Too much and not enough. Always both. Alwayswrong.
The anger felt foreign in her body, like a limb she'd forgotten she had. For years—her whole life—she'd swallowed it. Turned it inward. Let it become shame instead, because shame was easier, shame was what good girls felt when they were wrong.
And she was wrong. She knew that. She was wrong in all the ways that mattered.
But tonight she'd run anyway.
The shivering was making it hard to think. Delia pressed her face harder into her knees, trying to conserve warmth, trying to breathe slowly despite the chattering of her teeth.
Dawn, she told herself.Just survive until dawn.
And then what?
She couldn't imagine. Dawn would bring the guards and their tracking dogs, or dawn would bring orcs who would smell her human blood and—
Stop.
She couldn't think about that. If she thought about everything that could go wrong, she would fly apart into pieces too small to ever reassemble.
One hour, she told herself.Survive one hour. Then survive the next one. Then the next.
It wasn't hope. It was something smaller. A stubbornness she hadn't known she possessed, born in the moment she'd slipped those ropes and decided that death on her own terms was betterthan death on theirs.
The forest creaked around her. Wind through branches. The settling of old wood. Sounds that could be anything, could be nothing, could be the monsters the stories had warned her about, moving silent through the darkness.
Delia closed her eyes.
She didn't sleep. Couldn't sleep. But she drifted, exhaustion pulling her down toward something that wasn't quite unconsciousness, just a gray space where the fear couldn't reach her.
In that gray space, she thought about warmth. Real warmth. Not the desperate shivering heat of a body fighting hypothermia, but the kind of warmth she'd dreamed about as a girl. A hearth. A blanket. Arms around her, holding her close, someone's breath against her hair and a voice sayingyou're safe, you're safe now, I have you.
No one had ever held her like that.
I would have liked it, she thought, from very far away.Just once. I would have liked to know what it felt like to be wanted.
The thought dissolved into static. Into cold.
Delia curled smaller in her hollow and waited for morning, or for monsters, or for whatever would find her first.
Chapter 3
The storm had passed, but the mountains still bled rain.
Ralvar moved through the forest silently despite his size. Water dripped from the leather guards at his shoulders, rolled down the scarred planes of his chest, collected in the grooves of the war-marks inked into his skin. He didn't feel the cold. Hadn't felt it for years. The Mountain Clan bred warriors for this—for the high passes where lesser fighters froze, for the long nights when enemies thought themselves safe.
His patrol had found raiders three hours ago. Six of them, human, stupid enough to think the storm would cover their crossing into orc territory. They'd been wrong.
Blood still darkened Ralvar's knuckles. Not his own.
He should turn back. He was three days south from the outpost already, and his second would expect a report. But something was wrong tonight.
A prickle at the back of his neck. The kind of instinct that couldn't be explained and shouldn't be ignored. It had pushed him past his usual patrol route, toward Stonehall Pass, where thehuman debt caravans sometimes crawled through like wounded animals.
Debt caravans.
Ralvar's jaw tightened.
He'd seen them before. The wagons heavy with people who'd been sold by their own families, their own laws, to work until their bodies gave out. The practice disgusted every orc who knew of it. Orcs fought their enemies. Killed them, sometimes. But they didn'townthem. Didn't reduce them to numbers on a contract.
