The first night I arrive, I keep my head down and my hood low, letting the shadows make a beggar out of me. Liana’s warning is fresh in my ears—I need to find someone to glamour me before they realize what I am and dismember me. Mrath provided her with the name of one. Neryth.
But I will only find her inside the city’s walls.
Until then, my silver hair stays braided and hidden. My tail is bound tight against my thigh with a strip of linen that bites into the skin when I walk. I’ve wrapped and padded the metal from mycleaver and now try to angle the handle so it looks more like a stick for walking than a deadly blade I’ve used to cut through armies.
Unlike the programs used to help displaced Enduares, elven refugees live in disgusting conditions. Filth pools in the ditches near where children sleep. Tents made from torn cloaks sag under their own damp weight. There’s no clean water, no medicine—just the stench of too many bodies pressed together and not enough hope to go around.
The city’s walls loom over them like a stalactite ready to break, shadows swallowing whole families who wait for mercy that never comes. Shvathemar treats them like debris—cast off from broken villages and left to pile up against its gates.
I am shocked to discover how little Arion’s government does to help the people, and my chest aches when I realize there is very little I could do for them either.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life living by the belief that there are many people, and therefore, many hands to help. But these people just seem…abandoned.
It doesn’t take much longer for me to learn it is possible to pay your way into the city, but when you are fleeing a place where your every possession was destroyed, how could you possibly have enough money to visit the capital?
A kingdom isn’t measured by its crown, but by how it treats the people who don’t have anything. If they’re suffering, the whole place is rotten.
Is there not enough wealth—enough food—to spare? From a distance, I can see just how massive the city is. Surely there are courtiers who could help. Granted, allowing people into Enduvida was always easy. We were prepared to die out with nothing, and we sacrificed for each soul we brought into our kingdom. We had room.
But surely, as beings sharing the planet, we care about each other enough to give of our excess from time to time.
I consider bribing one of the guards at night, but the risk of discovery is too great. Surely there is some unsuspecting hole in the elves’ defenses I might use. I’m very good at finding my way into places where I’m not wanted.
Instead, I veer away from the refugee camp to scout. However, just as I am leaving, I spot a clearly pregnant woman crying as she feeds another small child from her plate.
My heart breaks. A hot anger spreads over my skin. Guilt tugs at me for not bringing more, not being able to do more. At a loss for anything else to do, I sneak the money into her threadbare blankets and hope she runs straight to the guards when she finds it.
After that, it only takes one more night to find that other entrance to the city—a hidden passage in one of the walls through which what appears to be an elven servant sneaks in and out to visit one of the patrol guards. When I first set out to follow him, relief floods my veins.
Sitting in the bush, watching and waiting when I am meant to be getting into the palace and finding Arlet before she can be married off, was torture.
Once I make it past the wall, I watch the servant skirt away, through the shadows. To some safe place, I hope. I stand there, alone in the cold night, trying to decide where to head first.
The blue of my skin is the real risk—moonlight can highlight it in darkness like a flag—so I keep to doorways, eaves, and the broken teeth of walls where gutter-lamps don’t quite reach.
Shvathemar’s lower city breathes in smoke and exhales laughter. The big streets angle toward the palace hill like tributaries feeding a single mouth. Here, at the bottom, the slabs are damp, the gutters choked with spice peels and fish bones, and the taverns spit out heat and talk in equal measure. I don’t go inside. I still keep to thresholds and lean posts, molding myself into an easy shape to forget.
The elves’ ignorance is my friend; I want them to see nothing more than a refugee with no coin left after entering this massive, and quite opulent, city, warming his palms on other people’s fires.
It feels like I’m a young soldier once again. Trying to find my way and scour up bits of information to help satiate my superiors. I know better than most that the best place to learn anything is where alcohol abounds. Spirits loosen any tongue.
I need to know exactly how soon the wedding will be and where to find someone who can glamourme.
The first tavern coughs up card players and a pair of off-duty guards so proud of not wearing their helms they keep laying them on the table to admire the dents. Their talk is sharp with the confidence that comes from ale and the belief that no one is listening closely.
“…five nights until the masquerade,” one says, jabbing a thumb toward the hill where the white of the palace catches the last light. “Theme’sthe huntthis year. Stags and swans and all that poetry. I’ll be in the Inner East. We get masks for duty, too—stag livery.”
“Five?” the other groans. “Thought it was sooner.”
“They pushed it,” the first responds. I hear a smirk. “Some seamstress mess between the courtiers and the new trollop. Heard the king didn’t care, as he wants more time to polish his new pet.”
“Test her out, more likely. One should always inspect their goods before buying.”
Test her out.
Laughter coughs and dies, replaced by the scrape of cups. Blood rushes and roars in my ears. Arlet’s name takes presence in my mind, less as a collection of syllables and more as a collection of smells, bright and warm: red hair, supple skin, and soft spots. Of goodness and selflessness.
Of something mine.