Nobody’s Quest (The Nobody Chronicles #1)

Chapter One

I’m elbow-deep in cleaning mold off the bottom of a bookshelf when six of the king’s guards come for me. Five of them with swords drawn, which makes no sense.

Because I’m nobody.

I heard the tramp of boots, of course, but I ignored them.

King Pallan often sends his guards to the royal library to demand scrolls from the Sisters.

Not that he’s a scholar, from what I’ve heard in the kitchens, but it gives him pleasure to order people about as if he’s playing Spires with living pieces.

If you’re a king, I guess you always capture Triple Crowns—the winning hand.

I freeze and drop the sponge on the ragged hem of my skirt. Kneeling in the corner at the base of the marble staircase, I wait for them to pass by.

Except they don’t.

Instead, the lead guard, wiry in his crisp blue uniform, frowns at me. He curls his lip in distaste as he touches the point of his sword to my neck, forcing my head up.

“This? This can’t be what he wants.” His voice conveys enough contempt to fill the entire kingdom of Pyrrh. “How can the king expect—”

“Shut your mouth. All of you, put your swords away,” growls a voice like broken gravel.

Four swords immediately slam into sheaths. The fifth digs into my throat.

A thickset guard, her uniform bearing the silver chevron of rank against its royal blue, shoves past the first guard and slaps his sword down.

“I said put it away. King Pallan wants what he wants, and it’s not for the ravens-begotten likes of you to question it.

Or do you want to face the Inquisitors?”

He shrinks back. A tiny part of me I’d thought was long destroyed is viciously glad to see the fear in his face.

But then the heat trickling down my neck tells me he cut me, and my defiance vanishes.

I quash my instinct to slap a hand on the wound, because my hands are filthy.

Instead, I swallow hard and look up at the officer.

Her square face is impassive, but I see a glimmer of pity when her gaze lands on my throat. She digs in a pocket and tosses me a small bit of white cotton.

“Hold that on your neck and get up, girl. We don’t have time to dally.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, staring at the cloth in disbelief. It has been a very long time since anybody in authority aimed even such a small kindness toward me.

A whore’s daughter doesn’t deserve pity.

Especially one who’s scarred and broken, like me.

I stand, my knees shaky after hours on the stone floor, and press the cloth to my neck. “Why … where are we going?”

Instead of answering, she glares at her soldiers. “Move back, you fools. Does this pathetic wisp of a girl look like a threat to us?”

Pathetic is not an unfamiliar word in the lexicon of descriptors thrown at me, so I barely notice it. Instead, I focus on the officer and ask again, “Where are we going?”

She bellows out a humorless laugh. “To see the king, girl. You’re a very important person today.”

I blink and then relax. This is all a mistake. They have the wrong person. “Oh. No. I’m sorry, but you’ve made a mistake. I’m not her. I mean, I’m not whoever you’re looking for.”

The officer, who’s already turned to leave, whips her head back to stare at me. “Are you Soli Graymind?”

“I … yes, but—”

“Then get your feet moving. The king doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

She marches off, confident that the rest of the guards and I will follow behind her.

For a moment, I wonder what it would feel like to have that kind of confidence.

But then the first guard, safe now that the officer’s eyes aren’t on him, punches me in the back so hard I have to scramble not to fall.

“She said get your feet moving,” he snarls.

“Flack!” the officer bellows. “Get your bony ass up here and open doors for me.”

As he scurries past me, Flack elbows me in the ribs and sneers when I gasp. “Just wait till I get you in the dungeon,” he hisses.

The dungeon?

“But why—”

“Best be quiet,” the guardsman next to me says quietly. “Flack’s a jumped-up bunghole, but he has connections. Let’s get you to the palace in one piece, hey?”

I nod and touch the tiny scraps of parchment twined into the thin braid hanging down the left side of my face. It occurs to me that my words today may have been prescient in some small way. Because tucked between strands of my braid are Courage and Endurance.

I’d picked them half in jest for the onerous task of cleaning the stacks. Now, though, realization sinks into the pit of my stomach that I may need large quantities of both to survive the day.

Or the dungeon.

We march up the seventy-seven stairs from the under-library to the main rotunda.

I keep my head down, avoiding the avidly curious stares of the Sisters and servants we pass along the way.

