Three months earlier...
“Stand up!” The chief nudged the cowering girl with his boot. “Sorry, m'lady,” he said when the whimpering wretch only curled up on herself all the more. “She's a right rude one.”
Frightened and cold, Kelsie shivered in her rags. Her dirty skinny limbs were curled close to her body, her dark hair matted and hanging in locks about her face, forming a shield between her and what terrified her.
She was being inspected by a fine lady with softly wavy hair like white fire and eyes like fine emeralds. A lady who wore silk and satin, who smelled like lavender and magic. A lady whose beauty was extreme, but cold.
Kelsie caught the woman's eye. Her rouge lip curled with something like disdain and Kelsie lowered her head, embarrassed at how poorly dressed and dirty she was. She knew she smelled like the pigs she tended and lived among, fighting them for the tastier, more edible looking scraps.
The lady was a sorceress. Nobody in the village of Kinleigh had seen one before, but they had talked about nothing else for a solid week after a courier from the next village over had come running with a message to tell the chief to gather every gifted girl between the age of eighteen and twenty five. In Kinleigh, that meant Kelsie.
She had heard all sorts of tales about sorceresses, how powerful they were. How they could turn a cat into a castle and a king into a toad. Kelsie did not need to be transformed to feel like a filthy animal, she already lived like one so she’d supposed she had nothing to fear - until the lady made her appearance.
Nobody had mentioned how grand sorceresses were. This one was very grand indeed. She looked like a queen and held herself the same way. She was tall for a woman, almost six feet. She was wearing a gleaming green gown that had somehow avoided being tainted by the mud that splashed the clothes of all the others in the village. Her form was voluptuous without being excessive, her skin creamy and unblemished, her fingers long, and bearing beautiful jeweled rings.
It was hard to say how old the sorceress was. She seemed to defy the very concept of age itself. Her skin was free of the usual wrinkles and marks that would denote age, and yet she had a maturity about her that suggested that she had seen many years in the seven kingdoms.
Kelsie had never seen a creature like this, a woman so feminine she would have made a scarecrow swoon, and yet so powerful in personality that even the chief of her village, who loved to boast how he would bend the knee to no man, had given way to his instinct to bow.
The lady's lip curled as she looked at Kelsie, and when she spoke, it was with refined and modulated tones that spoke to high breeding and education.
“She's small. Are you sure she is eighteen years of age?”
“Aye. I can vouch that she was born on the first of fire, under the sign of the fox,” the chief said. “'Er mother has the bloodlines of three fiefdoms in her veins, so it was said. Came here as a wanderer, died ten or so years back.”
“And her father?”
“Unknown, if it pleases you, m'lady. Her mother was alone when she arrived heavy with child and would not speak of the male responsible.”
“It does not please me,” Victoria said, her lips thinned. “You have no bloodline for her. Nothing to prove she would be of any use to me at all. You have wasted my time in an attempt to claim the bounty.”
“No! M'lady. We have no bloodline for her, that is true. No man will claim her as his progeny. But she has the gift.”
***
Victoria cast another glance over at the stinking, cringing wretch. They could at least have given her a scrub before presenting her, but she doubted the villagers even noticed how filthy she was. Not one of them had bathed in the current year, she was sure of that. These remote little villages had a stench you could smell ten miles off.
It was terribly tiresome, trying to find a girl with any of the magic left in her. Generations ago it flowed richly in almost every female lineage but over time, most of them had mixed so thoroughly with unsuitable male counterparts that what had begun as a torrent of magic had become little more than a trickle. Even that was drying up now.
“Does he speak the truth?” She addressed the cowering girl in tones that demanded obedience. “Do you have the gift?”
The girl shook her head. “I don't,” she denied. “I really don't, m'lady.”
“She's lying, Lady Varys,” the village chief swore. “She lies horribly and almost constantly.”
“I do not!” The girl attempted to defend herself, pouting furiously with dark eyes that peered out of her dirty face with far too much intellect for one who was not a liar.
“Silence, girl. Come here and look into my eyes.” Victoria crooked her finger and called the girl closer.
***
Kelsie did her best to stay strong as she looked into the fine lady's face. As she did, she felt a tingle run over her skin, a light blush of some strange prickling that made all the little hairs on the back of her neck rise like a startled cat's. This was not like being looked at normally. She was sure she was being probed, every little curl and twist of her mind taken in by this sorceress in her fine green gown.
