The Art of Courts and Lies (Book 1 in The Gifted Trilogy)

1- The Garner

"The Garner is in two days" was his form of a greeting to me.

"Glad to see you made use of a calendar for once" I responded, immediately grabbing the scythe next to him and raising it behind my head before setting it deep into the blades of wheat that I held with one hand. "What has it been, only 19 years for you to figure out that holidays are things that happen consistently each year?"

The growl that escaped Porter surprised me enough to pause my attack on the wheat in order to look up at where his stony expression was staring straight down at me. "I'd hardly call a time where those pieces of shit steal and kill our people a holiday" he snarled.

Our people. The people of everyone in this village. The people that were not gifted any of the elemental powers possessed by our rulers. The Gifted. That's what they called themselves, as well as other things. Our superiors, our masters. The Gifted were the ones who ruled over the unfortunate of us who were not blessed with magic in our veins. Their ruling took the shape of six kingdoms: the Wind, Earth, Ocean, Ember, Shadow and Sun Courts. The kingdoms rested on the edges of our continent and split the land into six equal parts. Most of the people like me and Porter who had no magical abilities (they called us non-Gifted. Clever, I know) lived towards the middle of the continent, right on the edges of the different kingdom's territories. We were surrounded by the Gifted like herds of cattle.

And every year, just because they could, they made a spectacle out of selecting 18 women of the age 18 that lacked the possession of magical abilities- non-Gifted- and brought them to their joined court of every kingdom, right in the middle of Naturian, where all six territories met. The Nature Court. There, the Gifted created tasks that the women were forced to endure. If a woman failed a task, she died. They only stopped when there were only six women left alive and competing.

Then was the truly wicked part. Rather than granting these women their freedom and allowing them to go back home, the six kingdoms then each chose one woman to take back to their own courts where they would spend the rest of their lives, a symbol of the Gifted's mercy.

Mercy. They did not think of it as slaughter or imprisonment. They believed that they were granting us mere inferiors a gift. I'd heard the horror stories about the kinds of things they did to the woman once they were brought back in their kingdoms. The thought made my stomach subconsciously whirl.

I looked over the furious boy in front of me. Since our first introduction when I was 7, I had never known Porter to have an angry side. Usually he took what he was given and never complained about it. Never spoke out about the injustices performed on him. But at this moment, standing before me with such fury in his eyes, I knew that if the opportunity presented itself, he would scream of these injustices at the top of his lungs.

"What, you're worried about me now?" I asked him, rolling my eyes at the idea. "Relax Porter, I'm sure if they take me your father will easily find someone else to help you tend to his fields."

"Stop it!" he snapped, throwing his own scythe to the ground and stepping towards me. "Don't you dare stand there and act indifferent to the idea of being selected by those savage beasts!"

"Well what do you expect me to do Porter?" I snapped back, glaring at him. "I knew at some point I'd turn 18. Being selected has always been a possibility of something that could happen to me eventually. So now that the time has come you expect me to be scared?"

"I expect you to be something, anything but this calm ghost standing in front of me acting as if she isn't the only thing that is keeping her sister alive. As if she doesn't give a shit about her life or the other people in it!"

Porter's breathing had gone ragged but I refused to let him win. To let him stand there and tell me things I already knew.

"Of course I'm scared you prick!" I hissed, shoving the oaf back roughly at my last word. "But what am I supposed to do, huh? You expect me to just pick up everything and run? There are hundreds of eighteen year old girls that are in the same position as me right now. What are the odds that I will be one of the unlucky eighteen that they pick?"