Prince of Traitors

Owin

I can still smell the blood, the simmering burnt flesh.

Days ago, a shopkeeper caught me plucking coin purses from his customer's pockets. He gripped my arms so tightly they bruised as his son ran for the guards patrolling the city.

"You insolent savage!" he snarled. I bared my teeth at him.

I knew I'd stayed there too long, risked too much by targeting his customers, but I was desperate. The Navaarim won't survive long without the resources to leave the mountains between Astria and Odrend. The territory is ours, and yet it isn't; the mountain range separating the two empires still belongs to them, even though the Navaarim make their home there.

I fear it will be a very long time until I can return.

"I caught the savage stealing money in my shop," the old man exclaims. The guards toss me down before the king as he sits on his throne. The marble monstrosity gleams on its dais in the morning sun. The shopkeeper upturns my satchel. A dozen mismatched coin purses tumble out, their contents clinking. A delicate string of pearls that I took right from a lady's neck bursts and scatters over the floor. I glare at the damning evidence, wishing it wasn't mine.

The king's courtiers stand around the perimeter of the room. They titter amongst themselves. Their disgust is written in the curled lips and grimaces on their faces.

"She shall serve the crown for it," the king says. He waves a ringed hand, and a guard comes forward, holding a knife over a torch until it blazes red. I struggle in the guards' grasp, but the guard with the knife pinches my ear and slices. I smell burning flesh, the pain so searing that tears run down my cheeks.

Smoke curls next to my temple, the wound cauterizing almost instantaneously. I hear an animal wail, and absently realize it's coming from me. Blood dribbles onto my shirt as I double over. I no longer struggle—I try to calm my trembling body, forcing myself to stay awake. My hair spills over my shoulders, wet with sweat and stained red.

"I sentence you to one year's servitude," the king's voice says. I glance up, my vision blurry with tears.

"You can't do this," I hiss. My voice is rough as stone.

The twin princes stand on either side of the king's massive throne. I don't know which is which. The one on the king's right is fair, his golden-blond hair smoothed back under a gold circlet shaped like antlers that rests softly on his forehead. The other has darker, longer hair, and an antler circlet to match his brother's. Their green eyes stare down at me, expressions inscrutable on those serene, lovely faces.

I turn my gaze on them, hoping uselessly that perhaps one of the princes will speak against his father. The dark-haired one sneers down at me. The fair one meets my eyes for only a second before he rights himself, standing straighter and tucking his hands behind his back. His tunic and trousers are neatly pressed, bright white and embroidered with gold.

The king gazes down on me, his golden crown nestled in thick hair streaked with gray. He isn't very old, perhaps only in his forties, but the way he sits in his throne commands respect. He cocks his head to one side.

"Your eyes and hair are silver, are they not?" he bemuses. "You are Navaarim. You are no citizen of mine, and so you will not be given the privilege of one." He waves his hand dismissively. "Take her away."

The guards haul me up, pulling me from the throne room on wobbly legs. A medic applies a stinging healing salve to my ear, and I am thrown into a shabby room in the servants' quarters beyond the palace walls. A servant roughly undresses me, yanking an itchy brown dress over my body. I curl on the dirt floor beside a flattened straw mattress, my silver hair in curly tangles and my dress spotted with blood.

I foolishly probe the wound with shaking fingers, cursing loudly when a new wave of pain sparks through me. My ears, delicately pointed and honed for hearing far-off echoes in the mountains, feel lopsided and too hot. Now only one of them is pointed, the other flattened like a plateau in the plains. Pain brings tears to my eyes when my hair brushes against the missing tip of my right ear. I let the tears fall, though they are not all from the pain.

The wound to my ear is not just a punishment for my crimes. It is the brand of a slave.