The lady looked away from her and the tingling faded. Kelsie felt strangely bereft, though she could not say why.
“She's of marriageable age, and she's not unpleasant to look at. No defects in her form. Why has she not been married?”
“Boys are scared of her,” the chief grunted. “Men too.”
“Is that so?” For the first time the lady's purr held a note of approval. “What causes their fear?”
“There was a suitor, once,” the chief said. “Fine lad.”
“Harvald the butcher's son,” the girl spoke up. “He tried to come to me in the night and do me like the boar does to the sow. I told him no, but he didn't listen...”
“So Harvald's a eunuch now,” the chief finished when her voice wavered.
“Is that so?” The lady smiled.
“It wasn't nothing I did on purpose,” Kelsie stammered. “It just...”
“Happened, I imagine. As, I would guess, many things tend to simply happen around you when you are not pleased.”
“She's only good company for pigs,” the chief spat on the floor of his own home. “Misfortune follows her like flies on a pig's bum.”
***
Victoria watched the girl's face twitch with annoyance, and her trained eye picked out the little sparks of potential dancing in the air like a cloudy haze. This one had something, that was for certain.
“I will take her,” Victoria said. “I will not give you a hundred gold coin because you have not proved she is of the blood, and I have my doubts about her. I will give you fifty.”
“But, m'lady...” the chief attempted to bargain. Victoria had no time for such things.
“She is a pig girl with blood muddier than the contents of her sty. When she becomes angry, men lose their manhood. I am the product of a long line of sorceresses stretching back to Lyra the Terrible. What do you think might happen when I grow displeased?”
Victoria's tone was melodious and yet so full of icy menace the chief forgot to argue.
“You brought me out here, seven days ride in the promise of a young woman with fire in her veins. I come here to find some filthy lying wretch whose only claim to fame is the fact she decocked some handsy butcher's boy. You should be grateful I am taking her off your hands and leaving you any coin at all.”
***
Kelsie had never seen anyone speak to the chief like that before. He was a broad man, built like a barrel full of bears and his face and arms were marked with the scars of battles he'd won against men and beasts alike. And yet he let Lady Varys speak to him so without so much as a word against her. She dropped a small pouch of coin into his open palm and bade him close his open jaw, then she gestured to Kelsie.
“Come girl, we will leave immediately.”
She beckoned and Kelsie followed. They left the chief’s house together and there Kelsie saw the lady’s mare standing, waiting for her rider quite patiently. Her saddle and reins were of the finest quality and had been thoroughly eyed by every horseman in the village.
Lady Varys mounted smoothly and set the mare to a slow walk. She did not say another word and it was obvious to Kelsie that she was expected to follow in the lady’s wake. She did so, for want of anything else to do. She was not leaving behind any possessions, not even a home. Just a sty.
The lady kept her mount at a pace Kelsie found relatively easy to keep up with and in the silence, Kelsie found compelled to speak.
“Uhm…”
“What is it, girl?”
“In the village, you called me a liar, m'lady, but...”
“Never apologize for being a liar,” Lady Varys interrupted. “A lady must lie every now and then. A sorceress must lie almost all the time. But you will not lie to me, understand? I will whip you if I uncover an untruth you have told me.”
“Will you not lie to me too?”
A silence met the question and Kelsie knew the command did not go both ways.
“Where are we going m’lady?”
“We will adjourn to my home in Englred City,” Victoria replied.
Kelsie’s eyes widened. A home in Englred City, the very center of the seven realms. Over the years she had heard how Englred held people from all over the world, rich merchants and traders and incredible houses and buildings, some many stories high.
Positioned in the very center of the seventh of the seven kingdoms, Englred was a hub for trade and intrigue. Whenever anything happened, it happened in Englred – or at least, that was how it seemed to Kelsie. They did not get much in the way of news in Kinleigh and in truth, she had very little concept of the world outside the swampy farmlands the peasants worked. They were so far from anywhere that even war did not tend to touch them, and yet tales of Englred still filtered through, so she knew it must be an astonishing place.
It had never so much as crossed her mind that she might one day go there herself, much less in the company of a rich and powerful lady. After years of existing in the muck, fortune finally seemed to be smiling on the simple peasant girl.