Fortune Favors the Cursed
the-reticent-seer
diverselit
diverselit
1.3K5
An orphan girl with questionable morals. A scarred prince with two lives. One relic to change their world.
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Badriya As-Sahra is sick of piling up camel dung and ...Chapter 47
Once, in a feeble spot in the desert wasteland, there was a boy who was lost. His family had abandoned him when they left for the capital, for he was so sickly they deemed him a burden. The streets became his home. For a while, he thought he wouldn't survive, but when he started to steal things he needed to live, he found the strength to live on.
That was when he met the girl marked by the moon.
Like him, she was frail and small and had nothing but the strangest marks on her face. The boy found them pretty, like splashes of rare white dye. However, the kids that surrounded her didn't think the same thing as him.
It happened in an alley next to the souq. They taunted the girl's face, who started to cry and fold into herself. Something inside the boy snapped. Those mean kids didn't have the right to bully her for her appearance—it wasn't her fault she was born that way.
So he did the most stupid thing: he stepped in front of the girl and yelled at the bullies to scram.
Of course, a stupid thing had stupid consequences. After landing several punches everywhere, the bullies left the boy and the girl alone, unaware that the boy had picked their pockets empty while they beat him. Now their mothers would be pinching their ears all day, demanding to get back their spare coin.
The girl gave him her thanks, but she was quick to leave as if she was scared of him. The boy didn't have to look for her for long. Only a few days later, he spotted her stealing a few apples from a distracted vendor's stall. Instead of stopping her, he helped himself with a couple of pears. The girl was surprised to see him, but then she grinned when she saw what he was doing. The best part was they got away with it before the vendor even turned around.
The two of them grew close, and from that day onward, the boy promised himself that they would become the family that they needed. He kept that promise for years, until the Jewel hunt dropped onto their laps, and the girl, who was a woman by her own right, fell into the spell of an impossible treasure.
The boy tried to persuade her into ignoring the hunt, but while his thirst for the thrill of stealing grew over the years, so was her greed, and that was enough to blind her from the dangers of the desert. The boy loved her so much he couldn't imagine her leaving their town, and him, behind. He knew their lives were far from perfect, but at least they were alive. Traveling across the desert in search of an object that didn't exist was a death sentence.
And so the boy did the next most stupid thing yet: he confessed his feelings for her.
Those feelings were true from his heart, but the girl didn't know that. The girl stormed off in anger, and that was the last time he ever saw her. The boy wanted to be angry at her too, but his worry got the better of him. Not only was he stupid, he was reckless in a way that he stole one of his employer's camels and left to follow the girl.
His recklessness further brought the boy into the claws of a slave trader caravan. They picked him out of nowhere, and the next thing he knew, he was being whipped, beaten and starved to the point that he couldn't distinguish night from day. He had experienced blackouts before when he used to be ill, but those were the most painful days he had ever endured. The whole time he suffered, all he could think about was the girl—his closest friend and only family—and her fate. Was she suffering the same thing as he, kidnapped by a ring of slavers and tortured to near death? Was she taken by the same traders? Was she even alive?
The boy told all this to the man who greeted him when he woke up. At first, the boy turned afraid at the man, whom he later realized was only a bit older than him. He was clearly a foreigner, with his tan skin and unnaturally blue and green eyes. The foreigner explained what had happened while he was unconscious. The boy couldn't make sense of most of it—how and why in the world would the crown prince save him and a bunch of soon-to-be-slaves? And somehow the caravan got all the way to Zarab, the damn capital. It all sounded like a fever dream.