage of guards behind them.

Eve tried to set aside the niggling in her gut, but she couldn't seem to shake it. In another life, Eve could have been that girl. The streets of Teryon were a far cry from where she had been born and raised. No, she had come from rags and sand on the Isle of Light. From a nameless father and a mother who chose to sell her body to merchants and foreign nobles rather than be separated from her bastard daughter. If they had stayed on the Isle, would Eve have followed her mother's footsteps? Would she have ended up in a brothel murdered by some drunken brute?

As they walked along the marble streets, the sound of her black, heeled shoes was swallowed by the noise of the busy afternoon streets. May excitedly chattered about the small house party that Eve had been planning for some time. Don, her uncle, had sanctioned it under the condition that Eve would have to clean up herself, and couldn't ask Fan, their housekeeper, to help in the clean-up. She wasn't planning to let things get so bad that she wouldn't manage to clean it herself, but even so Fan had already agreed to help, Eve having bribed the woman with a bar of her finest chocolate.

"I'll see you later," Eve said, squeezing May's arm.

"Are you sure I can't help?" May asked, fixing her black hair.

"I'm sure," Eve said, trying not to laugh. She had everything she needed and planned to get the house set up – and by that she meant to put all the more expensive pieces in clear view of everyone. May wasn't much for manual labour, even the smallest bit. She'd been coddled her whole life, so much so that she wasn't even allowed to brush her own hair. Eve loved a good pampering, but even she thought that was a bit much.

She used the fan in her hand to keep herself as cool as possible in the humidity. At least on the Isle it had been dry heat, the winds from the sea keeping it bearable. Some days she did wish to go back there, to a land of magic and myth and mystery. Those were the days she went to the courts in the morning to listen to reports of Zyrna's indentured neighbour. Homelessness, unemployment, hunger. But Zyrna at least threw food and water their way.

But for that, she probably would've died hungry on the streets she'd run through, chasing trouble as well as food. She wouldn't let nostalgia for the friends she'd known let her forget that the nights she'd gone to bed hungry had been the nights she'd curled up at the bottom of the wardrobe with a pillow covering her ears, trying to ignore the sounds that drifted into her from her mother's room. She'd rarely seen the men and women that visited her mother, but she'd often helped her mother clean her wounds and soothe her bruises when she was forced to take rougher clients.

She forced a polite smile at one of the neighbours in the complex of townhouses that she lived with her uncle in. She quickly walked up the marble pathway to the three-storey building that had belonged to her uncle for years before she'd moved to the city to live with him. She unlocked the door, straining her ears, glad to hear the humming that came from the kitchen.