The young blue horn woman stumbled across the border into Aldenburg like a ghost.
Her robes hung in tatters, stiff with dust and dried mud. Her feet were bare and bleeding. Her silver hair was tangled with burrs and leaves, and her face was hollow from weeks of hunger. The soldiers who seized her were shocked at the sight of her. But what truly stirred their pity was the swell of her belly beneath the torn fabric. She was far along with child.
Amara braced herself for the cruelty and mockery she had always been told to expect from the long-eared elves.
It never came.
Instead, they wrapped her in a wool blanket, gave her water and bread, and brought her somewhere warm to wash. They even sent for a physician, who examined her gently and assured her that the baby was growing strong.
By Mycean's laws, she was a renegade, a "spare." So it was decided that she would stay at the monastery until she gave birth. There, behind its quiet stone walls, she befriended the other deva girls who lived under the nuns' care. One of them was Nafula.
The two of them were closer in age than the little Am-nar girls who ran laughing through the abbey's halls every day, so they naturally drifted together. In the evenings they would sit by the window and trade romantic stories. Nafula, blushing to the tips of her lion ears, confessed her feelings for a young lord who had once rescued her in the desert.
Amara was stunned by how the deva girls were treated. She had assumed the elves meant to raise them for some immoral purpose, or keep them as servants. Instead, they were treated almost like nobility. They received lessons in reading and arithmetic, learned the practical skills of everyday life, ate luxurious meals, and were doted on by the elven nuns, who cared for them like mothers.
Amara's horns were unusually powerful at reading the hearts of others, and everything she sensed here was genuine. No lies. No deceit. Only the loving family these girls had been denied in Mycean.
Among the children was Calista, a frail-looking deva not yet a century old. She was delicate as a reed, yet when she touched a harp she became something else entirely. Amara had the privilege of watching her perform once. Calista sat in a pool of sunlight, her white dress and silver hair glowing as though lit from within, and her slender fingers barely grazed the strings. The music that poured out was so pure and so beautiful that it seemed to come from the heavens themselves.
Yet Amara noticed something odd. Calista always wound her silver hair around her horns, hiding their blue shimmer from sight. She never explained why.
As her pregnancy neared its end, surrounded by warmth and kindness, Amara found a sense of safety she had believed was lost forever. Lost on the day her lover, Xavier, turned back to face their pursuers alone, buying her time to escape, so that their child might have a future.
She had heard nothing of him since. And she knew she could not risk searching. If Mycean ever recaptured her, they would force her to drink abyssal tea and poison the child in her womb.
Abyssal tea had once been common among all deva societies. Deva women who failed to find a mate by the time they came of age often died from the heat of their own unfulfilled cycles. Over the ages, two solutions arose. A woman could live apart from men entirely, as a nun in a monastery. Or she could forsake motherhood forever by drinking the tea, brewed from the toxic void root. It was meant to destroy her womb. But all too often, the women who drank it bled to death in agony. In modern times, most had come to see the practice as monstrous. Yet in Mycean, it was still quietly kept, as a punishment for women who broke the law.
So Amara did everything she could to bury her memories, even those of her beloved. There was nothing she could do for him now. All the love she had left, she would pour into their child, so that the child would survive.
At last, the day arrived.
The deva girls huddled in the hallway outside Amara's room, whispering and clutching each other's hands, their ears pressed to the door. Inside, candles flickered along the stone walls, and the air was thick with steam and the scent of lavender.
Amara lay in a shallow, warm bath, the water lapping gently at her shoulders. The elven nuns knelt at her sides, taking turns massaging her arms and murmuring soft encouragement as each contraction rolled through her, stronger than the last.
Nafula knelt at the foot of the pool, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows. She had volunteered to serve as midwife, and though her hands trembled, her violet eyes were fixed and steady.
"One more, Amara," she whispered. "Just one more."
Amara gripped the edges of the bath, gathered every last scrap of her strength, and pushed.
The moment Nafula felt the tiny body slip free, she reached into the warm water and lifted the baby out.
The room fell utterly silent.
The nuns stared. Outside, the girls who had cracked open the door gasped. The newborn in Nafula's hands was a blue horn deva, two tiny nubs of sapphire already peeking from her brow. But her little head was crowned with hair of the brightest red any of them had ever seen, vivid as a flame, as a fresh peony in full bloom.
And strangest of all, she did not cry. Instead, the infant blinked up at the candlelight, waved her tiny fists, and began to giggle and coo, smiling as though she had been waiting a very long time to meet them all.
The nuns gently washed her and wrapped her in soft linen, then placed her in her mother's arms. Amara cradled her daughter against her chest, and the baby made happy little noises, her small fingers curling around a lock of her mother's hair.
Tears spilled down Amara's cheeks.
"You look just like your father, little one," she whispered.
News of the red-haired child spread quickly. Within a day, it had reached the ears of the most powerful elf in all of Aldenburg: Archduke Cyrus Sunstriker.
The very next morning, his gilded carriage rolled up to the monastery gates. He arrived bearing armfuls of gifts for the girls: ribbons and silk scarves, sugared fruits, painted dolls, and little music boxes that played when you turned their keys. The girls squealed with delight and crowded around him. But Nafula hung back by the doorway, arms folded, watching him with narrowed eyes.
After the gifts had been handed out, the Archduke politely asked to speak with the renegade priestess.
