Julia quickly threw off her light sleeping gown and moved to her wardrobe. Most of her clothes, she ignored, pushing them to one side until she found what she was looking for–a simple brown travelgown, light enough to be comfortable and far more simple than all of her other dresses. Jonslin had grumbled about buying it, but when they took their annual trips to Jellis or Wavecrest, Julia needed something to travel in that wouldn’t leave her fine dresses stained or worn.

  She quickly changed into a fresh set of functional undergarments, devoid of the little decorations she usually preferred on them, then pulled the dress on.

  Next, she went to the bundle she had removed from her hiding place, and shook out a heavy cloak of deep purple fabric. It had been a gift from her old chambermaid, Ella, before Jonslin had decided that the two were getting too close and fired the woman.

  Ella had been the one who had first put the idea of running away into Julia’s head, and this cloak had been the last thing she had smuggled to Julia before Jonslin had fired her. Julia threw the cloak over her shoulders, tying it off and shifting a little to settle it comfortably around her.

  Only then did she look in the mirror, inspecting her appearance.

  Julia had taken more after her mother than her father. Though she had only seen the woman in paintings, Julia clearly saw her own long limbs, her angular features, her curling red hair, in those depictions of her mother. Perhaps the only thing she had inherited from her father, besides his eyes, was a little of his build, filling out the thinner frame of her mother with soft curves. Similarly, her height fell between her stout father and her willowy mother, leaving her just a bit over average height.

  The dress did as she had hoped, draping enough to conceal the curves of her hips, its chestline loose enough to be neither scandalous nor conservative. Over the simple garment, the cloak almost seemed a little much, but Ella had bought it second hand, and a few hastily sewn tears and worn patches did a lot to make the fine garment look more pedestrian. Her shoes–little more than slips of soft black fabric with thin soles–were far from the most functional, but they’d have to do. Considering that she only ever left the house for social calls and business trips, she’d had no way to justify buying sturdier footwear to her father.

  Finally, Julia pulled back her thick, crimson hair, tying it off into a practical tail with a simple black ribbon.

  There. That would do, Julia decided. She didn’t have the garments to blend in with the most destitute of Lowrun’s citizens, but the woman looking back at her from the mirror looked much more commonplace, and even weathered, than Jonslin Brooker’s daughter. She looked like a servingwoman, like one of the chambermaids she had grown up with, someone with work enough to get by and little more.

  That just left the rest of her bundle.

  The little bag of coins, she emptied into her hands. Seventeen scepters, two mantles, and a loose handful of copper rings. Not too much, but it was all she had been able to scrape together over the years since she conceived of this plan. Hopefully, they’d be enough to help her get settled in Lowrun, or even to buy her passage out of the city, if she decided that was necessary to escape her father’s attention.

  She slipped three scepters into a pocket in her cloak and poured the rest back into their purse, then took a few moments in the mirror to slip the purse under her dress, secured tightly to her right thigh.

  “You wouldn’t believe what even an ungifted pickpocket can do,” Ella had warned her. “Never keep more than a few coins in easy reach, and hide the rest as close to your body as you can.”

  Julia’s books agreed on that point, with well-hidden coinpurses a common plot point among many of them, and so she did as Ella had suggested.

  The next bag was only slightly heavier, but was significantly more valuable. She still wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the ten golden crowns she had snuck out of her father’s study a month before, but for now, she secured them against her stomach, pressed into the dimple of her waist and disguised by the loose fabric of her dress.

  That left the knife. It was a skinny little thing, what Hubert had called a “stilleto.” The guardsman had given it to a young Julia years and years ago, before a drunken ruffian killed him, confident that the young heiress couldn’t hurt herself with the small, dulled blade.

  Julia had managed to acquire a whetstone from another guard–she didn’t know his name, as she had stopped getting to know the guards after Hubert’s death left her crying and disconsolate for weeks–and had spent late nights honing the dagger to a razor’s edge.

  She slipped the sheathed stiletto up the long sleeve of her travel gown, tucking it into a simple little pocket sewn into the inside of the fabric. Likely meant for carrying knitting needles or quills or some other appropriately feminine accessory, the sleeve’s inner pocket held the knife easily enough.

