Once upon a time I was a princess.
But that was a long time ago, and I’ve been hitting the ground ever since.
My head smashed against the stone floor, teeth tearing the inside of my cheek, vision darkening, sound dampening.
My lips curled into a smile. Thick warmth seeped between my teeth and dribbled down my chin, pooling in purple smears. For another second, the world was slow, silent.
Then the rest of it hit me all at once. The smell of sweat and spilled wine. The raucous shouts of drunken spectators, the shift of the grit beneath my feet. The rough ground under my hands as I pushed myself back up, the cool air across my skin as I whirled —
And the pain, waking in my knuckles as they smashed against a bony, angular face. He staggered. My opponent was larger than me, but skinny and out of shape. I threw myself over him and bared my teeth, my razored incisors sliding from my gums.
He turned away, but not fast enough. I caught the point of his ear. He howled.
I spat his ear onto the ground, followed by a mouthful of his blood. And before he could rise—
“Aefe!”
That voice made me stop short.
I looked over my shoulder just long enough to catch a glimpse of a familiar, deeply unhappy face in the crowd.
That distraction was more than enough for my newly-lopsided friend to stagger to his feet and send my world spinning with one decimating blow to my head.
I hit the floor in a pile of limbs. Everything went grey. When my sight returned, I saw Siobhan, my commander, standing over me, powerful arms crossed over her chest. Dark curls dangled around her face as she shook her head.
“If you’re going to get yourself expelled over a pathetic pit fight,” she said, “you’d better at least win.”
“He insulted the Teirness,” I shot back. Despite my best efforts, I was panting.
“And you took it upon yourself to show him the error of his ways?” She cast a dry, disapproving stare to my opponent, who was mumbling a string of vulgarities while groping around the bloody floor for his ear. “He certainly looks like a man reformed.”
“I—”
“I don’t need excuses. Get up. Wall. Now.” She threw my cloak at me, and I winced as it thumped against my stomach.
“Yes, commander,” I wheezed.
She began to turn, then cast one more look down at me as I struggled to my feet, crimson eyes narrowing. “You insult your vows by using your training in a place like this, you insult the Teirness by using her honor to justify this farce, and you insult yourself by losing.”
My mouth tightened. I drew my eyes down to the ground, suddenly very focused on adjusting my bootlace.
Yes, once upon a time, I was a princess. Not anymore, and that was probably for the best. I was ill-suited for such things. I was too quick-tempered, too honest, too poor of disposition. And the House of Obsidian would be better, safer, stronger, with my taint far away from the throne. I would write my stories in blood on pub floors rather than in curling script on royal decrees.
But still. Sometimes, in moments like this, I couldn’t help but look to the past and wish.
By the time I scraped myself up off the ground, Siobhan was gone.
The wall was nearly a mile beyond the edge of the Obsidian Pales, just far enough away that when you looked back the cliffs loomed in their full, dramatic glory beneath the cresting sun. They reminded me of a star-dusted night. A black so dark that it glowed.
That effect was only enhanced by the silver, running in twisting rivulets along the stones’ surfaces. From this distance, they looked like ornate metallic shocks of decoration, invisible until the sun hit them just the right way. It was only up close that one would see that they were actually thousands upon thousands of palm-sized swirls and images carved into the stone, painstakingly poured with silver. Each individual strand consisted of many carvings, and the longest of them spanned hundreds of meters of the cliff face, tangling with threads of other stories. Many of them immortalized epics, tales of deities or heroes, the origins of our kings and queens. But many, too, told tales of everyday mundanity. The birth of a child, the record of a wedding, the tale of a family business as it was handed down through the generations. All on equal footing.
The Obsidian Pales were our home, and all Sidneè Fey looked upon them with swells of admiration. But for me, it was less about pride of my home or my people or the grand achievements of our forefathers. No — it was more about the stories. The stories that we valued so much that we carved them onto our home just as we carved them onto our bodies.
“Aefe.”
Siobhan’s voice was so sharp that my horse, Rhee, yanked at the reins in a start, lurching me forward in my seat. I snapped my head up to meet her deeply unhappy glare.
“What?”
“What, she says.” She let out a scoff. “I don’t know what to do with you anymore.”
“I apologize, I—”
“Therein lies the problem, Aefe. ‘Apologize.’ Apologies imply that you have accepted some form of responsibility. It implies that you have remorse, and plan to do better. The first time you said it, I believed you. But now?” She regarded me stonily, with the militant, analytical focus of a predator. “I don’t think you are sorry. I think you regret your actions, yes. But I do not think you have any interest in improving, because if you did, you would have done it by now.”
I swallowed a pang of hurt. I sighed and loosened the laces of my leather sleeves, yanking them up to
