SHARDS - grishaverse

(prologue): secrets

Carinya's mother told her to always keep things secret.

Carinya always followed her mother's rules. Even after she disappeared.

And even when the orphanage gave her a room with six other girls and watchers around every corner, Carinya kept her secrets.

The time the nurses who found her at the doorstep, shivering and cold, checked her hands and found a tiny tattoo reading 'Devin', she'd insisted that she had no idea what it meant, that she was Carinya Redder, an abandoned Fjerdan girl with a strange first name and out-of-place black hair. That momma and poppa had died in a fire.

When Matron Taya found welts in the walls or holes in the floor, the young girl shook her head and denied everything. When her playmates saw three-legged tables and twisted wooden swords lying next to them, Carinya swore she'd no clue how these things had come to be, even as they pulled her hair and swore profanities that the then-seven-year-olds shouldn't have known.

But Carinya had lied, of course. She could bend wood without touching it, make glass without sand, melt metal in the cold and hear the dirt humming under her toes as she walked barefoot in the dying garden. 

Even when it was winter, and freezing cold, when everyone especially loved to pry. When if they didn't get their answers, Carinya was in trouble. Even when their peaceful Fierdan village started screaming, when the wooden structures of homes started burning, even though it was below freezing and they should not have. When the men and women in cloaks riding air and shooting people down without ever touching a gun arrived at the orphanage, kicked down the burning door and hauled Carinya away screaming. 

They brought her to a castle, the grandest one she'd ever seen. It was nothing like the drawings of the Ice Court, all majestic and stoic, in the picture books back at home. It was magical, golden, filled with doors and windows that Carinya would've loved to just lay her two palms on and listen to.  They asked for her name, these people who introduced themselves as the Second Army of Ravka, Grisha. The name tasted unfamiliar on her tongue, a word from a language she hadn't heard or used in nearly seven years.

She tried to lie. At first, when they gave her a room and tried to question her, she cried and sobbed in Fjerdan, pounding on the floor with whatever she could find until marks appeared. And then a very large Grisha grabbed her hand, pried her thumb away from the side of her index finger, and read her true last name out loud.

"She's Ravkan," the man said in his language, but Carinya wasn't sure he was really a real man at all. After all, every Fjerdan child is told stories about the drüsje. Witches. "that's for sure."

"Is your name Carinya Devin?" a pretty, round woman asked in startlingly accentless Fjerdan. She was dressed in dark red with brown hair. Carinya noticed there were streaks of blonde in the woman's hair, and something about her eyes seemed a bit off in color. Then her sharp eyes wandered to the bumps in the woman's sleeves. Perhaps this woman held hidden weapons and was going to kill her if she answered wrong.

"No." she managed to squeak out. "My last name is Redder."

"Do you speak Ravkan?"

"No."

"Do you know what Grisha are?"

"If that's what you barbarians call witches, then yes." Carinya narrowed her brown eyes.