  Lastly, she grabbed a satchel and slung it over her shoulder. The unadorned leather bag was empty, but Julia decided it was better to have it and not need it.

  Then she turned to her broad oriel window and cracked it open, just enough to squeeze out.

  #

  It took better than ten minutes to climb down the long ivy that clung to the manor’s walls, and by the time her feet touched ground, Julia had decided that she might as well have not brought the satchel, for all the trouble it had given her. Her travelgown was significantly more rumpled now, and her cloak had picked up a few fresh tears from where it had caught in the ivy, but she decided to look on the brightside: At least the climb had made her look even more authentically not-rich!

  Her books had never mentioned just how sharp and irritating ivy could be.

  By some minor miracle, none of her father’s guards caught her as she stole out of the manor grounds, and she soon made her way to the gates of Highwalk, where the road turned downhill and led out of the wealthy merchant neighborhoods.

  The guards there asked her a few cursory questions, but they were posted to make sure no unauthorized rogues entered Highwalk more than they were to keep people from leaving. Julia mumbled her way through a story about being a new servingwoman for the Lowen family, stuck late on cleaning duty. They checked her bag, confirming it was empty, and sent her through the gates with nothing more than a warning to get home quickly.

  The gates closed behind her, and Julia paused for a moment, stunned at just how easy it had been.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  She was free! She had gotten out of her fathers’s vault of a home, and now all of Lowrun lay sprawled out below her, a twinkling sprawl of lights and lives, of a city much too busy to ever rest.

  She could go wherever she wanted!

  Which just left one very big question.

  Where, exactly, should she go?

  #

  Founded in the south western corner of the Realm, Emeston was a trade city, one of the few crucial centers of enterprise and industry that allowed the bastion cities to continue their endless fight against the Wastes. It was built around a natural harbor, a calm bowl of deep water that allowed even large ships easy docking, and extended from the coastline up to the trio of broad hills that formed the wealthy district of Highwalk.

  Fish from the southern Cliff Road, textiles from the Jellis Vale, clay and preserves from the deadlands, wines and beer from the vintner villages, reagents and totems from hunters across the heartlands, even fresh food from Valley Hearth and Vital, it all flowed through Emeston, shipped from there either to the Cliff Road villages to give them the essentials they needed to survive, or north to Westerlen and even Cita, bastion cities that couldn’t afford the dedication to industry that Emeston had been founded on.

  If Highwalk was the product of Emeston’s wealth, Lowrun was the cost of its industry. The harbor, the shipping lanes, the trade routes, the various processing and storage facilities, they all required a massive workforce–and with that workforce came further necessities. Lowrun, the sprawling district of Emeston that covered the ground between the harbor and the hills of Highwalk, housed that working population, and so much more besides.

  Jonslin and the other Gold Council merchants had plenty of excuses for the state of Lowrun, but Julia knew better than to listen to the lies they told themselves even more often than the public. Simply put, the money in Emeston flowed uphill, leaving Lowrun as the home of the working poor and those who preyed on them. Crime of all sorts–theft, drugs, pit fights, prostitution, and worse–thrived in the mostly unsupervised neighborhoods of Lowrun, and the Gold Council did little to stop it.

  Without ever being explicitly told, Julia had come to the conclusion that the majority of profit from those criminal enterprises also trickled up to Highwalk eventually, benefiting the merchant lords of Emeston as much as its crimelords.

  Still, for all of its flaws, Lowrun had come to capture Julia’s curiosity. Compared to the stiflingly civilized, carefully ordered blocks of Highwalk, Lowrun was a tangled ramble of buildings, crooked tenements bracketing packed bars. Those lucky few able to make a living as artisans dwelled in tiny apartments above their storefronts, vigilant for thieves, while countless others worked in long, low mills and foundries. Wide avenues could dead-end into the soot-stained walls of workshops, while tight alleyways could lead to entire neighborhoods that were otherwise inaccessible.

  While Highwalk at night was uniformly silent, Lowrun was a patchwork of activity even past midnight. Some residential blocks were dark and quiet; others were only dim enough to cover those who slipped from shadow to shadow, in search of a safe place to sleep or whatever vice they sought to indulge. Yet other areas were bright and raucous, a jumbled mix of bars, taverns, breweries, drinking halls, brothels, drug dens, gambling halls, and arenas that never truly slept.

