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Prologue
Alanna fell with a thump onto the soft sheets of her bed. Curling up, she reminisced over the day's events. Being teased by the other girls for her clumsy needlework, having her brother, family, and all she held dear insulted, every Daughter working their hardest to make her life a living hell. Around halfway through the day she had collapsed, shrieking vehemently at the First Daughter and earning herself a week of pot washing in the kitchens. Dinner had been a disaster; with her least favorite people tripping her and making her spill her soup everywhere, all over the floor. She was made to mop up the brown mess in front of the entire hall, the others aiming cruel verbal barbs at her limp form, feverishly wiping the cold flagstones.
Then a group of girls had trashed her bedroom, and she had had to clean it up. She has been stitching and mending the curtains nearly all night. They looked horrible, with stray threads and uneven patches, but she didn't care. The Daughters, who had been overseeing the project, had left when she had finished, late into the night. They had left her to clean her mattress, which had been covered in mud from outside. Numerous other things had been done to her quarters, but she was too exhausted to fix them. Turning her face to her bedside table, she looked at the framed painting of Thom she had, to find it on the floor, words carved into it with a knife.
You don't belong here.
Alanna looked around at the gray, empty, stone walls of her room. She hated the walls, she hated the fences, she hated the girls, she hated the Daughters, and she hated everyone in the cursed convent that held her prisoner, all with an unfathomable and violent passion that she would keep with her for the rest of her life. Her spirit was naturally wild and raged at being bound and forced to do the hateful things that they taught in the convent. The prison had altered her mentality over the years, the mold for her spirit. The mold had failed, and her spirit had sunk down, irretrievably deep, into despair.
She would to go to court to find a husband tomorrow, when she turned fifteen. The First Daughter had said she would have to go early, as finding a husband would take a while in her case. The Daughters hated Alanna as much as the girl hated them. She had made their lives into a living nightmare, turning the quiet, neat, and orderly convent upside down and inside out. Smiling, she remembered when she had covered their bedclothes in honey, how she had put spiders in their drinking water, and how often she had wandered into their privies to soap the seats. These few pranks had earned her the all-time low position of underdog in the Convent's hierarchy, and there she would stay until the few hours it was until she would have to awaken and leave.
They all knew Alanna had never been meant to be sheltered behind the ornamental iron gates of the convent, but there was nothing the Daughters could have done to reverse the situation. They had refused to teach her magic, even with her extraordinarily potent raw ability, because they had been afraid she would blow up the buildings. Alanna was more of a fierce, brave, warrior type, not someone who would do embroidery in her spare time. Ever since the time the tall, forbidding gates had shut with a reverberating clang behind her, she had felt a sense of inner superiority to all inside, that there was a side of her they would never know and she would never show. She was stronger than they were, and she would never allow them to break her spirit.
Everyone knew her story, of the wild plan that would have worked, if her brother and Lord Alan had not interfered. Thom had argued incessantly about the subject, finally agreeing. Nevertheless, he had wasted so much time arguing that Lord Alan became suspicious, and he barged in on them as Thom was forging his letters. He became furious, dispatching them on their separate ways immediately. If only Thom hadn't been so stubborn! If only…
Now Alanna had been locked up for years in a place she had dreaded to go to from the start, learning how to be a proper "court lady".
She was hopelessly unprepared for a world she would meet in two hours' time.
Smiling, she placed her head on her pillow. Her eyes focused on the uneven lines of stitching in her curtains before the image blurred and everything went black with the heavenly coming of sleep.