Chapter 395: The Ghost of The Past
Tsalinade wasn’t her real name. But it was a name that she remembered the most; the name of a gorgeous queen in a desert kingdom of ancient era. The name was mentioned in a forgotten song that her mother used to sing to her.
A mother who was found dead in the bed where she served her client.
A mother who left the world with a huge debt that got her even more beautiful daughter sold off to a rich, cruel aristocrat. A rich, cruel aristocrat who killed her.
The young, barely teenage daughter had a feeling she would die soon, so she used the gift she had been keeping as a secret all this time. She couldn’t do much, but she moved the wheel of the carriage bringing him to the city. Just slightly. Just enough to make the carriage swerve in the middle of a muddy road, plunging into a ravine.
She had thought that if she was going to die anyway, she would rather die before getting defiled.
But she didn’t die. She survived on top of a plank from the destroyed carriage that brought her to a lake. And then an island. The island of fairies, she thought, like those in the children’s book belonged to the Madam’s child.
The island was beautiful; green and grey, red and yellow, violet and blue. It smelled of real flowers, not the sickly sweet kind that had been made into perfume and burned as incense to cover the scent of drugs and bodily fluids. The grass in the meadow was softer than the plank bed in the brothel. The water of the lake and river was refreshingly sweet, perfectly drinkable without boiling it. The trees gave her fruits and led her to a vegetable garden she couldn’t help but forage to fill her stomach.
She had nothing, but it was the richest she had felt in her twelve years of life.
On the fourth day, the owner of the vegetable garden came, with eyes as deep and rich as the forest around her.
The same eyes that were now looking at her with anger and disappointment.
"...Master--" she blurted out before she could help it. It had been so long; so long since the guilt had started to gnaw at her heart, her soul, her being.