The Duchess

Author’s Note: This is chapter one of a much longer story I’m working on. It also has adult themes that are potentially triggering, read at your own risk.

The Market. 

The cries of eager merchants, the splash of waves punctuated by the squawks of seagulls, and the conflicting bawdy lyrics of sailor shanties battling the plucking of harps and chirping of flutes as each spilled forth from theaters and pleasure houses told me the Harbor District was near. My feet had already started to blister in the rough-made boots that I’d been given for my disguise. It hurt, but I was determined so I didn’t allow myself to limp, even though the blister on my left heel was about to pop.

My pulse raced and shallow breaths made it feel like I was sucking air through a flute. I was used to the usually quiet grounds of my home, with its rolling hills of well manicured grass, fields of white and yellow wildflowers, and twisting old peach and apple trees. I liked it out there, past the ornate statues and primped up rose bushes of the inner garden. Out in the field and the orchard I could pretend I was in the real world, free to roam and explore without judging eyes and scolding tutors. I inhaled deeply to calm down but nearly coughed as the scent of salt, fish, wet wood, and seagull droppings slapped me in the face, a chill breeze having carried them over from the nearby waterfront.

My hands were shaking and I double checked the hood of my cloak. It was scratchy, and smelled like road dust and horse breath. Someone had really been thorough in trying to make me seem unremarkable. It was so foreign and rough, but it reminded me that this was my adventure. Under my cloak I was wearing my favorite dress, a simple piece constructed of burgundy stained silk. It had been my mom’s when she was a girl. It had been mended hundreds of times. I had fought many grand word battles with my governess, Ms. Taffy, to keep it. The poor lady had been trying to tame me for as long as I could remember. I often argued and yelled at her, but no matter how strict she seemed, she never put me down, and always let me hug her and cry in her arms when I was upset. In moments like that, it was almost like I had a mother again. As I ran my fingers over one of the resewn seams that Ms. Taffy had repaired for me, my shoulders released tension and my hands stopped shaking.

Pushing past the pain in my boots, which now seemed less significant, I sped up and passed the guards Father had assigned me. I was going to lead this expedition.

The Harbor Market was something I’d dreamed about for two years. Ever since I read that copy of ‘Empire City:- Center of Civilization in the East’ I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like to actually be there. I couldn’t stop wondering if it was really as beautiful and romantic as the author, Kilborne Hagberry, had made it out to be. My mind was full of colors and faces, spices and mystery. I knew that if there was one place in this city I would be guaranteed to have an adventure it would be there.

Don’t get me wrong. I also read books about heroes and villains. About mythical dragons. About the Pure and the Magi, and the Weavers from the far continent. I read about simple people who grew up to be mighty warriors, healers, sages. But I was seven at the time, so I knew I couldn’t just walk outside and slay a dragon or rescue a family from a burning building. I also knew I was a duchess, and the life of a wandering hero wasn’t one I was likely to have anyway. But still, I dreamed. I knew that, even if it was small, my adventures had to start somewhere.

That was the first time I asked to leave the family estate to see the city. Father is a stern and independent man, an unmoving rock on the shore of civilization. He’s notoriously protective of everything that is his. That includes me in his mind. So he said no.

In my studies at home, I always turned in all papers early and performed all etiquette and maiden skill practice with exacting attention to detail so my tutors would agree to bring me books about the city, especially ones that talked about the harbor district, it’s history, and all of the people that passed through, whether they were merchants on trade vessels, dignitaries from foreign lands, wanderers, local peddlers trying to make a coin off the affluent people who passed through, or pickpockets trying to do the same. All the books agreed that if one wanted to see the broadest blend of Empire City’s many faces, the Harbor Market was the place to go. They also talked about the theories that Empire City’s criminal underbelly made its home in the district. About the astonishing representation of the wealth gap in Empire City. About the latest fashions from overseas. About the spices from far shores, and tea houses that play foreign music. About brothels, and historic inns that heroes stayed at. The more I learned the more I had to see it. Every month I would write a letter to Father petitioning him. I even had my tutors help me with a few, but when father found out they were replaced.

