Bloodline [YoonYul]

Part I: The Festival of Kingdoms

Yuri could hear the music all the way from the top of the hills to where she worked in the stables.

It was a loud and joyous chorus accompanying another dance taking place in the King's castles.

Her sister hummed along with the orchestra as she slipped through the stable doors.

Yuri gave her mare, Riel, one last stroke to her black and white neck before setting the latch of her hold.

Krystal stepped carefully as she approached.

A buck lowered his russet head down for her to comb fingers through his mane.

He was their father's horse used to draw the single wagon into town where they delivered vegetables and wool for the shops.

The buck never cared much for Yuri, so she left Krystal to steer when they took over for their father's delivers.

"Where's Jessica?" Yuri wiped her hands on a rag hanging from the belt buckled loose around her waist.

"Asleep."

She smiled. "Are you ready?"

"You're going in that?" Yuri looked down at her clothes.

They were dirty and worn from working with the horses all evening.

Self-conscious, she dusted at the smears of mud caked into her cream shirt.

"You can't be serious." Krystal's eyes swept her up and down with an amused grin on her lips.

"The guards will find us out before we have a chance to get inside the castle if you go looking like that."

"I hadn't thought about it."

Krystal shook her head. Long, black hair rippled in glossy waves.

She had already changed into her
finer clothing: A simple pale, baby green dress made by the hands of their mother fell down to sweep along the floor.

Laces threaded through her cinch vest, the fabric the color of tree bark in the winter.

Yuri was never fond of dresses. Their eldest sister, Jessica, always tried to make her play dress up when they were younger, but stables and boots suited her much finer than gowns.

"Hurry and change," said Krystal as they walked out into the warm night.

"I'll be waiting by the mulberry tree."

Closing the stable doors, Yuri hurried toward the house to change.

It was a small place, home to the Jung's who Yuri would forever be indebted to.

Though she came to them before the time she could remember, they didn't hold it from her that she was not their birth child.

She was told early on that she
had been left on the porch of their town's hospital, newly born and bloody with only a name and wrapped in soiled blanket.

The Jung Mother, who worked there, quickly took her in and tended to a malnourished Yuri.

Few spoke up saying they saw a mysterious woman fleeing the town in the night Yuri was found.

No one knew who she was or where she had gone. As for her father...

he was unspoken for.

So the Jung's raised Yuri as one of their own.

In the light of a bedside candle, Yuri looked at herself in the small looking glass hanging off the wall.

She now wore the garb of a young boy of the rich made from some of the finest materials.