“Believe me,” I mutter. “I’m just as stupefied as you are.”
Everything about her is dull, from the film in her eyes that suggests she’s hardly had a single night’s rest in maybe a decade, to the grey sheen of her skin. Even her red hair is streaked with a cloudy shade of white that mutes the color from what I’m sure was once a vibrant shade.
She looks as if she’s been living on the road for some time, the layers of grime caked into her pores hardly even fazed by the rainfall from earlier, let alone the tears streaking her cheeks.
“Now let’s take a look at—"
As I reach for her trapped foot, the stillness in the air makes my spine stiffen.
I take another look into the woman’s eyes, replaying her voice and the words she said to me in my head until I realize it wasn’t relief or gratitude in her tone, but sorrow and guilt.
She wasn’t helpless.
She was baiting me.
At the same time I grasp the imminent danger I’ve put myself in and reach for Sable, I hear my crossbow clatter across the cobblestone street as the woman shoves it away.
I whirl on her, but not a second later, something cool closes around my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, and I can’t tell if I believe the sincerity I find in her parched voice or not. “I had to do it. I was given no other choice.”
Frantic, I paw at the metal cuff clamped around my wrist.
As the woman stands, her foot free and without injury, I realize it wasn’t my trap she’d been clutching onto and acting like it had caught her. It was this. This heavy iron band that’s now clasped around my arm and chaining me in place to where it’s bolted to an impossibly large and heavy lump of cement.
Mouth agape and tongue like charcoal against the back of my throat, I can’t do anything but stand there and gawk and struggle as she disappears down some dark alleyway, her head low.
If I don’t find a way out of this, I’ll be lucky to die of starvation before any monsters find me.
Sable’s black shadowood glistens out of the corner of my eye like a night sky dazzling with a thousand stars. I throw myself at her. My free arm outstretched, I strain to reach her smooth frame, to wrap my fingers around the dark wood that had belonged to my mother, to defend myself in this very spot with the same weapon that should’ve defended her in our home all those years ago.
But the crossbow is too far out of reach, my shackle bound too tight.
I twist my arm, the metal grinding atop my flesh while my hand squeezes into the iron cuff.
My palm is too fleshy though, and no matter how much I crane myself, I can’t seem to slip free.
“Stupid.” At first, I curse under my breath, but what’s the point in whispering anymore? “So fucking stupid!”
I knew better than to fall for this. If there’s one truth I’ve always understood, even as a small child, long before Hulbeck fell, it’s that far more people are undeserving of trust than those who are. If it were anyone else but me in this predicament, I’d say that they deserved the death coming their way. But I’ve fought so hard for so long. I’ve earned a better, more honorable death, than being chained in one place until starvation or a diseased throng of cannibals claims me.
Panicking isn’t going to help me much. As far as I can tell, I have two options: do nothing and die, or think about what I know and try to find a way out of this mess. Dying sounds pretty unappealing, so I focus on the facts. The woman clearly wanted to bait me out into the open, but I don’t know why. What was her goal? It’s not uncommon for people who live on the road to rob, rape, or cannibalize humans they come across—sometimes all three—but the woman I encountered had done none of those things. She left Sable. She left my belt of supplies. She didn’t so much as even glance back at me or my belongings as she walked away.
I had to do it. I was given no other choice.
At the time she said it, I just assumed she meant she was doing it for survival, but it’s becoming increasingly more obvious that assumption was wrong.
I was given no other choice.
Someone forced her to do this, to trap me here. But who?
Nothing about the circumstances make it seem like an accidental trap set by cannibals. It was too staged, her placement too perfectly aligned with the path I had to take to get to the well where Elison had last been seen. But the only person who knew I was coming here was Rowland, and no matter how much we bickered, he would never have reason to capture me—okay,reason, perhaps. But he’d never act on it. Of that, I am sure. As much as he’s begged me to join him in his community, he has always wanted me to make that choice of my own free will, I think because he knows it’s the only way I’d ever stay.
If it wasn’t him who set this trap, and it wasn’t some crazed lunatic…
It could be whoever took Elison. If they knew she belonged to a larger community and thought that someone might come looking for her, they might try snagging the next person who comes.
Which means it’s only a matter of time before they return for me.
