Jade Halvern's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Jade Halvern had won every duel of her life, but she could not win a room for the night. She stood at the edge of the tournament town with a satchel of coins no banker here would recognize. The royal tournament of blades began in two days. To fight in it, she needed to sleep near the grounds. To sleep near the grounds, every innkeeper wanted the one thing she could not give: a name and papers that marked her as born in this kingdom. She was not. One honest question, and her whole plan would unravel. She tried the first inn anyway. The keeper looked up from his ledger and asked for her family seal. Jade smiled, curtsied, and said she had lost her papers on the road. He shook his head and pointed at the door. "No seal, no bed. The guard checks my book every morning." The second inn was worse. The keeper narrowed his eyes at her glowing silk gown and called for a magistrate's clerk. Jade left before the clerk arrived. She walked fast until the lamps thinned behind her, her hand near the knife stitched into her sleeve. Every door she knocked on would end the same way. The town would never hold her. So she stopped trying the town. Jade found a dark alley and reached into her satchel for the one thing she had carried from home. It was a folded doorframe no wider than her hand, carved with runes that pulsed when she shook it open. She set it against a bare stone wall. The frame grew. Its runes brightened, and the space inside it filled with shimmering light, like water turned to pearl. Through the glow she saw it: her own hall, her own fire, her high gleaming walls of colored glass. The portal had opened a passage straight back to her castle, far from any clerk's ledger. A low growl rolled out of the light. Her armored beast pushed its horned head through the frame, scales flashing green and pink, loyal and enormous. It had followed the portal's pull. Jade pressed a hand to its snout. "Not all the way through," she whispered. "We stay close." That was the trick. The doorway did not move her home into the town. It only linked the two. She could sleep in her own bed behind the castle walls, then step back through the frame each morning onto this same quiet stone. No name. No papers. No clerk would ever see her enter a single inn, because she would never need one. Jade stepped through and the light closed behind her. The problem was solved. But a glowing doorway in a dark town does not stay unnoticed. As the frame dimmed, a boy who swept the alley at dawn stood frozen at its mouth, bucket dropped, eyes fixed on the fading runes. He had seen a woman walk into a wall of light. By morning, he would tell someone.