AN.
I wrote this while my power was out. I don't know why I'm on such a SilMil kick lately.
Four chapters so far (of very varying length lol).
I'll finish it if there is interest.
Chapter One
The first time I spilt another's blood it was my half-sister's.
She had been taunting me.
"If you keep hanging around the taverns like you do, you'll end up like your mother." The concern in her voice may have been real, it didn't matter to me.
"And you'll end up like yours," I said. "We all end up dead someday."
"At least my mother was married," she snapped.
I still remember the hate in her dark eyes when I took the knife I had been using the cut the vegetables for dinner and sliced it across one perfect, peaches-and-cream cheek. The anger wasn't for the pain, but because I marred her beautiful face. And laughed in it.
"At least my mother was loved," I said. "And now you'll never be married."
I fled the very night of the incident. Not to avoid punishment, as it was thought by the people in my village, but for a much different reason. One cannot return without having left in the first place. And I planned to return. Return and claim my place as the most cherished, the most loved, and the most powerful. The rightful daughter. And my father would sob and beg me to spare him. And I'd spit in his face, his face like mine, until he'd wish he'd divorced his legitimate wife and married my mother instead of sending her off after she dared to bear him a girl child with his features splayed plainly across her face.
It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would.
I changed my name. It wasn't to protect myself from retribution for stabbing my sister, that petty crime did not follow me from a remote village. No, it was because the illegitimate daughter of a merchant would have no chance rising to power in the type of society I sought. I wanted to leave that all behind.
I had to trade my mother's things for transportation to the capital, and for clothes fine enough for me to pass as a wealthy courtier from foreign lands. Along the way I used the most dangerous and valuable thing I had inherited from my mother: the ability for magic.
It was rudimentary and she never taught me much before she died. But how do you suppose she had so many admirers, and got men to follow her, gift her with such expensive things? Of course, there are ways to bewitch men that have nothing to do with magic, but when you throw in some outside power it helps immensely to cease any questioning, suspicion or confusion when something just isn't right.
It came in handy.
It's how I managed to enter the capital on the arm of a high-ranking official, with my new name as Lady Beryl. I chose the name of a semi-precious stone partially in apology to my mother, for trading her lovely gemstones for my transport here, and partially to complement the Four King's names – all named also for precious stones. Although it was almost too ambitious, I considered it merely a good omen. I hoped to climb high enough where I would have a chance to meet them. To even have a chance to influence men that powerful – the thought made a thrill go down my spine. But I didn't have plans much beyond that. Beyond becoming rich, powerful, and returning home to buy my village and exact revenge.
But then I met Prince Endymion.