Page 20 of Cursed Shadows 1

I pick up the beaded silvery bracelet from a dish of cheap jewels—and I slip it into a small cotton bag before tucking it safely into the trunk. The only piece I still have of my human mother—a cheap, greyish bracelet. It’s not very pretty, but I keep it for luck, mostly for my dancing. It might be my most prized piece, though it is entirely worthless.

Pandora sighs softly. But she still says nothing.

We’re often quiet, or I irritate her for my own entertainment, or we bicker. Sisters like any others. But we lack what some sisters have—a friendship. We have our bond, but friendship? Not quite.

I wonder if it’s because she’s fullblood and I’m halfblood that we can’t seem to fit those parts of ourselves together, or is it that we’re so wildly different from each other that we have little to bond over?

Pandora is the child father needed; I’m the one he wanted.

With his late wife, he had my sister. His heir, and a vicious female warrior he’d had trained since youth. One to restore honour to our once great lineage.

But he wanted another. One he could sell off into a political marriage.

So he stole a bargain with my human mother and released her when I passed infancy and no longer needed her nursing. She left willingly, never returned, and I don’t even know her name. I never asked her name. I never cared.

I am a bargain-born and that is all there is to it.

I know father loves me, but maybe the reason I don’t tell him about Taroh’s attack on me is that I’m afraid to learn how deep that love is. Would he still sell me off to the lordson?

“I wrote to Eamon,” Pandora tells me.

This catches my attention.

I look up at her, blankness on my face.

“Once father summoned you, I sent my crow to deliver a message,” she explains. “I figured you might need his support today.”

This is her apology. Summoning my best friend to me when I’m faced with Comlar, Daxeel and Taroh. Her apology for not warning me about any of it.

It’s enough and I nod firmly. But to get athanksfrom me would be like pulling teeth, so she takes all I offer and, with that, leaves without another word.

I pack my corsets in the trunk that Knife, the brownie servant, drags into my room some moments later. We both slide dark, narrowed gazes to each other.

I know it was him. Knife was the one who told father I snuck out that night. So I don’t care when I knock him over in the hall. And he doesn’t care when he crushes glass and stuffs piles of it into my boots.

But Knife leaves and it’s some time later when he returns after lunch to tell me that Eamon is coming up the fields.

I abandon my messy room and rush out to meet him.

Eamon always comes to visit from across the fields, never through the village itself. His home—a town—is over the border, the same border my home is perched beside.

There’s only an hour walk that separates us, the Queen’s Court from the Light Court. It’s funny to think that he, a hybrid, lives in the Light Court, and I’m never crass enough to ask him if it hurts at all, the Sun.

Today, the light is kind to him. I see that in the way it glistens his darker skin tone into something smooth as he wanders out of the shade of some midnight willow trees, and it shines his black hair with a blue tint.

My smile is small as I rush up the packed-dirt trail to meet him at the cusp of the hill.

He has Rya—my sister’s messenger crow—perched on his shoulder. From between his sharp, black nails, Eamon pinches fresh boneworms and feeds them to a content Rya.

“Where’d you get those?” I ask.

I reach out to scratch behind Rya’s left wing. Predictable, a shudder of pleasure runs through the crow, and his feathers ruffle.

Eamon lifts a fresh, juicy boneworm to the beak—and it’s gone in a snap. “Picked them up on the walk over.”

My smile only widens into a crooked grin.

I know these worms aren’t found on the earth or even a small dig under the dirt. They are buried deep into the dens of gnomes, a fair amount of effort goes into scooping them out.

---