CH01:WORD ON THE STREET
(Seren's POV)
If there's one thing the Ordinary Zone excels at, it's minding other people's business. Which is ironic, because most people here barely manage their own.
Take me, for example — Seren Veylan. Weaver's daughter. Seventeen summers old. I've lived all my life in the same crooked street between Old Merra's bakery and the tanner's yard that smells like something died in it centuries ago and never got the hint. My father mends nets for the river fishers. My mother died when I was small, so I was mostly raised by Aunt Fenna, who believes sarcasm is a sin and sewing straight hems is a divine calling.
I'm not exactly the kind of girl ballads are written about. My hair's a mess half the time, my skirts are always one tear away from scandal, and I've been told my eyes "don't know how to behave themselves" — which I think is a compliment. Not that it matters. Most boys in the Ordinary Zone stare at me like I'm some rare fruit at the market, but I don't date boys who polish their shoes more than their brains. Makes for a shiny wedding photo, maybe, but a very dull conversation.
Anyway.
The shop was warm that afternoon, filled with the yeasty scent of Merra's bread wafting through the open shutters. I was elbow-deep in a stubborn roll of wool, fighting the thing like it had personally insulted me, when voices floated in from the street.
Not the loud, put-on gossip people use when they want to be overheard. This was quieter, more careless — the kind of conversation people have when they think the world isn't listening.
"…I'm telling you, he had a daughter," a woman's voice murmured, low and conspiratorial.
The other scoffed. "And here we go again. First she was taken by pirates, then she wandered into the Moonlit Woods, then she—"
"This time I know it's true," the first interrupted, her tone smug enough to make me pause mid-fold. "Kellan told me."
Kellan. That'd be Kellan the kitchen boy, her on-again-off-again beau who worked in the castle kitchens and had a talent for finding scraps of gossip to bring home along with his bread wages.
"What makes this any different?" the second woman asked, clearly unimpressed.
"Because," the first said, stretching the word out like taffy, "the whole court is still pretending she never existed. No funeral, no grave marker, nothing. She just… vanished. And now they're planning a search. Well—more of a ritual, really. All the girls are to be brought in for testing. Royal or not."
My fingers tightened on the wool.
The second woman laughed. "What, they're going to pluck some farmer's daughter from the Ordinary Zone and call her a princess? Please. The last time one of us went to the capital, she came back with lice and a broken heart."
I nearly snorted aloud. The Ordinary Zone: a place where your neighbors measure your worth by the straightness of your hems and your ability to keep your mouth shut — two skills I've never mastered.
Still… a ritual at the castle? A missing daughter of a dead king? It sounded like the kind of story Aunt Fenna would call "NONSENSE" and I would call "Interesting."
And if there was one thing I couldn't resist, it was interesting.
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