I’d gasped, fully shocked to see such a thing, as had half the people in the place. But the man had just coyly smiled, as if he’d liked showing off for the poor, magicless riffraff.
The second time I saw magic was a bit more serious. A Nightling had attacked our village. We’d heard Mrs. Turvy scream and rushed out to help, but by the time we did, the creature was attached to her neck and drinking. My father shot it with his hunting bow, and the Nightling morphed into black shadows and disappeared. It had scared me so badly I didn’t sleep for three whole nights.
Voices up ahead had me slowing. I’d been so lost in my thoughts I didn’t realize I’d reached the outpost to The Gilded City. It was fully dark out now, with only the moon to give me light. A small guard tower was up ahead, and I could see the lights from the city beyond it through the thick forest. The gates glistened in the moonlight, drawing a perimeter of envy to all who were not allowed entrance.
I was about to partake in the forbidden fruit that The Gilded City had to offer, and I should have been scared. My hands should’ve at least been shaking, but all I could think about was my father and the death lines trying to carve their way to his heart.
Sucking in a steady breath, I did what I did best.
I disappeared.
Not literally, like a magic fae might if they had the ability, but in the way I knew how to after seventeen years of trying to avoid being touched by people. If they didn’t notice me, they wouldn’t touch me. If they didn’t touch me, I wouldn’t feel pain.
Pulling up my hood, I hugged my back to the trees and moved through the thickest part of the forest. I walked on the balls of my feet, avoiding leaves, twigs, or anything that would make a sound. I stuck to soft moss and deep-churned earth. Working at an eastward angle, I was able to sneak past the guard tower and avoid the main entrance to The Gilded City. Those gates were guarded beyond anything I could infiltrate. When I’d been walking at a northeast angle for quite some time, I finally reached a part of the forest where the tree line thinned, and I could see the glowing golden city gates beyond.
My heart pounded in my throat as I reached down to double-check that my dagger was still stashed firmly in my boot where it would be hidden from view. I didn’t know why I’d brought it. I wasn’t sure I was capable of actually hurting anyone in an effort to save my father, but… I wasn’t beneath threatening them. The mere thought caused shame to wash over me. My father taught me a lot about growing up in Isa. We were survivors of circumstance. When he’d given me this dagger on my twelfth birthday, he told me to only ever use it in a situation where I thought my life would be taken if I didn’t intervene. Sure, life in Isa was hard—growing up without magic, or status, or coin was difficult. Compared to The Gilded City fae, we died younger, we were skinnier, and we worked servant jobs, but we weren’t criminals. We weren’t killers. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
What I was about to do—stealing from The Gilded City and possibly using my dagger to do it—would not make my father proud.
But I didn’t care.
If he was alive to yell at me, that was good enough for me.
With that final thought, I broke through the trees and into the open meadow that stood before the golden fence. Looking left and right quickly, I noticed no one and pushed forward. I ran across the flat, grassy meadow like a lioness going after her prey. I knew I was at my most exposed right then to any guards in a high tower and would need to act quickly. I had every intention of scaling the twenty-foot-high golden fence, until I got about three feet from it and heard the high-pitched whine of electricity.
We didn’t have electricity in Isa. Because it required a special kind of magic to generate the energy current and then an expensive crystal to trap it, we never had it as an option. But I hadheardabout electricity, I’d learned about it in the books Sorrel taught me to read. I knew that a buzzing current sound was associated with it, and I’d heard those rumors that the wall was guarded in this way. That if you touched it, you’d be painfully shocked.
It was funny, I’d always described the pain of being touched as being electrocuted, though I had no idea what that really felt like. Sorrel had read a book to me when I was little where a boy was hit by lightning and his whole body burned, and shook, and felt like his skin was on fire.
I’d gasped at the time and told her that was what it felt like every time someone touched me. My father was there. Unable to read himself, he enjoyed Sorrel reading out loud to us.
I never forgot the look on his face that night: absolute horror. He’d told Sorrel and I that he was tired and wished us a good night.
Our house wasn’t very well insulated, so we’d heard his sobs coming from his room for the next hour. Even at a young age, I understood that hearing me describe my pain had causedhimpain, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I stopped describing my discomfort to my father after that day.
Now I stared at the bars of the golden gates and braced myself for what I was sure would be a lot of agony. But for my father, I would do it. I stepped closer, trying to plan my way up, wondering if grabbing the bars with gloves would help at all, when I realized the gaps between the bars were huge. Not large enough for a grown man, but for an underweight seventeen-year-old girl without much chest…I might just fit! I deliberated if I could just slip between them. Deciding it was worth a shot, I tucked my stomach in and turned to the side.
There was forest on the other side of the gates, so if I could just get to it, I could hide from any guards. Without overthinking it too much, I threw myself into the gap between the bars and prayed to the Light that I would make it out on the other side alive.
The first half of my body slipped through relatively easily. But when my breast grazed the bar, pulling on the fabric of my cloak, I gasped as the electrical current ripped through me. Pain lanced along my spine, stealing my breath as my whole body shuddered. I threw the rest of myself through the gap in the fence just in time before I fell to my knees with a cry on my lips.
It hurt.Bad.But not more than my curse. That made me sad for a moment. To know that the curse I carried was so bad it was akin to what The Gilded City used to protect themselves from harm.
Crawling on my knees, panting as the remnants of pain still lingered on my skin, I made it to the thick tree line inside of the city and then fell onto my back. My head was buzzing, much like it did after I was accidentally—or not-so-accidentally—touched. Some people were curious, mostly in my younger school years, and wanted to know if my curse was real. Or what reaction I would have.
A finger to my neck, a graze of my hair—my father almost took me out of the village school because it started to happen way too often.
Then I brought my dagger to school. And the next time someone touched me on purpose, to laugh or watch me squirm on the floor, I pulled the weapon out and pressed it lightly against their throat.
It completely stopped the events from happening and my father didn’t even hear about the weapon being brought to school. It was a win-win.
My father.
As much as I wanted to lie on the cold earth and let my painful skin cool off, I had to keep going. Those angry, red lines on my father’s stomach were an omen of death. If they made their way to his heart, he would be gone forever. I couldn’t allow that.
I got my bearings and headed into the city, away from the golden gates and towards the sound of revelry. I knew that sound: glasses clinking, boisterous voices, feet stomping. There was a tavern up ahead, like the one I worked at. With a tavern came people, people who were usually mind-numbed by mead and would hopefully not look twice at my tattered clothes, or the fact that I needed directions in a city I was supposed to live in.
Sure enough, I spotted the large building as I broke out of the thick trees and onto a neatly laid cobblestone road. This tavern was nothing like the one I worked at in Isariah. It was four-times as big, looked to be made of solid red brick, and there was a front porchfullof fae dancing and raising their glasses to the sky.
