Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy
Someone had looked at a small girl, decided her strength was too dangerous to leave in her, and locked it away, and let her grow up grateful for the cage.
Grief and rage rose in me together, so knotted I could not pull one from the other.
Then the lamp shifted, and the light caught the mark at a new angle, and I saw the thing worked into the curve of the scar.
Small. Deliberate. Pressed into me on purpose.
A crest. Two crossed spears over a crescent moon.
I knew that crest. I had polished silver stamped with it a hundred times in the great house at Silvercrest. I had poured wine under it at feast after feast, unseen, a servant no one bothered to thank.