I can’t answer the questions in their eyes when I have no idea what is happening—or why.

My mind races, trying to find a single reason I’d be called before anyone in the palace, let alone the king of all Pyrrh.

In the early days of my indenture, back when I was only four years old and crying for my mother—partly because I missed her, and partly because of the pain from the fall that ripped open my right hand to my wrist and the edge of my right cheek—I fashioned fairy-tale dreams of one day discovering that I was a princess.

That the king and queen were searching for me, and soon they’d find me and take me to live in the castle with my mother.

My young brain didn’t think to wonder how the daughter of a whore could be a princess, until one day I innocently made the mistake of telling the tale at breakfast. The other servants’ cruel laughter shredded through me, sharp-edged like the cook’s knives.

After that, I locked my dreams into a small, deep corner of my mind, to be taken out only rarely and always in the dark.

Life had already taught me a hard truth: Dreams are as fragile as moon glow on cobwebs, easily destroyed in the unforgiving light of day.

As the years went by, and I realized that a term of indentured servitude actually had no end for someone like me, I let reality erode my foolish childhood notions.

Palaces and princesses.

Not for a nobody.

Not for me.

Now, if I can believe these guards, I’m on my way to the palace. Not in a beautiful dress or riding in a carriage, but stumbling across the cobblestone streets, wearing rags and covered in mold and dirt. My filthy clothes and skin are as gray as the label the Inquisitors slapped on my mind.

The label they slapped on me.

Graymind.

In other circumstances, I’d be thrilled to be outside on a day like this.

The crisp autumn air is filled with the cinnamon-spiced scent of cider, and red-cheeked children run around waving banners on sticks and stealing iced buns purposely left out for them by indulgent shopkeepers.

In the distance, people gather to watch the sunset at the low wall that surrounds Pallanhold Keep.

I’ve stood at that wall before, looking out over the deep blue swells of the Thalassian Sea, where the waves crash into the Indigo Cliffs of Pyrrh. Wondering what lies on the other side of that impassable ocean.

Wondering if I’d ever see anyplace else but this city.

After that first time looking out at the water, I found a tome on geography and learned about the unique blue clay and stone that give the cliffs their name.

I read about unsuccessful attempts to cross the Thalassian Sea as recounted by the few explorers who’d made it home after one or more catastrophes on those unforgiving waves.

“Here be Monsters,” the old maps say in curled and faded script on their edges. But no histories I’ve ever read describe them.

Maybe we’ve always been too busy with the monsters right here in Altarra to find out about those waiting beyond its borders.

When we reach the palace—the tallest structure at the highest point in the city, which rings out in concentric semicircles around it—the officer wheels sharply to the right and steps off the main road that enters the palace grounds.

We follow her onto a neatly tended gravel path that wraps around the sweep of the shining white stone wall encircling the king’s domain.

After thirty paces, she stops at a small gate. The rest of us halt behind her.

I clench my teeth together to keep from asking questions. I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself, especially from Flack and his “connections,” but a constant refrain of why why why why why reverberates inside me.

Two guards on the other side of the gate wear the unrelieved black of rank-and-file soldiers, rather than the royal blue of the king’s guards. They snap to attention and salute the officer. When they open the metal gate, it creaks with disuse.

Maybe it’s the special gate for the truly desperate criminals, my brain offers. I have to bite my lip to keep from letting any hint of hysterical laughter escape.

Me. Desperate.

Right.

I’m tall compared to other female Pyrrhans, but I’m so thin that even the oldest, weakest soldier in the army could take me down with one hand tied behind their back.

Deprivation is the key to a pure mind, the Sisters tell us. Rations are always scarce at the two meals a day we’re allotted. I’m at the lowest rung of the hierarchy, so I’m only allowed to put food on my plate when everyone else is done filling theirs.

And I’m lucky to get that much, I know, after being told so almost daily for most of my life. I’ll be one and twenty at Harvest Fest, the age at which indentured servants are formally freed from their bonds.

Except for people like me.

I’ll never be free. Grayminds never are.

When I hesitate at the gate, the guard next to me takes my arm and pulls me through. “No use being late to a place, even if you don’t want to go,” he says gruffly. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think he gives my arm a reassuring squeeze.

I lift my chin and pretend the action gives me strength, but then one of the gate guards points at me and laughs.