Yes! By the gods, that’s how you deal with them!
Through a patch in the trees she glared up at the brown pall that cloaked the east. Stellar jays screeched in the trees. The morning smelled of dry grass and dust.
On top of everything else she was an escaped slave with Dreams of something better. She could make no claim on family, kin, clan, or tribe. Her only defense lay in her ability with weapons and in the cold aloofness she maintained with her comrades.
So why had she confessed so much to Wrapped Wrist?
She shook her head, deluged with self-disgust as she stormed down the trail. Around her, muted light gave the ponderosa and lodgepole pine a ruddy tone as it filtered through the smoke-hazy eastern sky. Through patches in the trees she could see the distant plume. With each passing day the pall grew larger as it was carried off to the east.
If the sky was a bowl—as some people maintained—eventually it should fill up. But for days now, the smoke had just vanished over the eastern horizon. That being the case, just how big was the world? Not even Nightshade had seen the eastern edge of it, and she had lived out there for years.
A memory of Wrapped Wrist smiling, eyes sparkling as he talked to his kinswomen, lingered down in her souls. Was that it? She’d seen him so at ease, watched the warmth as he talked to Yellow Petal, Soft Cloth, and Fir Brush. They had genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. It had touched some part of her souls she had long thought cold and dead. The very notion of a man at ease with women had confused her.
Enjoyed? In her experience, no woman had ever enjoyed a man’s company. If he wasn’t ordering her around, working her until her fingers bled, or trying to ram his rod into her, he was asleep.
Wrapped Wrist had thought his relationship so normal; that had confused her even more. “They’re clan kin. Surely you grew up with the same.” He might have been saying, “The sky is blue.”
It’s not blue, you fool.
If only it had been. She thought back, way back. She’d accepted the beatings and humiliation that came with being a slave. She’d never known any different. As a girl she had come to admire Wraps His Tail, the Matron’s son. For a brief instant when a hard warm body slid into her bed that first night, she’d thought it was he. Only to discover it was his brother who clamped a hand over her mouth, groped her breasts, and jacked her legs apart with his knee.
She’d started to cry out when his hard shaft began prodding at her, but a hand had closed like a rawhide clamp over her throat. He hadn’t even forced himself inside when he stiffed and groaned, his seed trickling hot across her skin.
Cursing under his breath, he’d slumped. For long moments she’d lain in fear, taking shallow breaths, feeling his semen soak into the blanket beneath her buttocks.
“Put your hands on me,” he’d finally growled into her ear. “If you don’t, by the Blue God, come morning, they’ll never find your body.”
Somehow she’d managed to overcome his ineptitude, contributing to her own rape that night.
So she’d run away—right into worse trouble.
Leather Hand had been nothing compared to Snake Head. She remembered his face, triangular to the point that his cheekbones seemed to stick out of the side of his head. That first night the firelight had glowed red on one side of his face; he was grinning down at her as he twirled a greased stick painfully inside her. The worthless weasel had been absolutely gleeful as she chewed on her wrist to keep from screaming. And all the while, his guards had remained oblivious just beyond his door.
She looked down in the morning light and could still see the faint scars marring her skin. Generate enough pain, burn with a hot-enough anger, and she could endure anything—even Snake Head. Even the memories, and the bits of her souls he had ripped out of her.
“I saved myself!” She knotted a fist, feeling familiar anger come bubbling up from inside. Anger had been her ally. It had nerved her when Whistle grabbed her in the willows. He’d seen it burning behind her eyes, felt it in the stiletto tip she’d pressed into his throat. The knowledge was in his eyes every time he looked at her: I made him fear!
So why should she think Wrapped Wrist was any different? Perhaps he did treat his kin well, but they were off-limits, family, and thus safe. But let him have a vulnerable woman in his control, and yes, the beast would come out.
She was thinking of Wrapped Wrist, her souls seeing that sparkle of good humor in his eyes, when the trail entered a thick patch of serviceberry. Her thoughts were on his smile, on his unassuming manner, so different from the men she had known.
Gods, yes, he watched her body with the same desire other men did, but not with that covetous need to possess. No, he watched her with something akin to worship. When had a man ever looked at her that way?