With that thought, it felt as though the gods held a quill over my head. The tip swelled with ink until one black droplet fell directly onto my crown, and a feeling I’d never experienced before spread over me. My heart began thumping, the blood rushed in my ears, and I clenched my jaw so tight I could have broken my own teeth.
What was this feeling?
A single word came.
Rage. It was rage.
Once I had the word for it, I knew the feeling like I’d experienced it my whole life. It was tearing, gnashing, shredding, murderous. My fingers clenched, and my body’s shivering became shaking.
I wanted to end someone. I wanted to destroyhim—them—all of them who’d killed my family.
It was just to find the right time.
As I shivered, I became aware that my body was weighed down by the tarp, laden with rain. That was why my limbs felt heavy. I turned my wrists side to side and found them unbound; same with my feet. All it would take to escape was to lift this tarp and roll out the back of the wagon.
“I wouldn’t try that.” His voice cut low, less accommodating than before, crystalline in my ears even through the pelting rain. “You’ll be dead the second your feet touch earth.”
I stared into the semidarkness, shock flaring through me. The horse’s hooves clopped on. Steady. The wagon rolled. Steady. The rage thundered in me like it belonged to itself.
How had he known?—
“Best save your energy,” he said.
“For what?” I said in my hoarse rasp.
“For Feyreign, rabbit.” He paused, and the rain seemed to pound harder. “Soon enough you’ll get your chance to run.”
I didn’t tryto escape. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to lift my arms or legs; with so much water, the tarp must have weighed more than me.
I felt wild, like an animal.
In my life I’d only ever seen wild animals from atop the walls. All our meat came from farms in the inner districts—pork and chicken and veal, though all were so heavily rationed to the outer districts that I barely knew their taste.
We had words for the animals we saw beyond the walls. As a girl I had learned them: bears and wolves and rabbits.
Rabbit. That was what my captor had called me.
The rain poured and I saw a rabbit in my mind’s eye. Small, earth-colored, long, weedy ears. They ran at any sound, even the far-off changing of the guard on the walls.
Rabbits were quick. Rabbits were prey.
The world around me gradually darkened over the next hours. Nighttime had fallen. The rain tapered, and the wagon veered at a thoughtful angle. Soon we came to a stop, and my body thrummed with the memory of the past eight or ten or twelve hours. I didn’t know how long we’d been traveling. I didn’t know how long I’d slept before I’d woken.
The wagon creaked and boots hit the ground. They passed over grass, and then the tarp was thrown off the bed. Water sloshed onto the ground. Cold air rushed over my face and a tree-fringed, moody night sky offered itself to my eyes. The clouds were low and fat, but the fingernail moon still made itself faintly visible.
The wagon’s boards jerked beneath me, and dizzy anger spiked as he climbed into the bed and stood over me, his hair a shroud over a shadowed face.
I stared up at him. I wouldn’t be the first to speak.
“Can you walk?” he said.
I gave a single, careful nod.
“We’ll see.” He lifted a blanket I didn’t know lay atop me and flung it off my body. Cold swept in like a greedy scavenger, seeking out every warm part of me. “Get up.”
I felt almost fearful to try. I pressed my palms flat on the wagon’s bed, and first lifted my head. The dizziness struck me, then pain, and I wavered there as the treetops veered sickeningly to the left. Acid rose to my mouth.
No, no?—
