In the year 1448, late summer, somewhere in a southern province of China, a girl child is born to a poor family, second child after her sister. Although not quite welcomed due to her gender, she led a reasonably happy life helping her mother out in her herbalist shop. That was, until that fateful day, three years later when in the cold weeks before winter, to the family's delight, at last a baby boy was born. Her mother laboured long and hard, but to their horror, the baby was horribly anaemic and very weak. Despite her mother's best efforts and herbal concoctions, the boy showed no signs of improvement, for he was too young for even the herbs to help. The baby was dying. Desperate, her mother turned to the spirits—for she was, in truth, a sorceress. Just a little time, until the boy grew strong enough to survive on his own. The spirits agreed to her request, but with a price—the blood needed to be supplemented by a living human, for as long as the spell held in place. Not the first daughter, for a first born was sacred, male or female. The mother made her decision. The second daughter was dragged before the spirits, crying out to her mother for help. They engulfed her, casting the spell to make her the sacrificial lamb. All at once, they disappeared in a flash of unholy light. The boy began to wail for the first time, finally strong enough to cry. Overjoyed, the family gathered around the boy—forgetting the young girl lying weakly on the floor, gasping for air, shoulder branded with the dark mark of her sacrifice—a black scar in the shape of a rose strangled by four of its own thorns—the symbol of the girl, betrayed by the four who would call themselves her family.
At first it was difficult to cope with the sacrifice, the young girl felt as if she were fighting for her life every day. As the boy grew, however, he was slowly able to stand on his own and the toll on her decreased. On his seventh birthday the sacrifice was deemed unnecessary. With the ugly marking on her shoulder though, she would be marked as cursed and unlucky, no longer marriageable. A daughter who could not be married off and was no longer needed to supplement her brother was a liability to the family. They sold her off to slave traders from the west who were ignorant of superstition and believed that a young, exotic Asian girl could be sold for a high price. Taken away from her home, the ten-year old girl crouched chained to the wagon and wept, for the last time, she told herself, for a family that never loved her.
When she arrived in England, it was a time of turmoil. Elizabeth I had just taken over as queen of England. The times were changing, and she had just been thrown into the middle of it. So begins the story of a girl who cast aside her name and her past to face a future that seemed equally bleak—but that she was determined to change.