Exile was nothing like the polished cruelty of the court.
Politics sliced with words. Exile sliced with steel.
The caravan they threw me into wasn't gilded in silks or guarded by royal blades. It was a tangle of wagons and worn-out horses, driven by men and women who bled for coins and killed for less.
The caravan master, a broad-shouldered half-orc named Darran, took one look at me—dressed in court silks, barefoot in the mud—and laughed.
"Princess," he spat, like the word itself was a curse. "Keep up or die. Either works for me."
I kept up.
By the end of the first night, my hands were blistered raw from holding the wagon ropes. My feet bled from the rough stones of the forest roads. No one offered help. They watched. Waiting for me to die.
I wasn't going to die. They aren't the first and won't be the last.
The first time I stole, it wasn't for greed. It was for bread.
Three days in, my rations "went missing." Coincidence, they said with sharp smiles. I knew better.
That night, I watched as a grizzled dwarf named Grath stashed half a loaf beneath his bedroll.
I waited.
I watched.
I took it while he slept.
The trick wasn't in the stealing. It was in knowing when to disappear.
I ate my first stolen meal beneath the roots of a hollowed tree, watching frost gather on the edges of the world.
The next morning, Grath woke to an empty stash and a missing knife. His howls echoed down the valley. He never found either.
I wasn't a court girl anymore.
I was a shadow.
The first time I fought, it wasn't with a blade. It was with my fists.
A human boy, older by three winters, thought to corner me behind a tavern when we stopped in Greymoor. Said I'd fetch a fair price in the slaver pits.
I broke his nose with a rock before he could finish the offer.
He drew a dagger. I drew the shadows.
I don't remember reaching for my Song Magic. I don't even remember singing.
But when I opened my eyes, his body lay twisted in the mud—eyes wide with terror, mouth filled with black feathers.
Ravens circled overhead.
I left him there.
The caravan whispered about me after that. Keep their distance. Some called me a witch. Others called me smart.
Darran just called me dangerous.
"Good," I told him. "So are you."
He laughed and taught me how to throw a knife two days later.
Vanishing wasn't a skill I learned. It was a choice I made.
I became the girl no one saw unless I wanted them to. I learned the weight of footsteps, the silence of breath, the art of shadows.
By fifteen, I could lift a coin purse in broad daylight. Slit a throat in a crowded hall and slip away before the blood cools.
The world forgot the exiled princess of Syl'Valen.
They remembered The Crimson Dancer.
But before I earned that name…
Before I became a whisper in the dark…
There was a battlefield.
A boy.
A dragon.
And a choice that changed everything.