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 was old. 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 uncertain death 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.
They'll tear you apart, her father had said.
They take women, old Genna from the market had whispered once, leaning close over her basket of turnips. Take them and keep them and when they're done with them, there's nothing left to send home.
Delia had been twelve. She'd walked home from the market feeling like her skin didn't fit right, like she'd learned something she was too young to understand but couldn't unknow.
Now she was twenty-three, and she was in their forest, and every shadow between the trees looked like it had teeth.
She found the cliff face more by feel than sight.
The rock was slick with rain, cold as death, but solid in a way that nothing else had been for days.
Her hands spread across it, searching, and somewhere in the darkness she found what she was looking for—a hollow beneath an overhang.
Not quite a cave. Just a depression where the stone curved inward, deep enough to block the wind and wide enough to fit even her body.
She crawled into the hollow. The ground was damp but not puddled, carpeted with dead leaves that had blown in and dried over seasons. She curled into the space, pulling her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around herself in a parody of embrace.
Her teeth were chattering.
Cold, she thought. So cold.
But she was out of the rain. And she couldn't hear the guards anymore. Couldn't hear anything but the drip of water off leaves, the distant murmur of the storm retreating, and the pounding of her own heart.
She'd done it. She'd actually done it.
For now, a voice whispered. It sounded like her mother. You've survived for now. But dawn will come. The guards will search. And even if they don't find you—
She pressed her face into her knees.
Even if they don't find you, something else will.
The forest was quiet around her. Too quiet, maybe. The kind of quiet that meant predators had passed through recently enough to send everything else into hiding. Delia found herself straining her ears, searching for sounds she didn’t want to hear.
Footsteps. Breathing. The crack of a branch under something heavy.
Orcs hunt at night, her father had said. They can see in the dark, they can smell human blood from miles away.
Was any of it even true? She didn't know anything about orcs except the stories, and the stories were designed to terrify. That was the point. That was what kept Valdaran children in their beds at night, kept Valdaran villagers away from the border, kept Valdaran citizens obedient and afraid.
But what if the stories are true?
Delia shivered.
She thought about the guards. About Harren's weak chin and the younger one's mean eyes and the casual way they'd discussed her death. She'll owe double from the food she costs them. Accidents happen.
She thought about the other workers in the wagon. The woman’s hollow cheeks. The boy's too-large eyes. The old man's cough that had sounded more like drowning.
That was going to be me, she thought. Thin and silent and dying on a road to nowhere.
She'd run from that. Run toward this—a hole in a cliff face in monster territory with nothing but wet clothes and raw wrists and an ankle that was swelling inside her shoe.
Better, she thought fiercely. This is better.
The cold was getting worse. Her dress had stopped dripping, but the fabric was saturated, clinging to her skin like a second layer of ice. She couldn't stop shaking. Her body was trying desperately to generate heat it didn't have, burning through reserves she couldn't spare.
At least it's good for something, she thought. All this flesh might keep me alive another hour.
The bitterness of the thought surprised her. She'd spent so long hating her body quietly, politely, in the way she'd been taught—accepting the snide comments and the pitying looks and the way men's eyes slid past her like she was furniture. She'd never been angry about it. Just... resigned.
Now, huddled in a hole in the ground with her life measured in hours at best, something sharp and hot was uncurling in her chest.
They told me I was too much, she thought. They told me I took up too much space. And then they sold me to a worksite where I would die because I wasn't enough—not fast enough, not efficient enough, not WORTH enough to them—
Her nails dug into her arms.
Too much and not enough. Always both. Always wrong.
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 better than 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 saying you'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.