  This was a place of life, chaotic and brilliant and dangerous and thrilling. To a girl who had spent her entire life sheltered and hidden away, who had faced true danger but a single time, it was intoxicating.

  Which was why she was caught more off-guard then she should’ve been when a trio of brawny people–two men and a woman–came swaggering out of a loud, brightly lit building and settled their eyes on Julia.

  “Oi, lookee herrrre!” one of the men slurred. He took a couple staggering steps towards Julia, and even from a distance, she could smell the cheap ale on him, along with something sharper and more pungent, sharp enough to cut through even the funk of trash and unwashed bodies and rotting fish that perpetually hung in Lowrun’s air. The same dreck her father preferred. “I’s juss thinkn’ thas I needed a slot!”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t spent all your rings on bilgewater, you could’ve bought one,” the woman observed. As she spoke, she all but draped herself over the second man, the motion lifting her already brief blouse up higher, revealing the bottom of a robust chest.

  Julia flushed and looked away–only to flinch when she saw the drunk man had gotten a few steps closer to her.

  “I dun need to buy eny,” the drunken man declared. “”Not wit thes lil slot ou’her waitin’ far meh!”

  The second man sighed. “He likes it when ‘ey fight,” he explained to the doxy hanging off his arm. His speech was less slurred than the first man’s, though just as heavily accented, but Julia could at least understand him and couldn’t help more than a little alarm at exactly what he had just said–nor at the calm resignation the two seemed to share about their friend’s apparent preferences.

  The woman sighed. “Of course he does.” She gave Julia a look that was a little too opaque, in the dim light, for her to make out. “Poor girl.”

  Only then did Julia finally figure out what exactly was happening. She tried to take a few steps back, trying to edge away from the drunken sailor, and reached for the dagger up her sleeve at the same time, and completely failed at both efforts. Her feet got tangled up in each other, and she fell to the ground, her dagger flying out of her trembling fingers.

  This isn’t right! Julia thought, as the man continued his slow, staggering approach, drunkenly chuckling at her fumbling attempt to flee. This is where the love interest always arrived in her books, just in time to fend off the man before he could assault her.

  But no one was paying them any mind. Even the other passers-by, moving from bar to bar, didn’t offer her more than a single glance, and the second man was too busy with his doxy now, not even watching her or his friend.

  Her thigh suddenly burned, and Julia found herself reaching for it. Her father had always said her other gift was useless, shameful, but if it meant that she could avoid this, then…

  “OI!” A new loud, deep voice boomed as another figure exited the same building these three had come from. “Oi! Waster! You pokened me scep, dint yeh?”

  The drunken man finally paused, swaying in place. “Meh?” he asked, turning sluggishly to the approaching man. “I dunno what ya-”

  Julia’s would-be assailant broke off as a heavy fist smashed across his face with what had to be gifted strength, sending the man flying to the ground–on the opposite side of the street, twenty feet away from Julia.

  “Yeh, I’m spekkin t’yeh!” the newcomer roared, already pursuing the man’s broken body. “Yeh’ll be retunin’ meh sceps, yeh dogwhis!”

  Julia looked around hurriedly, eyes wide, breath coming fast in her throat. She looked from her drunken near-assailant, being thoroughly beaten by man he had apparently robbed, to the man’s friend–who was hustling away, his doxy still hanging off of him.

  At the very least, no one’s attention was on Julia anymore. She scooped up her knife and hurried away, her steps followed by heavy impacts and squeals of pain from behind her.

  Her books never had that sort of thing in them.

  Julia rubbed her hands together as she hustled down the street. Slowly, her palms cooled, her gift receding now that the threat was gone, and she came to a pair of inescapable conclusions.

  Her books probably weren’t worth trusting, now that she was actually down hill.

  And she had to get off the street, as quick as she could.

  There!

  Just a block away, Julia saw a bar that looked pretty quiet, and quite a bit nicer than most of the establishments she had passed by. The name was a mite ominous, sure, but it would have to do.