The world looked entirely different when viewed from your knees.
Selene dipped her fingers into the coarse wooden bucket, her raw skin instantly flinching as the boiling, lye-heavy water bit into the unhealed cuts around her wrists. She didn't have the luxury of a brush. Her tool was a ragged square of coarse burlap, stripped from an old potato sack, and her domain was the endless, weeping granite floorboards of the Blood Moon's lower mess hall.
The silk tunic was gone, traded for a shapeless shift of undyed flax that scratched against her fractured ribs with every movement. Her hair, once woven into intricate silver crowns by the high court maids, hung in a single, greasy braid down her spine, pinned out of her eyes with a splinter of pine.
“Move it, noble,” an old omega cook snarled,
