Ran toward the darkness. Toward the trees. Toward the unknown terrors of the Iron Wilds, because whatever waited in that forest, it couldn't be worse than the certain death behind her.
Monsters,she thought.
And:Maybe I'd rather be eaten than worked to death.
And:Maybe I'm already dead anyway.
The forest swallowed her whole.
Chapter 2
Delia ran.
Branches clawed at her face, her arms, her dress. The fabric caught and tore. She heard it rip, felt the cold bite of rain against newly exposed skin, and kept running. Her lungs burned. Her legs screamed. Every step was agony, her ankle threatening to buckle, her thin, worn shoes slipping on moss and mud and roots that seemed to rise up specifically to catch her feet.
The forest was nothing like the tame woods near her village. Those had been gentle places, sun-dappled and bird-filled, where she'd gathered mushrooms as a girl and dreamed of futures that would never come.
This forest wasold. The trees here were massive, with trunks wider than the wagon she'd escaped, branches that interlocked overhead to form a canopy so thick that even the lightning couldn't fully penetrate. The darkness was absolute between flashes, and Delia found herself running blind, hands outstretched, trusting her body to find a path her eyes couldn't see.
Stupid, she thought.Stupid, stupid, stupid—
Her foot caught a root. She went down hard, hands scraping against bark and stone, the breath driven from her lungs in a single painful whoosh. For a moment she just lay there, face pressed into the wet mulch of the forest floor, tasting dirt and rot and rain.
Get up.
She couldn't.
Get up, Delia.
Her arms were shaking. Everything was shaking. The cold had sunk into her bones, and every part of her body that she'd been taught to hate—her soft stomach, her thick thighs, her hips that had never fit quite right into any chair built for ladies—now dragged at her like stones sewn into her skin.
Cargo, they'd called her.Stock.
Delia's fingers dug into the dirt.
No.
She pushed herself up. Onto her knees first, then her feet. The ankle screamed; she ignored it. Pain was distant now, muffled by something hot and strange that had kindled in her chest when she'd slipped those ropes and hadn't gone out since.
She'd run.
She'd actually run.
The thought was foreign. Impossible. Delia Harrowmere, who had spent her entire life keeping her head down and her voice soft and her body as invisible as a girl her size could manage—she had looked at certain death and chosen uncertaindeath instead. She had ripped through canvas and dropped into mud and fled into a forest full of monsters because the world had finally given her nothing left to lose.
It didn't feel like bravery. It felt like something breaking.
But she'd done it. And that meant she had to keep doing it.
Lightning split the sky. In its blue-white flash, Delia caught a glimpse of what lay ahead. More trees, endless trees, and the dark bulk of rock rising through them like a giant's shoulder. A cliff face, maybe. Or the foot of a mountain.
Shelter.
She stumbled toward it. The rain was lessening now—still steady, but no longer the driving assault it had been—and the thunder had rolled distant, the heart of the storm moving on to terrorize some other stretch of wilderness. She was soaked through anyway. Her dress clung to her body in ways that would have made her cringe in any other circumstance, outlining every curve she'd spent her life trying to hide.
Does it matter now?she thought bitterly.Does any of it matter?
She was going to die out here. She knew that. The stories she'd grown up with—the ones her father had whispered and her mother had shushed—they painted the Iron Wilds in blood and shadow. This was where the orcs lived. The monsters. The creatures who raided border towns and carried off screaming villagers and did things that no one would describe in detail but everyone seemed to know.
