**Note: updating as fast as possible on this one, so it’s unedited. Forgive any mistakes and feel free to blast me off the planet for anything!**

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Menys stared at the body hanging from the southern gate in horror. Too high to see his features, there was no mistaking the golden-brown hair now hanging in bloody tatters over Tea-Master Louen’s embroidered silk robe.

Menys stuffed her fist in her mouth and tried not to panic. Her stomach cramped; she turned away from the terrible sight, afraid she’d throw up right there in the street if she looked any longer.

How could they? And why him? He never hurt a fly!

They hope to draw me out, don’t they? By making a shock example of him they think I’ll run screaming and weeping to try and pull him down! Who told them we were friends? Traitor, whoever you are!

There were two soldiers standing guard beneath him. Two blue-coated, hard-bitten men with the General’s personal sash across their shoulders. She hated that man. She’d hated him the day he’d come to her mother’s castle, bearing the thing she’d commanded him to fetch for her: a casket bearing the heart of her most hated rival.

He’d hunted the unfortunate girl across the kingdom, and cut her down in cold blood, the King’s seed already ripening her belly.

The casket had been rumoured to contain not one but two hearts, though Menys had never found out the truth of that. And it was never spoken of again.

She wondered how many people had known. Certainly, though she’d been so small a child at the time, sudden gaps had appeared in the inner sanctum staff and she could remember that well enough. She remembered seeing three of them strung up the same way Tea Master Louen was now.

Tears welled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily, her heart contracting with pain. Stupid, conceited, arrogant Master Louen, to not realise the danger he was in and end his life so ignobly on the gallows like that! But how could he have known?

Well, if the bastards wanted to draw her out, they’d failed. She wasn’t stupid enough to rise to such a crude and clumsy bait! What did they take her for – some silly, emotional girl ready to be caught in whatever net they tossed her way?

No. She was cleverer than that. She’d evaded them so far, for almost two months now, and she was determined to continue to do so. And she would lead them a merry dance before she’d ever allow that stinking General to ever lay a finger on her!

And she’d avenge Tea-Master Louen. Whatever his faults – and Menys considered them to be many, at least to his face – he didn’t deserve to die like that, and least of all on her behalf.

Menys ducked into a deep porch of an old apothecary shop and gathered her thoughts. She couldn’t go back to House Willow, that was clear; it would be crawling with soldiers. She couldn’t leave the town by any of the gates either, for they were also under a heavy watch. She could try the sewers, but she knew the General was not nearly stupid enough for that and every exit from the town, no matter how ludicrous, dangerous or improbable an escape route, would be under watch. He knew her just as well as she knew him. And while he bore her no enmity born of personal grudge, he was infallibly loyal to Verana. If Verana had told him to slit his own throat he would have, with no second thought.

He couldn’t be bribed, blackmailed or threatened. How had Verana done it? Had she….had she enthralled him?

That was dark magic: even their mother had forbidden its use.

She had her doubts that she was the one they were really looking for when she caught sight of herself in the shop window. Rats’ nest hair, face smeared with dirt, a sack of a dress. It hung from her generously-curved frame and made her look plain and plump. Too plump to be considered beautiful: current fashions favoured waifs like the Queen. Menys had lost some her plumpness over the last two months but there would never be hiding her large breasts and lush bottom. The sack dress just turned the whole into a dumpling. She kept herself that way deliberately, so as to avoid that infernal Mirror. All this time, she’d believed it had worked.

Tea Master Louen saw past it though. What if the Mirror did too?

She crouched between two grain barrels under the awning of a dry-goods store and tried to think. She had a good view from there, of the street and whoever went by. Several blue-coats trumped past, pikes glittering in the sun, making cursory searches through the stores, as if looking for something but not really expecting to find it. They overlooked Menys. A quick prod with the butt of a pike and a growled ‘raise your head, brat!’ and they’d left her alone. Still, a town full of the Queen’s soldiers was a town Menys didn’t want to be in if she could help it. Once she got a chance, she’d be off. But which way? There was Tarnbreck, or the moor, or the coast. If she’d had any coin, she could have bought passage on a ship. If she could risk cleaning herself up, she could have offered her body for it instead.

Ugh. No, I wouldn’t do that.

Unless he was handsome. I mean, if Tea-Master Louen wanted payment in something other than coin…

The thought of him caused tears to flow again and she wiped them shakily away.

A fist crunched into the side of her head and left her reeling, her vision swimming. Strong, rough hands pulled her out of her hiding place and a bag was thrust over her head and tied, almost too tight, around her neck. A length of some coarse rope secured her wrists behind her back and then she was lifted, and landed on something that felt like sacks of grain. A scratchy cloth was flung over her, and someone hissed in her ear to be quiet or he’d cut her throat.

Menys kept quiet. She heard raised voices: the sharp, cultured accents of the Queen’s soldiers, and the country brogue of her captors. Rough voices, hard voices. She heard someone swear in Karoni, and spit; he was harshly reprimanded.

Not Queen’s men, then. But who, if not them? Who else would possibly want me?

She was nothing but a scruffy, dirty urchin. That’s all anyone saw when they looked at her. She made sure it was. No reason to take her, nothing they could want something like her for.

Except hard labour. The mines! They’re taking me to the mines!

She tried to calm herself, panic threatening to burst from her. The gold mines in the North were notorious for death and mayhem and cruelty. Men were slaves there, worked to death for a daily ration of porridge and bacon and little else. She’d heard that, and she’d heard too that that was a lie and they were kings in that domain, and regularly brought in women from further afield to act as concubines.

She squeezed her eyes closed. Serving the gold miners as a sex slave was something she could never do. Even if necessity forced it upon her, it wouldn't happen in a million years.

She began to think she’d have been better off staying at House Willow for the General to find. At least then her death would be quick, and Master Louen would live.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Please forgive me, Louen. I’m so sorry.’ Her voice, cracked and hoarse from thirst and tears, broke.

In the darkness of her makeshift hood, Menys wept.