Foxglove wanted nothing to do with the boy. She thought that if his mother had lived, she’d surely have exposed him. Maybe that was just her savage blood talking but she knew no full-blood savage would ever amount to much in the kingdom they’d both been born to. Still, the practice of exposure had been made illegal and even if it hadn’t, she didn’t have the right. Only the kin and the person that saved his ugly little lump of flesh had that. The kin were all gone and the savior happened to be her better and half sister Leaura.

Leaura and she had the same father, the master of the house, but her own mother was a savage slave while Leaura’s was the master’s proper wife. They had a brother by Leaura’s mother. Everyone said he was stillborn but Foxglove knew better. She could feel the other out there in the city. The masters wife said it was punishment for his sleeping with the savage and making the half-savage freeborn. It didn’t matter; Foxglove was free in name only and had a home only until her father died.