Tamira stumbled out of the 'The Dead Griffin' tavern, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her with a dull thud that stole the last remnants of her hope. The night was cold, and the streets of Larnwick Stream were empty and muddy. Her last, clumsy words, thrown in the faces of the villagers, still rang in her ears, hotter and dumber than they should have. Shame and humiliation burned her from the inside, mixing with a stubborn, unquenchable anger.
"Bumpkins," she whined under her breath. "They have no idea about true art. Country fools."
For the next several days, she lived in a state of numbness. She didn't set foot outside her room. Her lute, with two broken strings, lay in its case like a guilty conscience. The village, which had seemed like her starting place, had now become a prison full of mocking looks and whispers. Children made fun of her, imitating her shrill singing, and adults averted their eyes when they saw her clumsy figure.
In these darkest hours, her thoughts returned to her mother. Sylanna, a true elf, daughter of one of the lesser aristocratic houses, a house that had long since gone bankrupt in both significance and wealth, leaving her only a title and a sense of superiority inadequate to her actual position. Sylanna did not work. Her 'profession', her source of income, and her favorite pastime was being charmingly and carelessly kept. She was a courtesan, a mistress, an ornament first of elven courts, and then, when even there she found no place due to a certain scandal involving the husband of Priestess Ceresti, also of human courts. Her life was an endless, dreamy duel between another cup of intoxicating moonpetal liqueur and choosing which admirer was the most generous, the most handsome, or simply the most available that evening.
Sylanna was the embodiment of elven sensuality, but devoid of any depth or melancholy. She was a beautiful, fragrant flower that never questioned its destiny of being plucked. Her world was limited to bedrooms, ballrooms, and boudoirs. Art? It was a pleasant background for her, like music playing at a banquet, nice, as long as it didn't drown out the conversation.
She also thought of her father. Father. The word sounded like an insult in her mind. She never called him that, not even in her thoughts. It was Lord Valerius, the Count of Larnwick. Once the ruler of these lands, before debts, failed investments, and political misfortunes shrunk his 'county' to this backwater Stream, a few surrounding villages, and a crumbling manor on the hill.
Sylanna, always practical in her frivolity, had seen him in her youth as a good maneuver. A local ruler, rich enough to keep her in luxury, and insignificant enough that her elven family wouldn't intervene too aggressively. Lord Valerius, in turn, saw the beautiful elf as a trophy, a sign of the prestige that was slipping from his grasp. From their short, passionate, and mutually cynical affair, only Tamira remained.
For Lord Valerius, Tamira's existence was a living, clumsy proof of his decline and poor judgment. A daughter devoid of the elven grace that could have brought him even a sliver of glory by association, and yet too awkward to send to some court as a lady-in-waiting or even a maid to squeeze any benefit from this wretched union. His 'care' consisted of one stern order given to Sylanna when she announced her pregnancy. 'Deal with it. I don't want to see or hear it. I will assign a modest stipend. Just please, make it disappear from my sight.'
And Sylanna, relieved, dealt with it in the way most convenient for herself. She rented an old cottage on the edge of the village for Tamira, paid a eccentric old woman named Agata to bring the girl food once in a while and check if she was dead, and quickly returned to her real life, the life of an eternal party, for which Lord Valerius had stopped paying, forcing her to seek new 'patrons'.
Agata was silent and treated Tamira like just another part of the landscape, a peculiar stone or a stunted tree that needed to be tended to in passing. Her visits were not acts of care, but a ritual, a ticking off of a boring duty.