Two Months Before

When an outsider commits a crime in Odrend, they are not shackled and put in the stocks as punishment. The milder treatment is reserved for citizens of the country. For everyone else, the tip of the right ear is sliced off with a hot knife, and they pay for their crime in labor.

My right ear still aches terribly, the stitched end swollen and an angry shade of red.

Days before, a shopkeeper had caught me plucking coin purses from his customer’s pockets. He gripped my arms so tightly they bruised as his son ran for the guards patrolling the city.

“You insolent savage!” he’d snarled. I bared my teeth at him.

I knew I’d stayed there too long, risked too much by targeting his customers, but I’d been desperate. The Ibim wouldn’t survive long without the resources to leave the mountains between Astria and Odrend. The territory is ours, and yet it isn’t; the mountain range separating the two empires still belongs to them, even though the Ibim make their home there.

I’d planned to return home once I’d formulated a plan to get my people out. Now I fear it will be a very long time until I can go home.

“I caught the savage stealing money in my shop,” the old man exclaims. The guards toss me down before the king as he sits on his throne. The marble monstrosity gleams on its dais in the morning sun. The shopkeeper upturns my satchel. A dozen mismatched coin purses tumble out, their contents clinking. A delicate string of pearls that I’d taken right from a lady’s neck bursts and scatters over the floor. I glare at the damning evidence, wishing it wasn’t mine.

“She shall serve the crown for it,” the king says. He waves a ringed hand, and a guard comes forward, holding a knife over a torch until it blazes red. I struggle in the guards' grasp, but the guard with the knife pinches my ear and slices. I smell burning flesh, the pain so searing that tears run down my cheeks. Smoke curls next to my temple. I hear an animal wail, and absently realize it's coming from me. Blood dribbles onto my tunic as I double over. I no longer struggle—I try to calm my trembling body, forcing myself to stay awake. My hair spills over my shoulders, wet with sweat and stained red.

“I sentence you to one year's servitude,” the king’s voice says. I glance up, my vision blurry with tears.

“You can’t do this,” I hiss. My voice is rough as stone. The king gazes down on me, his golden crown nestled in thick hair streaked with gray.

“Your eyes and hair are silver, are they not?” he bemuses. “You are Ibim. You are no citizen of mine, and so you will not be given the privilege of one.”

The twin princes stand on either side of the king’s massive throne. I don’t know which is which. The one on the king’s right is fair, his golden-blond hair smoothed back under a gold circlet shaped like antlers that rests softly on his forehead. The other has darker, longer hair, and an antler circlet to match his brother’s. As a girl, my mother had told me stories of handsome princes, and these two are no exception. Their green eyes stare down at me, expressions inscrutable on those serene, lovely faces.

I turn my gaze on them, hoping uselessly that perhaps one of the princes will speak against his father. The dark-haired one sneers down at me. The fair one meets my eyes for only a second before he rights himself, standing straighter and tucking his hands behind his back. His tunic and trousers are neatly pressed, bright white and embroidered with gold.

The guards pick me up, pulling me from the throne room on wobbly legs. A medic clumsily stitches my ear, and I am thrown into a shabby room in the servants’ quarters beyond the palace walls. I curl on the dirt floor beside a flattened straw mattress, my silver hair in curly tangles and my breeches spotted with blood.

I foolishly probe the wound with shaking fingers, cursing loudly when a new wave of pain sparks through me. My ears, delicately pointed and honed for hearing far-off echoes in the mountains, feel lopsided and too hot. Now only one of them is pointed, the other flattened like a plateau in the plains. Pain brings tears to my eyes when my hair brushes against the stitches that replace the missing tip of my right ear. I let the tears fall, though they are not all from the pain.

The wound to my ear is not just a punishment for my crimes. It is the brand of a slave.