1st 5 Pages July Workshop - Abdow

Name: Emily Abdow
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Title: Knives and Ribbons

The toes of Esper's boots, once her father's, tipped over the cliff's edge. 

She leaned forward, toes curling, things burning, looking down into the
darkness. A gust of wind wrapped her in an icy embrace, but she did not
shiver. She parted her lips, drinking in the bitter taste of precious stones
torn from the mines-amber, peridot, garnet, and rare, valuable crystal. 

The king was dead, and the village of Deadener's Peak was in mourning. It
was Esper's own sadness that had led her here, to the sheer, jagged drop;
the only edge of the village not walled in by slabs of gray stone. But she
was not sad for the king. She was sad for herself because King Roran had
kept alive the memory of her father, Lord Aeric, the knight who had served
as Roran's chief advisor until the Bloodroses killed him. 

She wrapped her palm around the hilt of Kabar, her knife, feeling the
familiar bite of the engraving on the hilt. She remembered the day her
father had given her Kabar. She'd been only five. 

He'd held the knife out, hilt first. A flower blossomed at the blade's tip,
stem snaking onto the hilt where thorns rose in angry points. 

She'd cried out as the thorns pricked her skin, drawing blood. When she'd
tried to let go he'd wrapped his hand around hers, forcing her fingers to
the metal. She'd felt the calluses on his palm, hardened patches in the
pattern of her fresh wounds. 

"As long as you wield Kabar," he'd said, "I can keep you safe."

That was the last time she'd seen him, twelve years ago. In those twelve
years, her own palm had callused like his. When she missed him, as she did
now, she clenched the hilt and dared her skin to give. But now she was too
hardened to bleed. 

As Kabar's thorns bit into her flesh, she looked down into the darkness. It
seemed almost soft.

"Esper!"

The shout startled her. Her boots crunched as she tilted further than she'd
planned. A pair of arms wrapped around her middle, hauling her back from the
edge. His body warmed her; the sugary scent of his mother's sticky snow
candies filled her nose. But tonight, she was in no mood for sweetness. She
brought both elbows to his stomach, breaking through his embrace. 

"Grower's seeds, Faean. You could have killed me."

His green eyes widened. "Me?" he said. "Kill you?" He shook his head, his
hair, sunrise orange, flopping against his forehead. "You're the one trying
to die the same way as your father."

Her fingers clenched around Kabar. "I would be proud," she said, "to die
fighting Bloodroses."

Faean sighed. "I meant falling off a cliff."

"He didn't fall," Esper said. "He was pushed." 

Falling was an accident. Her father would have never been so careless. The
Bloodroses had surrounded him at the castle's cliff, forced him back, back,
back, until there was nowhere to go but down, nothing to do but drown in the
Balmyran sea.  

She whirled from the cliff's edge and slammed her shoulder into Faean's
chest. The force of the impact sent him sprawling to the ground. Faean's
head knocked against a bulge of crystal root protruding from the mountain.
Esper was too angry to care. Pinning his elbows with her knees, she dug her
weight into the bone of his joints. He winced, face flushing and puffing.
She pressed her blade to his pale throat. A gust of wind ruffled his hair.
She smelled sugar. Every memory of him, her childhood training partner, her
best friend, smelled of sugar. Her anger evaporated. She raised her blade so
it hovered above his pale skin, now just a formality. 

"Any last words?"

Faean made a show of gasping for air. "Send Clara my love."

"Grower's Seeds." Esper rolled off him, onto her back. "Couldn't you pick
better last words? How about, 'Esper, you're destined to be the greatest
knight in Allaysia.'"

Faean laughed. "But you're already so certain of that. Why waste my dying
breaths making you more insufferable?"

Esper countered. "Why waste your dying breaths on a woman you'll be too dead
to marry?"

"It's the same as wasting my living ones," Faean said. "Clara will never
choose someone from an outer ring. She'll marry someone who reads, or Prince
Rain himself."

Esper hated when Faean talked like this, like he was worth less than those
in the inner rings. His father had mined ore for barely five copper seeds a
day before losing his arm and his livelihood in a mining accident. Faean's
mother did her best by selling her sticky snow candies for a half copper
each. If Faean's father could read, he could have made a living by lending
seeds or recording trades. But reading was a blessing reserved for the
innermost ring. Because one's ring was determined by how many seeds one paid
as tribute to the Grower, Faean's family tree couldn't be replanted in a
ring closer to the Grower's Tree. 

In her seventeen years, Esper could count on one hand the number of family
trees that had been replanted, and most to an outer ring. 

Esper's own family tree grew only two rings closer to the Grower's Tree than
Faean's, remaining where it did because of the meager pension her mother
received for her father's service to the crown. Given her father had been
chief advisor to King Roran himself, she would have expected more than ten
silver seeds a moon. But she would never complain about that, not to Faean. 

Instead of working, Faean's father and a growing number of crippled miners
could be found huddled in the mines scraped dry of treasure, shredding their
palms on the jagged edges of crystal shards. The shards were a drug. They
caused every breath of thin mountain air to sing with life. But for every
bit of life the shards gave, they took tenfold. Crystal shard users faded to
shadows of their former selves. But the worst was the newborns of the
addicts, born screaming with eyes that flashed silver and faded within
seconds as their small bodies grew cold and still with death. 

Every moon, more small corpses lined the insides of abandoned mines turned
burial grounds. The Under-Lord of Deadener's Peak was so far unable to catch
the criminal who was imbuing the scraps of crystal with their addictive
properties. Faean's father and the other users would fade away. But there
was hope for his son.  

"You won't be in the outer ring forever," Esper said. "Not once you become a
knight. Soon we'll be riding from Deadener's Peak to Balmyra, protecting
every village from Bloodroses."

Faean was silent.

"Come on." Esper rose to her feet, holding out her hand. Faean took it and
she pulled him up. The moment he steadied himself, she slid her fingers from
his and delivered a blow to his shoulder. This one was not powered by rage
but tempered. After all, she needed her training partner to be well enough
so that she could batter him again tomorrow night.

They sparred, their boots slipping and sliding on the crystal roots of the
Grower's Tree. The roots flickered with ribbons of silver ether, the world's
lifeforce, which flowed from deep beneath the mountain into the trunk of the
Grower's Tree.