1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of Deception: Book #4, Chronicles of Marsdenfel

Year 253 of the Bynding - Marsdenfel - Harvestime, part II

By the time the other women and girls have finished their breakfasts and started to enter and take up their embroidery, the dust I’ve disturbed in using the loom has settled, mostly, and I’ve a few finger widths’ of belt completed.

I beam at them as if last night was merely another escapade in the life of a foolish woman, rather than a mistake made by someone who knows better. Most of the others are young, more girls than women, but the felves have never been numerous, and the family that so recently enslaved this realm also slaughtered them.

One of the few older ones approaches me, circling so she enters my peripheral vision before she draws near—more likely instinctual than considerate, considering what this realm’s been through. “Are you well, child?”

I check her magic and revise my estimation of her age to my generation. She probably heard the stories of the nearby telven realm and that king’s bastard daughter who was so human that she bore a child at fourteen. Might have even known Paöthen’s mother, who’d insisted on raising her son’s daughter, since I couldn’t be trusted with a child.

Felves do treat their bastards better than telves do, so it would’ve been better for Onlé, had Marsdenfel not ended up enslaved.

“Why wouldn’t I be well?” I ask brightly in telvish, after a long enough pause that they’ll assume I need to translate the dialect.

It was my ability to speak fluent felvish or telvish at will that first caught my father’s attention, when I was young enough to be moulded into what he wanted me to be. Rumors of various things I’ve done abound in urban gossip, but my father sired dozens of illegitimate children. I’ve yet to meet anyone who realizes most of the stories refer specifically to me, though few telves have left Breidentel in the past few generations.

Even if this woman realizes I was Paöthen’s too-young lover, she should pair that with last night’s incident and think me little more than a prosti.

Her brow creases as she studies me obliquely, as if she’s trying to place where she’s seen me before. My looks take after my father’s side of the family, though, and even a pureblooded elf can fill out enough to pass as human if she makes herself overeat. My larger frame and deeper curves don’t necessarily make me human, unless I try to look it.

“Is there illness about?” I prod—again, in telvish, a clear sign that I’m not from this realm and a reminder of who I am, since I’ve been around here for long enough that she’s doubtless heard tell of me, even if she’s not seen me.

“No… no illness,” the woman says quietly.

Behind her, a few montai women enter the room, to my surprise. Lallie, Liathen’s wife, was the montai lulni, their leader and ruler, so the earth elementals have been living in Grehafen of late, helping with the rebuilding. The attention of the montai women snaps onto me—elementals can recognize each other—and I keep my smile in place as I nod at them.

Montai don’t smile at one another. It’s too close to baring one’s teeth, which is a threat.

The women hesitate, look back as if to take direction from someone behind them, then scatter to various embroidery baskets about the room. Evidently each one has been taking lessens from a different elf, some with more success than others.

But the parting of the women lets me see the one behind them, who’s short and bears no small resemblance to my own mother.

I widen my smile. “Bruneli!” Lallie’s mother, who was in Marsdenfel, but she likely returned when that realm’s rulers came to pay their respects for Liathen’s funeral. Queen Evonalé was Liathen’s half-sister, and her consort is Aldrik’s son.