The world rushed by her after she saw Taro. Her daughter was taken from her arms, roughly and without warning. The locked garden door was opened, and she was grabbed by her arms and taken outside the manor grounds. Her mother-in-law stood in front of her, flanked on both sides by two guards. Razea heard her daughter's cries get quieter and quieter until the back door of the manor shut with a bang. And then nothing mattered.
She had acted too quickly, too stupidly, and now Taro would make her pay for her foolishness.
"I knew it was only a matter of time," Taro said. "I told my son you would show your true colors eventually. I'm only grateful it occurred after his passing. He would've been broken-hearted to think his daughter was being stolen away from her birthright."
Taro leaned forward. In the light of the moon, she looked older than usual and more severe. The lines of her face were unsoftened by the darkness, and her blue eyes were those of a predator's.
"I will assure you this. My granddaughter will want for nothing in her life. She will be raised to be everything she should be and more."
"Mother, what do you mean?" Razea asked her. The child was her own daughter first, and Taro's granddaughter later.
"I'm no mother to you. Not any longer. You wanted to leave my home, break my son's oath, steal my bloodline. You have betrayed the Carmanor family."
"She's my daughter," Razea protested. "She's just a baby."
"She's a Carmanor. She will grow into greatness, like her father before her."
Taro withdrew a silk bag from the pockets of her dress. She tossed it at Razea's feet.
"This should be enough to set you up comfortably. I've spoken to the coachman to take you back to your town."
Razea looked up at her mother-in-law. Her little village was abandoned the last time she saw it, ravaged by war with crop fields deserted and huts ransacked. Her parents had disowned her years ago, when she had chosen Havim over her own more humble heritage.
While Taro thought the Carmanor family was superior and honorable, Razea's own family held different priorities. They told her she was a fool to marry a soldier, even if he was a wealthy one. That before half a dozen harvests she would be left a widow. The war had come, and there were no more harvests, but her parents had been right. Razea fell to her knees and looked at the bag in front of her. The silk was just transparent enough for her to see the gold within.
"Mother…" Razea pleaded.
"I have made my decision, Razea. We all have our place in the world, our parts to play. And yours is not here."
The young woman picked up the bag of gold coins. It was enough to make her the richest woman in her home town, if the town was no longer abandoned. She heard the horses being brought out from the stables, the beasts eager for the exercise. Taro had already turned her back to her, walking back to the house while her guards locked the garden gate. They avoided looking at her.
Minutes before she had been the daughter of the house, the mother of the Carmanor heir. Now she was banished. She looked along the length of the walls. The watchtowers that were usually just decoration were newly occupied with guards. From the beginning she never had a chance of escape.
Her arms were empty. Her child which had so recently lived within her still felt like an extension of her own body. Ripping her child away from her was no different from ripping out her heart from her chest.
"Time to leave, miss," the coachman said. He was supposed to call her Lady Carmanor, but that title had never been passed down to her. Taro had never become the dowager, and Razea had remained the young miss the master had married. She never became a part of the household, and now was being ejected from it ungracefully, involuntarily, as if the three years she had spent in the Carmanor mansion meant nothing at all.
The coachman took her small satchel and carried it to the coach. Razea followed, not knowing what else to do. The guards would stop her before she got to the gate. If she was caught again, Taro would condemn her to a dungeon instead of exile. But if she left, she could back later, when they weren't so vigilant, and steal her daughter away before it was too late.
Perhaps if the sorcerer did not exist, Razea could trust Taro to raise a child with some modicum of happiness and freedom. If only the sorcerer did not exist. She clasped the bag of gold coins in her hand. She could use them to become the richest woman in her hometown, or she could use them to find the sorcerer who found no fault in making a servant out of a child.
The sorcerers' guilds all rested in their special city near the border of the country. It was a difficult place to enter, and only a few non-magical people chose to live there. The people who made a place for themselves often forfeited their place in the real world. If they came back, they came back as different people, ones contaminated by the magic they breathed in day in and day out in the city of Pha-era.
It wasn't an easy city to live in if one wasn't a sorcerer, but one of the few places where magickers could live freely among their own kind. The merchants who passed through spoke of beasts who walked on two legs and rivers that flowed through the sky, terrifying wonders at every corner and sorcerers who broke the laws of the world and established their own.
She finally stood up. Minutes or hours later, she had no idea. The sky was dark lavender, heralding the arrival of the rising sun and a new day. Her dress was grass-stained and soaked with sweat despite the cold. It was an effect Taro had on people often. She wiped the sweat on her forehead with her sleeve and headed towards the carriage.
"Take me to the western trade route," she instructed the coachman.
"Miss, your home is toward the south."
Razea withdrew a coin from her bag. "Do you think the lady of the manor cares where I am as long as I am not near? Take me to the western trade route, sir."
She opened the narrow glass window to the coachman's seat and tapped him on the shoulder. His eyes grew wide at the sight of the gold coin.
Razea leaned back into the plush cushions of the carriage. This was the way the world worked. The powerful could make the weak dance to their tunes. For a second now, she was more powerful than the coachman, and so he was disobeying his mistress's orders without question.
She would go to Pha-era and find the sorcerer who wanted her daughter so badly. Razea steeled herself for the journey. There was a chance he would not be there. Some of the strangest of the sorcerers lived outside of Pha-era, outcasts even among their own kind.
Razea would search for him all she could. And if she didn't find him, staying in Pha-era could give her clues. People who returned were one of two things. Either they ended up being terrified of everything until the day they died, or they became terrors themselves. If she returned from the city, she promised to return as the latter.