THIS WOVEN KINGDOM #1) BY TAHEREH MAFI EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: TAHEREH MAFI
- Language: English
- Genre: fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 10.2 MB
- Price: Free
ALIZEH STITCHED IN THE KITCHEN by the light of star and fire, sitting, as she
often did, curled up inside the hearth. Soot stained her skin and skirts in
haphazard streaks: smudges along the crest of a cheek, a dusting of yet
more darkness above one eye. She didn’t seem to notice.
Alizeh was cold. No, she was freezing.
She often wished she were a body with hinges, that she might throw
open a door in her chest and fill its cavity with coal, then kerosene. Strike a
match.
Alas.
She tugged up her skirts and shifted nearer the fire, careful lest she
destroy the garment she still owed the illegitimate daughter of the Lojjan
ambassador. The intricate, glittering piece was her only order this month,
but Alizeh nursed a secret hope that the gown would conjure clients on its
own, for such fashionable commissions were, after all, the direct result of
an envy born only in a ballroom, around a dinner table. So long as the
kingdom remained at peace, the royal elite—legitimate and illegitimate
alike—would continue to host parties and incur debt, which meant Alizeh
might yet find ways to extract coin from their embroidered pockets.
She shivered violently then, nearly missing a stitch, nearly toppling into
the fire. As a toddling child Alizeh had once been so desperately cold she’d
crawled onto the searing hearth on purpose. Of course it had never occurred
to her that she might be consumed by the blaze; she’d been but a babe
following an instinct to seek warmth. Alizeh couldn’t have known then the
singularity of her affliction, for so rare was the frost that grew inside her
body that she stood in stark relief even among her own people, who were
thought to be strange indeed.
A miracle, then, that the fire had only disintegrated her clothes and
clogged the small house with a smoke that singed her eyes. A subsequent
scream, however, signaled to the snug tot that her scheme was at an end.
Frustrated by a body that would not warm, she’d wept frigid tears as she
was collected from the flames, her mother sustaining terrible burns in the
process, the scars of which Alizeh would study for years to come.
“Her eyes,” the trembling woman had cried to her husband, who’d come
running at the sounds of distress. “See what’s happened to her eyes— They
will kill her for this—”
Alizeh rubbed her eyes now and coughed.
Surely she’d been too young to remember the precise words her parents
had spoken; no doubt Alizeh’s was a memory merely of a story oftrepeated, one so thoroughly worn into her mind she only imagined she
could recall her mother’s voice.
She swallowed.
Soot had stuck in her throat. Her fingers had gone numb. Exhausted, she
exhaled her worries into the hearth, the action disturbing to life another
flurry of soot.
Alizeh coughed for the second time then, this time so hard she stabbed
the stitching needle into her small finger. She absorbed the shock of pain
with preternatural calm, carefully dislodging the bit before inspecting the
injury.
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