Page 21 of Kingdom of Rot & Ruin
The way he said it was so clinical, but it was my life. It was my mother’s life.
And the king … I’d seen him maybe less than three times total in my entire life, and we lived in the same building. Was it a secret, then? Was that why my mother was always so afraid? Was that why she had pushed me so hard in my studies, and told me I was better than everyone else? Not because of who I was, but who I had come from?
“No one knows, and it’s safer for you that way. Let everyone think you’re the result of a Noble woman dallying with a Fireguard. If I were you, I’d keep your head down and stick to the archives. Live your life so that the queen forgets you exist.”
Ha. Fat chance of that. I’d seen the way her hatred for me burned in those cold, silver eyes.
But a tiny sliver of satisfaction … of righteousness sparked inside of me. I had Noble blood. And I had mud blood.
I belonged where I said I belonged—with the best attributes of both worlds.
“Get something to eat, then get to the archives.Keep your head down,”he implored me.
“Vession, it’s like you don’t know me at all.”
His eyes narrowed at me, but I smirked.
Chapter
Six
Ispent the next few months throwing myself into my studies.
Including the study of myself.
Now that I knew for sure I had mud blood, I was determined to learn everything I could about my people, and why our society worked the way it did.
Mud boys were treated as less than; they were uneducated brutes with no manners and grace. Yet, I could forgive that, knowing how they grew up. From bits and pieces I’d collected from M and the other boys, each one of them had to fight for survival daily back in the mud quarter. Manners didn’t keep you alive.
And the mud boys weren’t stupid. They were uncouth, rough, and violent, but rarely stupid. I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t less than any Noble boy simply because I was half of a mud boy.
Saying people from the mud district were less was a common belief among the other Nobles, and while it was easy to believe, it made little sense. If the mud people were so inferior, why did the reaping take themost amount of girls from that quarter, and nearly all of them always got scooped up for marriages to Noble men?
Yet despite that, there weren’t litters of dark-haired Noble children running around.
Curious.
And hypocritical.
Everyone from the mud quarter seemed to share a similar heritage with dark hair and eyes that weren’t shared by the Nobles or any of the girls from the other trade quarters. Why was that?
There were far more mud boys, outnumbering the Noble boys almost four to one. Those numbers weren’t sustainable. And if the mud girls were marrying and having children with Nobles, why weren’t there more boys my age with dark hair and dark eyes?
Something was very, very wrong.
So I dove into my research, tearing the archives apart to find out everything I could about the mud quarter.
And the results were shocking.
“Did you need any more tomes? I am leaving for the day.” Elo was another scribe apprentice around my age, though a Noble boy who was a self-described book worm and researcher. Like me, he didn’t have the patience for people. His parents were pushing him into choosing a mud girl bride, but Elo was married only to his books.
I respected that.
“If I require anything else, I will fetch it,” I reassured him, eager to be alone to draw my own conclusions from the massive amount of census records and mining data.
Elo shrugged. “Very well. Don’t know what you find fascinating about all this. Unless it’s … familial related?”
He gave me a nervous look, stepping away as though already expecting my anger.
