Scar.
Temple to jaw, a jagged seam the colour of old milk, and she tilts her head deliberately so the firelight catches it. Let them see. Let them think she is already marked, already broken. There is less attention that way, and she learned that lesson three years ago from a fae lord who caught her staring and put her on the cobblestones for it.
*Keep your heads down and your mouths shut, and maybe you'll live through the night.*
Cora Flint presses her shoulder into the stone archway and watches the court's throne room spill gaudy light across the human offerings. A fire of coal and crushed cinderstone roars in the central brazier, throwing shadows that writhe like living things against obsidian walls. The air tastes of burnt sugar and somebody else's fear, and underneath it the metallic tang of the iron restraints threaded through the offerings' wrists.
She has bound her hair tighter than she has in months with a strip of oiled leather.
Then a man comes in leaning against a wind nobody else can feel, and he is not looking at the queen. He is looking at the humans, moving his gaze across them slowly, like somebody counting coins. When it lands, it stops.
Darion Moss. An exiled prince, sent to collect a tithe on behalf of a broken people, and the subject of every story anybody in the lower city has ever told after dark.
What follows: a debt she cannot name, a map of broken promises, a scar he chooses to show her, names that are not spoken aloud, the price of a shadow, a feast of embers, and the other face of a locket she has carried since she was a child.
*I don't want you to die.*
She came into that throne room with a blade meant for his throat and a working theory about who ruined her family. What she learns before the feast is over may permanently alter everything she has believed about her own blood, her mother's silence, and which court actually paid for it.
