Gammal, the wizened maid whose spine arched like a rounded hill, was the first to take note. I would never forget her knobby, crooked fingers working in a frenzy, teaching me to crush the petals of the blossoms, and forcing the dye over my lashes.

She had beautiful, coiled ink tattoos across her wrists that had faded from sun and seasons.

“Unfettered Folk marks,” she told me. “Our young ones are given their marks to begin the sagas of their accomplishments. My clan was often covered in them by the time they were ready to fall into the realm of souls. A bit like your house runes.”

On instinct, I brushed a hand over the tattoo beneath my ear where Gammal had helped alter the rune marks of what once was a sigil of a House named Bien.

The clans of the Unfettered were people beyond the cliffs of the Night Ledges in the North. People without a king, a queen, and no magical craft. They lived in huts and hunted with spears and stone axes. Some said the Unfettered shaved their teeth into sharp points.

Gammal’s teeth had looked like mine.

The woman let me draw my own designs on her wrinkled skin whenever we finished chores, and she taught me how to hide the silver scars.

“Take the sting or take death, elskan,” Gammal always whispered when I whimpered about the ache of the dyes. “Folk here kill for those scars.”

Three veins of magical craft lived in the soil of the realms, all brutal and lovely on their own. But silver in the eyes was proof the Wanderer King’s curse burned in the blood with the power of all. Power coveted enough it stirred wars.

Twice I’d witnessed the king’s melder when the royal caravans entered the village, almost as though searching for something, yet never finding it. Folk always said he was so well guarded because he was also the king’s consort, not only a crafter.

No one really understood why melding craft was coveted so fiercely, only that melders were never truly free.

Gammal led me to thick tomes where I could read the histories of wars in which our small seaside kingdom of Jorvandal allied with the lands of Myrda for nearly a century, before rising victorious over Dravenmoor.

For Jorvandal’s aid, through treaties and sanctions, not only did Myrdan daughters always wed Jorvan kings, but melder craft would always belong to Stonegate, the royal keep.

I didn’t remember the last raid hunting a new melder, only that it was during my tenth summer, and House Bien was the heart of the bloodshed. I wasn’t a fool. I had the manipulated sigil runes, scars in my eyes, and nightmares aplenty of dark words, flames, and screams.

Always screams in the dark.