Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Tempting My Nightmares

I met Tynne in the alley next to the temple, the hood of Luci's borrowed cloak over my head. Already there were lots of strangers in the enclave, and the main square had been set up with bronze fence panels two man-heights high. They called the event the "Great Churn". Everyone with a Trinket looking for their other half would get locked into the square to mill around like a bunch of confused sheep while the rest of the town watched. The high-breds would watch from the stone balconies that wrapped around the main square and created the upper market, while the low-borns (or anyone who wanted a good view) got to watch from the cool shade.

There was a line to talk to the scribe sitting at a small table outside the temple. She sat at a little folded table perched on a little folding chair, and I didn't recognize her—she must have arrived to help manage everyone who had come for the event. Just as well. If the usual clergy had seen Tynne and I work would get back to his family before we were ready.

My heart beat fast and hard. Would he show up? Had he changed his mind? Had his parents found out?

High-bred shifters like Tynne didn't marry foundlings like me. Especially foundlings like me. There were foundlings, and then there were foundlings. I hadn't been left on some doorstep with a mysterious letter tucked into a sweetly embroidered blanket and basket with a ribbon. Or a young child clearly stolen away from some higher-bred family and maybe taking care of the little one would net an eventual reward. Nope. I'd been literally found by a bunch of wolf shifters escorting a watercart on its way to the enclave.

I'd been found outside the enclave as a small child, battered and bloody, and when no parents had come looking for me, I'd been put out on the street. I'd been taken in by a woman who had a herd of feral street kids she tried to mother, but I was still a foundling. And in an enclave run by shifters, I was human. Two strikes against me. I was just a plain old human with no past, no pedigree, no family, nothing at all except the rags the enclave had given me. And I wasn't even pretty: whatever had happened to me as a child had resulted in lots of scars all over my back and shoulders and some on my face.

I had been too young—they guessed I had been about four—to remember anything. Not how I got there, not who my parents were, not even my name, apparently. Nobody even knew what my name really as. Apparently little me had (through a broken jaw and torn up lips and tongue) tried to communicate her name, and the best the old woman had heard was Theia. But my name might have been something else, and I'd long since forgotten.

They'd never found the bodies of my parents, or whatever adults I'd been with, and believe me, they tried. Because they wanted to get rid of me and send my parents the bill. and I'd been so far from anywhere that I couldn't possibly have wandered out there by myself. The best anyone could figure was I'd been a small child who had tumbled out of a wagon while asleep, nobody had noticed, and wild animals had attacked me but left me for dead instead of eating me. My family had never come looking for me. They probably had been some kind of vagrant or criminal.

But I'd still managed to make a good friend in Luci, and I'd figured out that if I learned to make good bread and sweet doughs, I'd always have work in any kitchen. Anyone can make bread (it's just water and flour and salt) but there are lots of tricks to handling the dough and little things you can do that make a common loaf a fancy loaf. Especially if you can cut pretty patterns in the top and impress the high table. I hadn't told anyone yet, but I was thinking that I might be able to open my own little shop one day, or get a position making special loaves. It was such an impossible dream for someone like me I didn't tell anyone, not even Luci.

I'd also figured out real quick that the fastest way to ruin my meager life would be to run around with boys and get pregnant. So I'd never done that. Until Tynne, and that's why I always told him to pull out.