"They hate me," Elara said quietly as she stood beneath the striped awning of a small tea shop on Bellini Street, watching the noon crowd move around her with the uneasy curiosity reserved for someone whose face had suddenly become familiar for all the wrong reasons.
The market district had always been one of Regina's liveliest quarters, filled with merchants calling over one another, carts rolling across uneven stone, children weaving between adults, and the warm scent of bread, roasted chestnuts, and spiced tea drifting through the narrow street, yet that morning the ordinary bustle carried a strange undercurrent because conversations seemed to falter whenever the Queen passed close enough to hear them.
