The Art of Courts and Lies (Book 1 in The Gifted Trilogy)

1- The Garner

Of all my shortcomings, I never believed my downfall would be the fault of my prideful ego.

Surely it was the universe's doing, its sick sense of humor reveling in the idea of giving the disposable village girl a small spark of hope and then crushing the flame before her downtrodden fingers could even grasp it.

It was my own fault anyway. I should have never trusted the insolent farmer boy to be capable of creating anything but a foolish plan with more holes in it than the tattered blanket my sister and I used for warmth during the brutal winter nights. I should have never believed that this world would ever offer me anything but pain and hardship. It was my own fault for expecting something better than what I was given.

But that's what I did. Like an idiot, I believed that there was a chance of getting out of Naturian without being detected. I believed that somewhere on another continent there waited a new future, a new life.

And maybe there did. Maybe there was a whole different world, a better world, waiting at the end of the vast ocean. I would just never see it.

I would have been able to go on through life without the thought of escaping Naturian ever crossing my mind if it wasn't for two things: Tessa and the Garner.

The latter of the two was the reason for my haste, my recklessness in planning an escape for my sister and I. The lack of time before the Garner was the main reason I made one of the worst decisions of my life and listened to Porter's plan, deciding it was foolproof enough to put the fate of both mine and my sister's life into the outcomes.

A fool. I was a fool with a lack of time.

But none of those precautionary thoughts crossed my mind that night as I wrapped Tessa tightly into our father's old brown leather jacket, the only thing we had left of him.

"Wren, I don't feel good about this" my 13 year old sister murmured, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with the back of her hand.

"I know, little bird, I know" I coo, grasping her hands in my calloused ones. Thank the stars her hands looked nothing like mine did at her age. Thank the stars my father had been around up until the last two years of her life. "But we need to leave. We have a chance to build a new life somewhere far away. It isn't safe for us here anymore."

"Are we leaving because of the Garner?" she asked, her eyes following my path as I attempted to ignore answering her question by hurrying around the cramped space we called our home and gathering the last of what we would take with us. It wasn't more than a pack for each of us but even so, we weren't leaving much behind.

Our father had left nothing for us other than his name. His disappearance was both sudden and unexpected. One morning I was sitting across from him as he muttered on about the troubling winter headed our way and then the next morning I was staring at nothing more than his rough leather jacket and a note that simply had written on it, I'm sorry.

But the apology didn't change the fact that on my sixteenth birthday, my present was the new and complete responsibility of making sure my sister and I survived. Most nights I went to bed without food. I spent most days helping Porter out in his father's fields for a scrap of money. His family paid enough to keep clothes on mine and Tessa's back. Plus, I had gotten over my initial disdain at Porter's company a long time ago, our initial bond being over the shared tragedy of our mothers having died when we were still children.

Porter was loud and obnoxious when we were kids and though his body grew into one of a man, his character sure didn't. Though I usually found myself scowling at his jokes and immaturity, I suppose I preferred that kind of Porter to one that resembled anything close to the other boys in our village. Distant. Unfeeling. Serious and cold. That was why Porter's expression earlier that day had scared me so much. It was a carbon copy of the calculating and threatening faces of every other man I knew.