THE MASKED PRINCE

THE GIRL FROM AVELORA

**THE GIRL FROM AVELORA**

Mira was awake before the sun had properly committed to rising, sweeping the stone path in front of her family's cottage with the tired, practiced rhythm of someone who had done it every morning of her life and expected to do it every morning still to come.

Her family had little. She had stopped resenting that a long time ago — there was no use hating a home for being modest, or a village for being poor, when neither one had asked to be either.

"Come with me to the well," she called toward the doorway, where her younger brother Daniel had just emerged, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"How many trips are we making this time?"

"Until the barrel's full."

"Go on without me, then. Someone has to help Mother with the morning stock."

"Fine." She set the broom against the wall and set off alone, two clay pitchers balanced against her hip, the morning air still cool before the sun climbed high enough to make the walk unbearable.

She passed a cluster of girls her own age gathered near the village square, all deep in conversation, none of them so much as glancing in her direction.

"—did you hear there's a royal gathering at the palace this weekend? Free food, free wine, and they say the gates will be open to anyone respectable enough to be let past the guards."

"The princes are back in the kingdom too, so it should be a grand affair this time, not one of those small formal dinners they usually hold."

"They say all three of them are unbearably handsome. Hard to believe that's true of an entire family, but that's the rumor."

"The queens, though — Queen Marguerite especially. I don't know how anyone in her household survives working for her. My cousin lasted less than two weeks before she left."

Mira let the gossip wash past her without much real interest, filling her pitchers at the well in unhurried silence while the others chattered on behind her.

By the time she'd filled both pitchers to the brim, the walk home felt twice as long as the walk out always somehow managed to be.

She slipped through the back entrance rather than the front, out of habit more than anything, and was halfway through pouring the first pitcher into the storage basin when she heard voices raised near the front of the cottage — one of them sharp enough to cut clean through the morning quiet.

"Where is your daughter?"

Mira froze mid-pour, water sloshing over the rim and darkening the stone at her feet.

She knew that voice. Everyone in Avelora knew that voice, and everyone in Avelora had learned, one way or another, to fear it at least a little.

"Where is your daughter? Don't answer a question with a question — where is she?"

Her mother's voice came back tighter than usual, careful in the particular way people got careful around Constance. "I have every right to ask why you're looking for her before I hand her over to anyone."

"How dare you question me." Constance's voice climbed sharper with every syllable. "Do you have any idea who I am? I won't ask a third time. Where is your daughter — do you even know what she's done?"

"What are you all waiting for?" Constance snapped, apparently at one of the attendants she always kept trailing a few steps behind her like obedient shadows. "Go inside. Bring the witch's daughter out here so I can see her face myself."

*This woman. Again. Always again.*

Mira set the half-full pitcher down as gently as the clay would allow, careful not to let it clatter and give her away, and slipped back out through the same door she'd come in through only moments earlier. Her heart was already hammering by the time her feet hit the path, and she was running before she'd fully decided to run at all.

She didn't know, exactly, what Constance believed she'd done this time. It could have been anything — a debt her mother owed, a herb she'd gathered without asking, a rumor twisted three times over before it reached the wrong ears. She only knew, from years of hard experience, that whatever the accusation actually was would matter far less than Constance's version of it once it had been repeated enough times to harden into something like truth.

And she knew, with the same certainty, that the smartest thing she could do right now was make sure she wasn't anywhere Constance could find her until she understood exactly what she was supposedly guilty of this time.

She ducked behind the low garden wall separating their yard from the neighboring cottage, pressed her back against the cool stone, and listened to her own breathing until it finally slowed enough to think straight.

*Whatever this is,* she told herself, *it will pass. It always passes.*

She almost believed it.

Somewhere beyond the wall, the distant sound of market carts creaking toward the square carried on, entirely indifferent to her trouble, and for a moment Mira envied them their simplicity.