Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Carissa Broadbent
- Language: English
- Genre: Sword & Sorcery Fantasy eBooks
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
E IGHT Y E ARS L A T ER
1, 2, 3…
When I danced, I never stopped counting.
The truth was, I was a terrible dancer. I wasn’t sure that I believed in the
concept of talent at all, but even if I did, I could recognize that I didn’t have
any. At least when it came to dancing. But talent, I had learned, was
optional. It could be substituted with long nights and early mornings,
bleeding feet, obsessively memorized footwork.
No one needed talent when you had brute force. And, despite my
willowy size and my unassuming doe-eyed smile, I had more brute force
than anyone.
…4, 5, 6…
Twirl.
And— fire.
I smiled at the merchant man seated in front of me, opening my palms
to let blue fire unfurl from between my fingers. The audience, Esmaris’s
party guests, ooh-ed and aah-ed appreciatively. There were several hundred
people mingling about the large marble room, all dressed in their finest
clothing. Lots of gold thread and floaty, sheer chiffon. Lots of white. Rich
people loved white, perhaps because it proved that they had the money to
spend on a small army of slaves to keep it clean.
All of those white-clad bodies bent towards me in that moment, rapt, as
I unleashed a wave of my signature translucent butterflies into the air. Four
dozen of them fluttered to the high ceiling and disappeared, unraveling into
puffs of blue smoke.
All except for three.
Three fluttered to three separate men in the audience, circling their
necks, flitting against their cheeks before they disappeared.
Every one of the men flinched as the butterfly approached, then laughed
with varying degrees of enthusiasm when they realized they felt like
nothing but air. Their gazes had been glued to me this entire time, and I
could tell that they were itching for the opportunity to throw coins in my
direction, if I used what I had correctly.
I focused on the youngest one first, a merchant man perhaps only a few
years older than myself. He had something to prove. New money. I danced
closer to him, and as my fingers reached out to flirtatiously touch his
shoulder, my mind did too — tasting the air for his thoughts, his
preferences. This one, it turned out, had no preference for me at all. In fact,
I could feel his attention being constantly pulled toward Serel, one of
Esmaris’s handsomer bodyguards, who lingered in the far corner of the
room.
That was fine. He didn’t have to want to screw me to serve my
purposes. If anything, it made things easier for me — he would be overly
eager to prove his virile interest in a scantily-clad dancer like myself, rather
than a scantily-clad guard like Serel. And he wouldn’t try to get me alone
once the dance ended.
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