To be what?she thought bitterly.Loved? Wanted?
She almost laughed. Almost.
Instead, she shifted closer to the gap in the canvas. Close enough to hear the guards now, their voices carrying on the wind.
"—three days behind schedule already," Harren was saying. "Vorn won't be happy."
"Vorn can choke on his own tongue. It's not my fault the mountain roads are shit." The younger guard spat onto the ground. "Besides, he'll forget all about it once he sees the stock."
"I don’t know. The stock's looking thin."
"The thin ones always last longer. It's the big ones that slow down first." A laugh, ugly and knowing. "Like that one in the back. She'll owe double the years just from the food she costs them."
Delia's breath stopped.
"Probably won't last the full term anyway. None of them do out at the far site. The cold gets them, or the work, or—" He paused. "Well. You know how it goes. Accidents happen."
Accidents happen.
Delia's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs, trying to still the tremor, trying to breathe around the pressure building in her chest.
Household service. Noble family. Clean work.
All lies.
She'd known. Some part of her had known from the moment she saw the other workers, their hollow eyes and silent mouths and the way they flinched from the guards' hands. But knowing andknowingwere different things, and now—
Now she understood.
There was no noble household. There was a frontier worksite where the terms could be extended and accidents happened and no one came home. There was her body, which cost too much to feed and would never work fast enough to satisfy.
And there was nothing she could do.
The numbness covered her like a blanket. Delia closed her eyes and let herself float in it, let herself drift away from this body that everyone had told her was wrong, this life that had led her to a wagon on the edge of the world with rope around her wrists and death waiting at the end of the road.
This is what happens,she thought.This is what happens to girls like me. We get sold and used and forgotten and no one—
Lightning split the sky.
Delia's eyes flew open. The flash was blinding—white-hot, close enough that the thunder came nearly simultaneously, a crack so loud it shook the wagon and set the horses screaming.
"Get them down! Get them down!" Harren's voice, high with panic.
The wagon jolted as the horses reared. Delia slammed into the side rail, pain exploding through her shoulder, and then the sick woman was falling against her, and the older man was coughing, and the boy was crying, and the whole world had become noise and chaos and the sharp ozone smell of lightning.
Another flash. Another crash of thunder. The canvas ripped, wind tearing through the gap, rain suddenly pouring in, ice-cold and driving.
Delia heard shouting. The guards were struggling with the horses, their mounts panicking, pulling against their leads. Through the rain-lashed gap in the canvas, she could see two men fighting to control animals that outweighed them, their attention wholly consumed.
And beyond them—
Darkness. Trees. The edge of a forest that seemed to swallow the dying light, its shadows deeper than any darkness she'd ever seen.
The Iron Wilds.
Her heart was pounding. Pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.
Monsters live there,her father had said.They'll tear you apart.