Finally, when I was nine, on a night that father’s cheeks were rosy with wine, and he was laughing between bites of roasted boar from his latest hunt, I read him a speech I’d been preparing for several months – about the importance of the Harbor District to the financial security of our city and our family’s wealth. He laughed at me, but I stood before him and held his gaze. I could feel him trying to crush my will with his eyes. Finally, he made a bet with me. I had done it!

We rounded a corner on to Market Street and my boot slipped on a stray rock as my eyes beheld what I’d dreamt about for years. So many people. So much more real than the books.

My shoulders bunched up again and my jaw hurt from clamping down. I kept walking. Henrick and Aetherman wouldn’t get any ammunition to feed to my dad. He had said, if I shed a single tear, this would be my last visit out of the estate until I was under my own will. The world outside didn’t have room for weakness.

The breeze from the water greeted my nostrils again. It wasn’t so nasty after all. It was like the world was saying “Hello.” As the wind ruffled my cloak and tickled my nose, my whole body uncoiled, from my jaw to my ankles. This was the real world! This was what I was here for.

Men and women in fine silks of every shade stood behind counters in shops, prying open wallets with hungry eyes and toothy smiles. Outside of the shops, along the road, stalls were set up laden with everything from squawking chickens to leather sandals for the upcoming warm season. Loud men dressed in coarse cloth, reeking of sweat and alcohol, chins speckled by hair, stumbled into street carts or strutted through groups of people wrapped in richly dyed spun cotton who stared back, pinching their soft skinned noses and furrowing their groomed brows. The chaos of the market surrounded me. Did the black cat on the corner belong to someone, or if it was a stray living off scraps? Was the boy selling newspapers going to get in trouble for missing lessons? He somehow looked more real than the children of royalty I’d occasionally seen when their parents came to visit. Would he have something more interesting to say if I were to go talk to him? A dirt caked face, shirt dyed brown with mud and over-sized boots painted a picture of a life with challenge, outside the glass cage that the upper crust kept themselves in through constant performances and invisible battles for power and prestige. His clothes told me he probably didn’t have days full of sessions with tutors. This was his life.

Hundreds or thousands of people wove their own stories before me, and my mind replayed the stories I’d grown up reading. My mind caught on the story of Jorah Silver-tongue. Raised by a traveling band of performers, he picked up the way of the blade after his troupe was captured by slavers. It’s said, he was so annoying that the slavers decided to cut out his tongue and leave him behind to save themselves the trouble of his company. That was when he found a sword, his new silver tongue. My heart quickened again, but this time, hungry for life, for more. I knew that when we reached the end of Market Street my protectors would dutifully return me to my metaphorical tower in the sky where I lived above and apart from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t make it that easy on them.

The corners of my lips turned up. As the drunkards on the other side of the street started yelling at a lone peddler, drawing the gaze of my guards, I took the opportunity and turned down a side alley.

My cheeks glowed warm with pride beneath my cloak as I heard the clink of metal on metal. I’d surprised my father’s best guards enough to break their focus on subtlety. All three of us were shrouded in dusty cloaks. Mine kept my identity hidden, and theirs hid their armor and deadly weapons.

“Duchess! What are you doing?” An urgent whisper came from Henrick behind me.

I kept walking.

“Girl. Turn around now,” Aetherman’s raspier voice sounded out this time. Notably devoid of any sign of its usual attempt at imitating politeness.

Not bothering to turn around, I smiled and said, “I’m going this way, and if you intend to do your jobs then I guess you had better come along too.”

Aetherman grunted, Henrick sighed, but neither stopped me. Wordless, we wove through a maze of alleys progressively getting grimier and narrower. Shifting glances from bloodshot eyes and fingers twitching near knife belts projected an aura of danger, but I puffed out my chest, running my fingers once more over the resewn seams of my mothers dress and pushed past any fear. Clearly none of them had seen Aetherman butcher a training dummy with the beat up short swords that hid under his cloak, or Henrik shoot an apple off the head of a moving pony with the crossbow he kept strapped to his leg.

My eyes were wide as I took everything in. The jerky movements, the way each person skirted around the others maintaining a distance just beyond the reach of a blade. The people here seemed much more weary than in other parts of the city. It was like they all feared each other. Like their lives were an eternal struggle to survive, and one wrong step could end everything.

