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The starless crown review5/13/2023 After sailing across the Bay of Promise, under the glowering eye of a winter’s sun, pursued by the king’s legion, they had made landfall along the treacherous coast of Mýr. The knife was thrust into her hands by her savior, by a man who broke a vow to help her escape the castle keep. The hunting blade is not her own, neither is the blood that already stains it. She sobs with wracking heaves and picks up the skinning knife near the base of the cottongum. The child is still tied to her by a twisted bloody cord. She slumps to the mud with the babe between her thighs. The child spills from her and drops to the wet mud underfoot. With one last push, she feels the release. As a pleasure serf of Azantiia, she was never allowed the luxury of speech. Still, a moan escapes her, wordless from her lack of a tongue. She stifles her scream, lest the hunters should hear her cries. As she hangs there, thorns pierce her palms, but the pain is naught compared to the final contraction that rips her wider and pushes the babe from her womb. Overhead, her hands remain clamped to a vine. She sweats and pants, her legs wide under her. To her side, a trunk as wide as a horse twists around and around, as if the tree were seeking to escape these drowned lands. Vines choke the massive tree, dragging its limbs to the mossy hillocks and draping leaves into the boggy waters of a slow-moving stream. She squats and strains under the fog-shrouded bower of a gnarled cottongum.
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