Page 2 of Storm of Blood and Shadow

The other members of my troupe keep dancing. They have to, or they risk being dismissed as well. I don’t blame them for it… and yet it hurts when they don’t offer one look or one wordof support, even though we’ve spent most of our waking hours together for years.

My head accepts the finality of it, the doleful truth. But my heart is sore, and every breath hurts.

The servant who was tasked with my dismissal beckons to me, and I follow her to the door. As I’m ushered into the hallway, I turn and grip her sleeve, desperation in my voice. “Will I be paid for today?”

“You’ve been dismissed,” says the servant tonelessly.

“Please. I need the money. There are children I’m responsible for.”

She yanks her arm away. “Should I have the guards escort you out?”

“No.” I swallow and back up a step. The servant gives me a disdainful look and re-enters the salon.

I keep my spine straight as I walk through the palace. My ankle aches, but I refuse to limp, to show weakness. Back in the rehearsal room, I tear off the scanty silk costume, shove the scraps into my bag, and pull on a simple dress with a scooped neckline. Spring is here, but the nights are still cold, so I wrap myself in the thin coat I usually wear to work.

Hitching my bag onto my shoulder, I pause in front of the wall of mirrors.

I’m too thin, my upper ribs and breastbone visible through the V-shaped opening of the coat. My red hair is thinner than it used to be, though I try to disguise the fact when I style it. Despite the makeup I’m wearing, there are shadows under my eyes, hollows in my cheeks.

I look weary, unhealthy, worn down to bones.

Too old. Depressed and half-dead,in the words of our illustrious Queen.

I peel off my dance slippers and tuck them into the bag as well. My town shoes wait on one of the low shelves by the door. They’re as worn as everything else I own.

When I first started with the royal troupe, I rented a couple of pretty rooms in a clean, spacious building not far from the palace grounds. I managed to keep those rooms for a long time, even as I sent increasingly large sums of money to my family. Eventually, their demands thinned out my compensation, and then my brother Bryon, my sister Ethalie, her mother-in-law, her husband Loram, and their two children came to the city with no advance notice, asking to live with me. Now we’re all crammed into musty quarters on the first floor of a dilapidated tenement building near the outer wall.

My ankle won’t hold up if I try walking that distance, and I don’t have money for a carriage, a cab, or even one of the barrow-carts pedaled through the city streets by grimy boys. I could wait in the rehearsal room and ask one of the other dancers for a ride home, yet my pride won’t let me linger. I don’t want to face any of them right now.

I’d rather not go home, either. Not empty-handed, anyway.

Bryon and Loram used to make half-hearted attempts to find work. They would take on odd jobs together, then spend most of what they made in a dice hall, drinking and gambling. But neither of them have tried to secure employment since the war began, claiming that they fear conscription into the Queen’s army. Instead they hide in the house, placing endless wagers on games of dice and cards, feeding each other’s obsession. Ethalie serves them meekly, giving them and her mother-in-law most of the food, barely saving enough for herself and the children.

Half of the meager pay I earned today would have gone to our landlady, to convince her to hold off on evicting us. The other half would have been spent at the market, purchasing food which, if we doled it out carefully, should’ve lasted a week—although thanks to the gluttonous adults I live with, it would have been gone much faster.

Without my pay, I’ll have nothing to stave off the landlady. Nothing to feed the little ones. And when my brother finds out there’s no money for drink, he’ll add more bruises like the ones on my arm.

Bryon doesn’t strike or beat me and Ethalie, but he still delivers the same vindictive pinches he used to inflict on us when we were children. He does it with a half-vicious, half-playful smile, and if I rebuke him for it, he pretends he was only teasing and that I’m the asshole for not being able to take a joke.

I’ve learned the hard way that yelling at him and my brother-in-law doesn’t work. They refuse to earn their keep, and I can’t physically force them out of the apartment. My sister claims that her role as a woman is to remain at home—a mindset encouraged by her useless husband. And her mother-in-law claims to be unable to work, though she has no trouble joining the men in their drink and gambling games each evening.

I’d have left them all behind long ago if it weren’t for the children—my nephew Lark and my niece Miri. I have to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. No one else will.

I can’t return with nothing. Yet in a city beaten down by the terrors and sorrows of war, few people have a coin to spare; and with my limited skill set, I can only think of one way to secure money quickly.

Lord Neran lives near the palace, not far from the building where I used to live in happier days. I can manage to walk there.

I hunch into my coat as I leave the palace, avoiding the torchlight in the courtyard, slinking out through the gate after showing the guards my papers. During the walk to Lord Neran’s house, I favor my ankle as much as I can. Tomorrow I’ll need to look for other work, and I need to appear as healthy as possible to any potential employers.

I put myself in this situation. I believed the living arrangements with my family would be temporary, believed the war would be over quickly and the good times would return, believed Bryon and Loram would stop feeding off each other’s bad habits and become useful, hard-working adults. I believed my sister would find the strength to stand up for herself and her children. I believed in the innate goodness of people. A ridiculously naive kind of faith.

And now I’m trapped in a cycle of endless, devastating disappointment, going through the motions with the troupe, fighting to keep a roof over my family’s heads and food in the mouths of two children who lack a proper education and seem to grow out of their clothes weekly.

I’m exhausted. I’m twenty-eight, but I feel twenty years older than that.

Approaching the gated courtyard of Lord Neran’s house, I’m painfully conscious of how worn and thin my once-fine coat is, wretchedly aware that I don’t look like the healthy, glowing dancer he has tried to seduce on multiple occasions.

Setting down my bag, I take the pins out of my hair and shake out the scarlet locks, hoping they don’t look too flat or too greasy at the roots. Water is something we have to ration at home. I can’t remember the last time I had a hot bath all to myself, rather than reusing the tepid bathwater in which least three family members have already bathed.

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