I had never seen poverty myself. Even the illustrations in my books didn’t do it justice. The torn and stained clothes were put together in mismatched outfits down to the shoes, if they even had shoes. Gaunt cheeks framed mouths nearly empty of teeth containing sores which oozed blood and puss. I suppressed a shudder as I walked around puddles of puss and blood that had been spit or drooled onto the ground.

A new odour forced its way into my scrunched up nostrils, making me gag. I’d never smelled anything like it. I couldn’t help but scream and jump back when I found the source. A person, no, a corpse, was leaned up against the wall of the alley to my right. It looked like it had been bleeding some kind of black liquid which had pooled underneath it. There was more missing flesh than flesh, and rotting sinews, clearly the meal of some kind of rodent, were on full display. The torso was actually full of small holes, out of which the black fluid had clearly escaped, leaving streaks down the length of the body. How could someone have left this poor person here to die alone? How could nobody have cleared the body? I took a deep breath and ran my fingers along the seam of my mothers dress once more. There were clearly still some things I did not understand about the world outside my family estate. I couldn’t display any further weakness by asking questions and risk father finding out.

“Duchess, are you okay?” Henricks gentle baritone came from above me. He was holding me, and had clearly caught me when I’d leaped back.

Pulling out of his grip, I lifted my chin before responding “I was just surprised, that’s all.” I scurried farther down the alley, turning my back on the guards to hide trembling lips and wet eyes. I had to get out of there.

As we arrived at a fork in the alley I noticed how the guards had moved even closer to me. Any resentment I may have felt earlier was gone at that moment, replaced with gratitude for the sense of safety and comfort their presence gave me. I just couldn’t stop seeing it – or smelling it.

I shook myself and blinked away the tears that had been forming in my eyes, then proceeded down the path to the left. Everything became a blur. I just wanted to get as far away from the body as possible.

All I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other. I felt dead. Empty. I didn’t want to think about anything. Just keep walking.

“Ghaaaggh.” A gurgle to my right woke me from my trance.

If I hadn’t been so numb, I would have jumped in terror again. There was a dark haired boy, likely several years older than me, lying in the remains of a shattered crate. One of his arms was clearly broken, a bone visible through the ripped sleeve of his coarse wool shirt. The hand of his other arm looked like it had been crushed too. In fact, there was a boot print visible on it. The collar of his shirt was soaked in blood that flowed from between busted lips, a crooked nose, and eyes that were nearly swollen shut. He looked so horrific that I almost thought he was dead even though I’d heard him make a sound.

“Uhhh… I…. Are you…” For the first time I could remember, I couldn’t speak. I wanted to run, run from the terror of the decaying corpse, run from the eyes filled with fear and hatred, run from the suffering of a boy I had never met.

“I am Sabien. I want- I – I want to help you if I can… Can I?” My body screamed RUN but I just couldn’t leave him.

The boy groaned again, his right eye meeting mine through the slit visible past the swelling. It was brown and flecked with amber. It was filled with an intensity that caught my breath in my throat. His crushed hand rose slowly, his whole arm pointing across the alley at a door on the back of a building.

I understood. He clearly needed urgent help, and obviously, I, a nine year old girl, wasn’t strong enough to carry him to safety. Nodding at the boy with a smile, I ran toward the door, hearing another gurgling groan from behind me.

I neared the door and realized that I no doubt looked suspicious with my hood on. Looking around, I saw that the men in this alley were all cleaner looking than the desperate people I had seen before encountering the body. In fact, Aetherman had even stopped to joke around with some of them. Reassured, I removed my hood and knocked on the door.

It felt good for my golden hair to be free for the first time in hours.

