June 3013

The thunk of the knife against tree bark was sharp in the otherwise silent cover of the woods. As the sound reverberated against the trunks of the trees surrounding the clearing, a bird let out a scream-like caw, and the sound of wings beating frantically toward the sky, disturbing leaves and branches on their way out, joined the noise. Martice exhaled slowly, glaring at the hilt protruding from the tree across from her. She hadn’t hit her target.

It was still early, the sun just beginning to poke through the tree branches, but she knew it was already too late for her to still be out here. She shouldn’t have been here at all, and if her father found out… He wasn’t exactly known for his ability to forgive.

She huffed and began to gather up the knives she’d deposited in the dirt beneath her feet, tossing them into her satchel with clangs and clacks. As she moved forward to pull the knife from the tree, she found she had planted it firmer than she had managed before.

“Stupid…” she murmured to herself as she yanked it free and stumbled backward, stuffing it in the bag with the others.

Martice did this most mornings. She got up before dawn and snuck from her bedroom to her clearing to read or practice throwing knives or sometimes both—on occasion she would read about throwing knives, though she found the technical books boring—and made it back to the mansion before her father or any of his minions noticed. They weren’t minions, she always tried to remind herself, but they certainly acted enough like it. She didn’t see another appropriate name.

Her father was the leader of the Abaddon Rebellion, a rapidly growing movement against the kings who ruled over them, and the people who came to him were desperate enough to be rid of the monarchy that they surrendered to him. They gave him their blind loyalty, forgetting in the process that in doing so, they were treating him like a king. She found the entire ordeal foolish.

But if it weren’t for blind loyalty, she supposed, she wouldn’t exist. Her father could be cruel and cunning, but as she saw it, her mother was more so. Melane’s ticket to the top of the Rebellion’s High Council had been Martice. She paid little attention to her daughter otherwise. Unlike Martice’s father, who paid her too much attention.

The mansion that housed the Rebellion wasn’t a long walk from the clearing, but it felt it when Martice was running later than she should have been. Most likely, it was already too late. It was bright enough that there was next to no way she could get back over the wall to the mansion’s grounds without being noticed by a guard. A guard who would be forced to report her to her father.

But even in her rush, she found herself slowing at the sound of another bird’s sharp caw slicing through the trees. A crash of branches and a thud of something slamming into the dirt followed. She wasn’t far from the sound. Maybe a few yards. She hurried toward it.

She stopped.

Before her, there was a girl. She wasn’t conscious, lying on her back, her hair—a mix somewhere between brown and blonde—splayed out in a halo around her bleeding head. Her pulse was picking up, her heart beating in her throat and blood rushing through her ears. She could walk away—she should walk away if she wanted to avoid getting into the very trouble she was on her way back to the mansion to avoid—or, though she had no idea how, she could help the girl. She barely thought about it, as she raced forward and knelt at the girl’s side.

She was a beautiful girl around Martice’s same age, dressed ordinarily. There was little doubt she had come from the nearby village: Rowan. Her eyes were closed, her lashes thick as they rested as the crests of her cheeks. She was positioned almost too perfectly as if she had taken a graceful fall from a surface hardly above the ground, as if she had rolled down a few stairsteps. But there were no stairs. There were only the trees and the grassy ground.

Martice hesitated. It hadn’t been long since the thud had brought her attention to the girl in the first place. She had begun her combat training young—that was what happened when one had a power-hungry mother and a paranoid father—but she had never been in the field. She had never seen someone on the ground directly following injury. She had only seen her father’s soldiers safe with the healers, receiving the treatment they needed, or already dead, their bodies covered in sheets as they were carried out to be burned. She didn’t have a clue what she was supposed to do with this girl.

She shook her. Her shoulder was warm, and her chest rose and fell at steady intervals. She was alive. Martice decided the next thing she needed was for her to be awake.

She shook her again. With the exception of her chest, she wasn’t moving, and, albeit slowly, the pool of blood around her head was growing. So she shook her again, harder.

This time, the girl stirred. A mix between a soft groan and a whimper emanated from the back of her throat. Martice released a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and shook her again.

Her eyes flew open, and Martice stumbled back, landing directly on her butt. It didn’t hurt, but a small, involuntary “oof” escaped her mouth as she landed. The girl was pushing herself up into a sitting position, a hand holding the back of her head and her wide eyes set on Martice.

They were wild, her eyes, mirroring the panic on her face. Her pupils were large, but they weren’t large enough to cover the color of her irises. They were a soft shade of purple, but calm as the color was there was a storm within them. It was one of the quiet ones. It was the storm that stuck in the middle of a bright sky plagued with only a few clouds of a non-threatening shade of grey. It was the storm that began with a singular low rumble of thunder and turned over a short period into a tornado. It was the most dangerous of storms: the kind no one sees coming.

“I—” The girl brought her hand away from her head. It was coated in a thin layer of blood. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the woods between Rowan and Abaddon Mansion,” Martice said. The girl gave her a blank stare. “Do you know what either of those things are?”

The girl shook her head.

“What’s your name?”

“Um…” The girl swallowed hard, her eyes flicking to the ground. “Luna, I think.”

“You think…” Martice trailed off, wondering at her and the blankness of her expression. “Do you know who you are?”

Martice recognized this could be a trap. She recognized that many people disliked and even hated her father, and she recognized that the King would leap at a chance to take him down. But this girl was so young, and the look on her face was too genuine to be an act. Whatever had happened to this girl, whether she’d simply fallen or something else had happened entirely—maybe she had been attacked or someone had taken her memory on purpose and left her here—it had not been staged.

Luna shook her head and raised her eyes to meet Martice’s. “No.” Her voice broke. “No, I don’t.”

“It’s okay. Come with me. I can help you.” Martice held out a hand, and Luna took it with her blood-covered one.

She let Martice pull her to her feet and linked her arm into hers, as they began to walk. She was unsteady, but she wasn’t steady either. Her grip on Martice was tight, and as they approached the outer walls of the mansion, it tightened.

There were two guards positioned on top of the wall, one on either side of the main gate. Both of them had noticed Luna and Martice and had straightened, one of them moving to lean over the wall and shout at them.

“What is this?” he asked. Martice didn’t like many members of the Rebellion, but she was glad to see him. His name was Havoc, he was about six years older than she was, and when he talked to her, he wasn’t cautious because she was his leader’s daughter or haughty because she was young. He spoke to her as he did everyone else, with care and respect. Now, his tone wasn’t one of anger but of protectiveness.

“Her name is Luna,” Martice said, moving herself and Luna toward the gate. She would avoid the question of why she was outside the gates and redirect the focus to helping Luna. “And she’s going to join us.”

She could feel Luna’s apprehension, and she leaned over to whisper into her ear. “You’ll be safe here. You’ll be protected, fed, clothed, all of it.”

“Why?” Luna’s voice was soft, almost low. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Because I want to,” Martice said and it was the truth. She hadn’t been taught to offer aid to others—that wasn’t the mission of the Rebellion, destroying the King was—but she could feel in the pit of her stomach that she was supposed to help Luna. It was instinctual. She had to take her home, and she had to protect her. What it cost her didn’t matter. This would bring a new purpose to her life.