Chapter 26 Fate Foretold
FATE FORETOLD
The door was kicked in with a crash, and our bedroom filled with the sour stink of unwashed men and ale.
Anca screamed from her small bed—a bright, urgent sound that cut through the night—and I lunged off the bed for her, but a rough hand caught my hair and wrenched me back; one man held a torch, and raw light illuminated the face of the man that had grabbed me: Ivar, the boyar's enforcer, leering with the contempt of a devil that delighted in breaking things.
Dani's fist landed on one man's nose with a sickening crack, then blows rained in from everywhere—four of them besides Ivar, armed and merciless.
I watched, helpless as I screamed for Dani, for Anca.
Then, as if in slow motion, a wooden club came down on my skull, sharp and brutal, as my world tore itself into blackness.
Anca's cry thinned and the distance opened between us until it was only a brittle thread in the dark. As I slipped in and out of consciousness, the hot, acrid smell of smoke threaded in, and with it the hollowing knowledge that something had been stripped from me I could not yet name.
I woke later to a new smell—the rot of wet leaves and turned earth—my cheek pressed into the forest floor.
For a moment I did not remember where I was.
Only the cold seeping through my gown, the weight of my own body, the taste of mud thick on my tongue.
I groaned and spat, trying to clear my mouth.
When I shifted, pain flared through my body, stitching memory back into place.
I forced myself to breathe, to listen. The forest was not quiet.
At first it was only a murmur threaded through the trees—low voices, indistinct.
Then a burst of drunken laughter, too close to be imagined.
It echoed wrong in the open air, careless and ugly.
My pulse stumbled. There—another sound. The deliberate crush of leaves.
The slow, uneven rhythm of boots pressing into damp earth. Not moving away. Coming nearer.
I kept my eyes half-closed, my body slack against the ground, as the footsteps drew closer and closer—until the sound of them seemed to fall in time with my own terrified heartbeat.
With a swift kick to the soft skin at my side, all my breath spilled out in a crumpled grunt.
I curled into a ball, batting away hands that groped for me, but another grabbed my tangled hair and yanked me upright, the world lurching as my head throbbed and my gut clenched.
“Why are you doing this?” I screamed. The hand that had hauled me upright struck my face with a ringing crack.
Light burst behind my eyes. I tasted copper and salt almost at once.
I turned back toward him anyway and spat blood into the dirt between us.
“Why?” I begged again, though the word came out broken now, more breath than voice.
No one answered. I forced my feet apart, willing my legs to hold. The ground tilted treacherously beneath me, the trees bending and swaying as though the forest itself had grown unsteady. My knees buckled. For one suspended second I thought I would be allowed to fall.
I was not. A fist caught in my hair and yanked me upright again.
The pain sharpened everything—the cold air, the smoke from the fire, the sound of boots grinding into soil as another man stepped closer.
Then another. My vision pulsed—darkness closing in, then receding in ragged flashes.
In those fractured glimpses, I saw four of the men had formed a loose ring around me.
One man rose from the fire as if roused by nuisance, each slow step heavy with contempt.
The world narrowed; I felt, with a hollow chill, that whatever they intended would not begin until he chose to start it.
My vision steadied just long enough for recognition to strike.
It was Ivar. His steely eyes were locked on me, cold and incurious.
He didn't see a woman standing there—he assessed me the way a farmer might look over a heifer at market, a thing to be used, bartered, consumed.
“The gypsy whore spread her legs for the boyar's son and then wed his best friend.” A man with a wine-colored birthmark on his cheek said with a laugh.
“Surely she'll let us have a go.” He stepped past Ivar and backed me to the tree, his breath foul and close.
I tried to flee; their laughter rose and a blow to my jaw split the night into brief, bright pieces.
They held me up against the tree while one of them tore at my nightgown.
I floated between fits of black and the feel of hands—each return to sense a small, humiliating shock: the weight of a man, the sting at my lip, the stinking breath across my face.
Each time I tried to move, another blow sent me further away.
One by one they came and the night swallowed them.
I remember only fragments: the animal shuffle of bodies, the bark of cruel laughter, and the silhouette of Ivar by the fire, a loathsome, indifferent shape, tugging and pulling at his cock as he watched his men have their way with me, waiting his turn.
I felt myself slip loose from my own body, as though I could rise above it and watch from some merciful distance—this broken woman covered in mud someone else entirely.
Then a small, obscene sound from Ivar cut through the haze and snapped the fragile thread of oblivion.
I was dragged back into myself all at once.
Nausea surged hot in my throat. Shame followed close behind, thick and suffocating.
The forest rang with the coarse laughter of men who found sport in cruelty, their voices cracking through the trees like splitting wood.
And beneath it—clearer than any of them—my child's cries.
Cries like a bell only I could hear, sharp and insistent, tolling through the darkness, calling me back to the body I could not abandon.
Another blow to the side of my head split the world again.
Hands seized me—two of them this time—hauling, dragging.
My heels tore furrows through damp earth as they pulled me through the trees.
What remained of my gown caught on briars and splintered branches, fabric ripping in small, helpless protests I felt but could not stop.
Each jolt sent a crushing throb behind my eyes, pain radiating outward until thought itself became difficult.
Through the roar in my ears, another sound began to rise—thin at first, almost imagined. Then louder, steady and relentless. Water. Not a stream, but something bigger—the river.
They released my arms without warning. I crumpled forward, then forced myself up onto unsteady feet, swaying. Behind me, from somewhere in the dark, Ivar's voice drifted out—low, controlled, faintly bored.
“Turn her around.”
A jerk on my shoulder turned me to face him. Then pain—searing, absolute. I looked down at the knife buried in my belly, Ivar's hand steady on the hilt. When I looked up, he was smiling—slow, cruel, his eyes colder than the steel he held. The blade withdrew with a wet, sucking sound.
His push sent me reeling, my footing vanished, the earth fell away, and darkness rushed up to claim me.