The door opened and I was relieved because I could tell the boy in the alley needed help desperately. A man stood before me and I watched as his eyes changed from curious to greedy and his smile turned up and his teeth shined out- each one hungry- but not as hungry as those eyes, and they didn’t gleam as brightly as his smooth scalp, but rather it was a dark gleam, like the one coming from his dull metal hoop earrings. And the darkness of his smile and his earrings matched the darkness of the tattoo on his arm, which was a black snake eating a black blade, and if it hadn’t been a black tattoo I would have been sure blood was used for the ink, and I would have sworn his smile was the snake, and what it was eating wasn’t a blade but all hope and goodness and light. I hadn’t been aware of the innocence I contained until I felt that smile trying to take it from me, and the strands of the chest hair that spilled out from under his vest reaching out to touch what was pure in me, but none of that mattered in an instant when blood came from his mouth where a crossbow bolt had pushed his gleaming hungry teeth down his throat, and the blood sprayed on my face, and squirted on the curls of my hair, which was now gold and crimson, which until then I might have thought a pretty combination, and the blood also sprayed my cloak and dripped down my neck onto my favorite dress which had belonged to my mother when she was little, but now the innocence of both our child selves was stained with the greedy blood of this man who even in death hungered to steal my childhood from me. And before the man hit the ground, with a thud I would never hear, I saw what was in the room with the man, and it was his friends around a table, and to the table a girl was tied, and her clothes were ripped nearly as bad as her flesh and she was naked where it counted and she was looking at me and I had thought I was scared but my fear drowned in her fear and in her eyes I saw terror and I saw hope that maybe I still had time to run, but not hope for herself because it was too late for her, and her childhood was gone and probably her life soon too, and I wondered in a moment that lasted an hour what had her dreams been before this, and if she had a family she wouldn’t come home to, and her eyes were no longer her own and hazel had turned to blue. 

Was this what happened to Mom the day she didn’t come home? 

Then the men started looking at me and moving their mouths soundlessly, and the girl whispered run, but I couldn’t hear her either, though I could see what she said in her eyes, but I couldn’t run. A man in black boots, who was still wearing his pants and a shirt that was only partly unbuttoned started walking toward me, and as he passed the oil lamps he cast shadows, but the shadows were cast on my soul, not on the room, and the light that was in me flickered in his darkness. The floorboards screamed in protest as the man stepped on them and crushed their hope – their cries fell on deaf ears because the man wasn’t listening and I couldn’t hear them or anything as the man reached out toward me and I couldn’t bare to watch or to stay there, but my legs wouldn’t move and my eyes wouldn’t close and my mouth wouldn’t scream, but my body knew that childhood was going to be taken from me so it made one last stand and though I couldn’t flee the room, urine fled out of me. It was hot as it ran down my legs and soaked my mother’s dress and filled my boots, stinging my blisters on the feet that wouldn’t move, but the pain of the raw flesh wasn’t nearly as bad as the fear of what was going to happen and my mind fled to home where I had been safe just that morning, and I wondered if I would ever see my bed, bedecked in softness and colorful feather pillows as it was, or my orchard where I liked to read under the peach trees or the fields of grass and wildflowers that I ran and played in, and if I ever did see them again would they welcome me, because the child in me who had known those places was about to die and whatever was left was going to be a stranger to all things safe and good, pale flesh burning in the warm embrace of the sun. 

An arm wrapped around me from behind and I was lifted. The shock of being touched shook me out of my petrified state. I had to escape. I bit and kicked and screamed and beat with my fists as I was carried at a running speed through the alley. I screamed as loud as I could but somehow couldn’t hear myself still. 

Finally, a warm voice reached my ears. I smelled something familiar. Oiled leather and cardamom. It was Henrick.

I wanted to collapse into a puddle and disappear. This was all too much. But I’d been saved. I wanted to go home and never leave again. I blinked around the tears that stung my eyes and rolled off my lips to my chin where they met the snot that had flowed out of my nose. When my eyes closed I saw eyes that were not my own. A single amber-flecked brown eye, full of fire, and a pair of hazel eyes that had asked me not for help, but to protect myself.

“Henrick…” I choked on words between sobs that wracked my whole body, “The girl… The boy.”

Henrick sighed and smiled, kneeling down and looking me in the eyes. “How grateful I am to serve such an amazing girl, my Duchess.” He kissed my forehead, and I collapsed into his arms. Henrick carried me into a little nook in the alley and covered me with his own cloak and some trash from the ground. “Stay silent and still, little hero. I will return shortly.”

I waited in the warm darkness of Henrick’s cloak as his footsteps got farther away. Even though I was alone now, I somehow felt safe wrapped up in the coarse wool. Smelling the scent of a man who had cared for me and protected me since before I could remember.