The name Siren followed Freya Helvar around like a curse from the moment her powers first manifested in a raid on her village. With the image of her father's charred corpse and her brother's disgusted face on her mind, she is hauled to the Little Pa...
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THE MORNING BEFORE the winter fete was to occur, Freya could not sit still. She paced the room she had been given in the Grand Palace to prepare, shuffling on her feet every few seconds. It was the first time she had ever been in the Grand Palace at all, and she could not really say she enjoyed it. Everything looked so expensive and she felt out of place. She was a village girl and the only grand thing she had ever owned before coming to Ravka was an iron chain necklace her father had bought her for her when she begged him long enough. It was a small and thin thing and she had not seen it since the night of her father's death.
The palace was nothing compared to that. If something here was made of iron, it was cheap and worthless. Gold and silver and platinum were the only things allowed, and it was what everything was covered in. From the pale white marble pillars to the corners of nightstands and stools. Freya could only think distantly about the run-down and starving villages she had passed when she was brought to the Little Palace. How much money was all this worth? How much of that money could have gone to helping the people instead making the royal family feel the slightest bit richer? She doubted that they would even notice if half of the things in the room went missing.
She tried to think about other things. Like how the thin robe she had been given was covered in expensive lace and how soft her hair felt after the servants had washed her with aromatic soaps and shampoos from Shu Han. Her skin felt just as soft bra that her fingers when she ran them over her face. The only thing that broke the gentleness of it was the taut skin of her burn scar, still stretched over the angle of her jaw. It had healed a lot throughout the years and it was not as ugly as it had been before, but it was still there.
When the General had offered a few days earlier for it to be removed entirely, she found herself refusing. The red-haired Tailor girl named Genya – Freya had hardly known Tailors even existed up until that point – had not argued against her, but did as she saw fit everywhere else. They discussed what she would look like during her presentation before the court. Whether she would wear natural colours on her face or if her eyelids would shimmer with blue and violet like her kefta did.
In the end, the two of them had spent hours giggling over various colours and styles of makeup. It was the first time in years that Freya had felt like a completely normal girl. Violet and blue is what they decided on, and so Freya would that very evening walk out in front of hundreds of people and look like exactly the thing the people had begun to call her.
A siren of the seas. Freya would be lying if she said she did not enjoy the nickname. The Siren had become so thoroughly embedded into people's minds that it ended up being the name she was mostly referred to by. Not the name given to her Grisha order – the Sound Bender –, but the Siren. A girl who could wield sound to her will just like the mythical creature could.
Around noon, there was a knock on the door. Freya was quick to fix her hair and smooth out her robe, just in case it was someone important from the Grand Palace that had come to see her. She schooled her face to be cold and unfeeling. When she opened the door, that ice melted away into a bright smile.
