HER EMERALD THRONE
FIRST PAGE
Aurel clutched her leather satchel closer and climbed the steps to the skeleton building.
There weren’t skeletons in the building, nor was it made of bones. The two-story structure itself was the skeleton, with a chipped blue pastel exterior, two rows of shattered rectangle windows and a char-edged maw in the flower-carved door. Same as its identical stone neighbor and the one after that, both sides of the narrow street lined with dead houses. They’d called this area a marketplace once, but now it was a graveyard.
And near midnight, with the moon hidden behind clouds, it had the ambiance of a tomb.
Which was probably why no one came here anymore.
Except for schacking idiots, Aurel thought darkly as she avoided the blacken stakes erupting from the door’s wood and stepped into a decaying storefront. The old town had been abandoned over three hundred years ago, but the burn marks were more recent, probably from a jittery Saxen Corps soldier with too much emer loaded into his rifle.
At least he hadn’t hit a person. Accidents were reported in every skeleton city in Saxeng, most near the edge of the Archduke’s territory like Perc was. But unlike other towns, Perc was surrounded by a range of mountains with snowy caps that shown coral pink when the sun set. There was no way in haven any Adanati spy was hiking those mountains just to get to the village of barely two hundred souls below. Obviously the soldier hadn’t known that or he wouldn’t have mistaken the wind for a binder’s spell.
If anything, it was ghosts complaining about the gaping holes being put into their pretty doors.
There weren’t skeletons in the building, nor was it made of bones. The two-story structure itself was the skeleton, with a chipped blue pastel exterior, two rows of shattered rectangle windows and a char-edged maw in the flower-carved door. Same as its identical stone neighbor and the one after that, both sides of the narrow street lined with dead houses. They’d called this area a marketplace once, but now it was a graveyard.
And near midnight, with the moon hidden behind clouds, it had the ambiance of a tomb.
Which was probably why no one came here anymore.
Except for schacking idiots, Aurel thought darkly as she avoided the blacken stakes erupting from the door’s wood and stepped into a decaying storefront. The old town had been abandoned over three hundred years ago, but the burn marks were more recent, probably from a jittery Saxen Corps soldier with too much emer loaded into his rifle.
At least he hadn’t hit a person. Accidents were reported in every skeleton city in Saxeng, most near the edge of the Archduke’s territory like Perc was. But unlike other towns, Perc was surrounded by a range of mountains with snowy caps that shown coral pink when the sun set. There was no way in haven any Adanati spy was hiking those mountains just to get to the village of barely two hundred souls below. Obviously the soldier hadn’t known that or he wouldn’t have mistaken the wind for a binder’s spell.
If anything, it was ghosts complaining about the gaping holes being put into their pretty doors.