"Fascinating! Simply fascinating!" Cyrus beamed as he cradled the giggling infant in Amara's guest room. "So this little red peony is the last of Mycean's royal bloodline? Are you not just radiant, little one?"
He was an elderly elf, tall and elegantly dressed, with long blond hair streaked with silver and a face that had clearly been handsome in his youth. His family had kept the purest, most untouched fae bloodline in all of Aldenburg, and from it they had carved out a mighty dynasty.
And yet, standing in that small room beside Amara, his noble aura seemed oddly dim. For the blood of the Azure Dragon ran through every deva of Mycean, and it gave each of its children the divine presence of a wild god.
At last, the old elf tenderly handed the baby back to her mother.
"Here you are, madam. Such a joy. As are all the girls raised here," he said pleasantly. "Their lives are their own, to live however they please. Though love can strike at any moment. Why, just the other day one of my nephews caused quite the spectacle when he was caught in the chambers of young Thalia."
Thalia was one of the older girls at the abbey, nearing her second century. Lately a young knight had caught her eye, the son of one of Cyrus's half-brothers from a bastard line.
Amara sat calmly as her daughter drifted off to sleep in her arms. Then she looked the Archduke in the eye.
"What do you want from me?"
Cyrus's expression remained perfectly pleasant. "Would you believe how many 'mistakes' I have had to 'correct' in my own clan? My father was a truly disgusting man. He sired so many half-blooded hybrids with humans. Mortals!" He sighed theatrically. "And yet I still love and provide for every one of them, in my magnificent extended family. Take Liam. For all his magnificent accomplishments, he is only a quarter elf. His blood could only open the primordial lily so far…"
Amara's guard rose again. "The primordial lily? What is that?"
The old elf brightened at her curiosity. "Ah! Would you like me to show you? As it happens, I have a few buds with me!"
He rummaged in his coat pocket and drew out a handful of dried, shriveled flower buds. They looked like they belonged in a teapot, not in some kind of test.
"Pitiful-looking things, I know. But allow me to demonstrate."
He set one bud on the table, pricked his fingertip with a slender silver needle, and let a single bead of blood fall onto it.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Then the bud began to glow. Slowly, its brittle petals drank in the light and unfurled, one by one, until a pale lily bloomed on the table, delicate and breathtaking. Even Amara could not help but marvel.
"Magnificent… Your blood did this?" Then she hesitated. "Wait. Could mine do the same?"
The polite Archduke had anticipated exactly that question. He knew where this visit was leading. And somewhere deep down, so did she.
He offered her a bud and the needle. Amara pricked her own finger and let a drop fall.
This time, the reaction was entirely different. Cyrus's lily had opened slowly, almost reluctantly, struggling against its own dryness. Amara's burst open at once, unfolding swiftly and gracefully, its petals shimmering with tiny pulses of mana that throbbed like a heartbeat.
"What?!" Amara stared at the flower. Then the old tomes were true. Elves and devas truly are sister tribes! "Then why are our countries…"
Her thoughts spun. The room seemed to tilt.
Cyrus raised a gentle hand. "Please, calm yourself, my dear. The most learned in our country are well aware of this. But we cannot trust the masses with such knowledge. So many unchecked bloodlines… It is best they never learn the truth about deva women."
Amara was still uneasy. Through her horns, she could read the Archduke's heart. Beneath the courtesy and the smiles, she sensed a great deal of greed, and even more vanity.
"Madam, why don't we test the lily on the last noble of Mycean?" he urged, nodding to the sleeping infant. "I promise she will not even cry. I will numb the needle with an enchantment."
Amara looked down at her daughter. Part of her wanted to refuse. But part of her burned to know what other secrets her homeland had kept from its people, about their blood and their bond with the elves.
She agreed.
The moment the baby's tiny drop of blood touched the bud, the lily blazed with light so brilliant that both of them threw up their hands to shield their eyes. The whole room flooded white.
"Remarkable!" Cyrus cried, blinking spots from his vision. "Do you see how much mana your bloodline carries? And yet neither you nor your child were cherished in Mycean! Let me offer you shelter, Amara. You may raise your little one here, at the monastery, and want for nothing!"
"No," Amara said at once.
The old Archduke paused, collecting himself after so swift a refusal. Then his smile returned.
"Perhaps my intentions came across the wrong way. I would never take your daughter from you. But I do believe your little red peony would make a splendid betrothed for my son! Perhaps we can arrange something, so that you may raise her in peace. Who knows? She may grow to fancy my little Magnus someday. He only started walking yesterday!"
Magnus. Amara understood exactly where this was going. He wished to "adopt" them both, to give them everything they needed, and in return, to claim her daughter's future. Given her situation, it was an offer she could hardly refuse.
Cyrus rose and smoothed his coat. "I will not press the matter. But the offer stands." He paused at the door. "It is a cruel world out there, young Amara. Our protection does not reach beyond our borders, and human pirates still prowl the coast near Eurelca. It is no place for a mother and her daughter to go searching for safety…"
The turmoil inside her swelled until she could barely breathe. He was right. She was a new mother, alone, with no home and no way to give her child a stable life. As much as she hated it, she knew this was a chance she could not afford to turn away.
"Wait… Cyrus."
The Archduke stopped.
Amara held her daughter close, and her voice rang out, steady and clear.
"I will accept your offer. But on one condition!"