Wild by Sara Fields
Chapter 2
Revna
Every muscle in my body ached.
It hurt to move my arms and my legs. They were so sore from being tied up for so many days in a row, but that seemed marginal compared to the pain in my heart.
Misfortune had always surrounded me like a cloud. Everywhere I went, people looked at me with suspicion and contempt. They saw the color of my eyes and screamed witch. If they knew I was even remotely nearby when tragedy truck, they blamed me for it. They accused me of casting spells and dancing naked for the devil god Odiyen in the middle of the night. It didn’t much matter what was true or not. They believed it and that was all that mattered.
In the small community of Lothinsa, a place that had once been my home, it had been enough to sentence me to death.
I shivered, a hard jolt of agonizing fear and sadness racing down my spine. No matter how much time passed, it was still as painful as the day it happened.
I forced myself to focus on my present situation instead.
With a sigh, I watched the man dismount his horse and double check the straps on his saddle for what seemed like the millionth time. He’d been the one to finally capture me, but it could have been a multitude of other faceless men in his place. I had a great number of enemies and every single one of them would sell me out in a heartbeat. I knew that. It had happened to me many times before, but this was the first time I’d been unable to successfully escape.
The night I’d been captured, I’d left my hut hidden in the trees to hunt for food. My rations were low, and I needed to restock them. I worked hard for what I had, and I didn’t depend on anyone else to take care of me, which meant I had to fill my food stores myself. I lived a solitary life for the most part because that was the only way I knew how to survive.
I knew what I was. I knew what was in my nature.
My captor had called me a witch woman and he’d been right.
The only problem was my powers came and went without my control. They only seemed to explode when I was especially angry or sad, but that wasn’t always true either. I would have sworn that they would have emerged when he’d taken me, but that hadn’t happened this time. My magic had abandoned me that day.
Or better yet, my curse.
The man had hinted at a fire. I’d been the catalyst for that. It had been my fault.
I closed my eyes, not wanting to think about it for even a moment longer. As always though, that wound continued to fester and I feared that it would never heal.
Two people died that day. Only one of them I still grieved.
My mother. May the gods have mercy on her soul.
My father though. He’d deserved it.
I’d run away that night, but I’d heard whispers of the aftermath. I’d been only a child, but the people had blamed their death on me. If I was ever found, I would be bound and burned at the stake for my crimes. I’d lost my home in a fiery disaster that night and because of it I could never return.
Now I had no one but myself and I aimed to keep it that way. I didn’t want to belong to anyone. I’d seen what my father had done to my mother, over and over until it burned into a fiery inferno of my own making that had killed them both.
Nature had other ideas about what was expected of me, however. I was an omega and that carried with it a certain set of instinctual expectations that I would fight against for the rest of my life.
My own genetics dictated that I be subdued by an alpha, that I spread my legs for him and beg for him to knot me and give me his seed so that he could breed me. It was a brutally savage instinct that I refused to give into, so I existed alone, and I liked it that way.
Avoidance was the best course.
The wilds were a dangerous place, but I’d taken to them because they hardly saw the likes of anyone. The forest was so thick in some areas that it was nearly unpassable. There were no well-traveled roads or freshly trampled hiking paths to walk along, even at a leisurely pace. No one ventured here because of the rumors of dangerous beasts that moved around late in the night in the overwhelming darkness.
I didn’t fear those monsters. I’d figured out ways to stay clear of them long ago. Some of them I’d even figured out a way to coexist with and even a few rare monsters I could call my friends.
I wished I could call on them to rescue me from my current predicament.
My captor’s face was hidden behind a wooden mask and his body was cloaked in a long set of blood-red robes that clearly meant something significant. He moved gracefully as if he was a noble of some kind, but other than that, I couldn’t get a read on him. His green eyes appraised me with brutal judgement. With just a single cold look, he could make me feel like nothing and I hated that more than anything else. While not very strong, his scent indicated to me that he was an alpha, and that made me feel terribly uneasy with each passing moment.
Would he try to take me?
I tried to distract him at first, but when I asked him questions, he refused to answer me. Eventually I gave up altogether and just focused on my surroundings so that I could make my way back once I figured out a way to escape. I never stopped searching for that moment, but he never gave me a single reprieve from the harshness of his ropes. It was as if he knew what I was thinking. His eyes were always on me, watching and searching for the slightest hint that I was going to try to run.
By the time several days had passed, I was tired, sore, and hungry. From time to time, he would feed me pieces of stale bread and dry chewy jerky, but never enough for a full meal. He was keeping me weak, and it was working.
I sighed and closed my eyes, trying not to let the constant jostling of being tied to the back of a horse get to me more than it already was. We’d crossed mountains, rivers, rocky outcroppings, and thankfully now a flat grassy plain, but my body was sore enough to feel as though I’d been trampled by beasts far bigger than a horse.
Despite my initial discomfort, I was able to rest on the back of that horse. I thought of it like a cradle, imagining being rocked to sleep, and sometimes it worked. It helped me to preserve my energy as much as I could. My stomach growled angrily, and I wondered how many pounds I’d lost in the past several days.
There was something different about his movements today though. His green eyes were focused on something far off in the distance and I turned my head to see it. There was a city rising up from the flat plains. I’d never been beyond the Crescent Mountains, so I hadn’t even known of its existence before today. It was placed in the center of the grasslands, giving clear sightlines all around the city, which put it in a strong defensive position.
Pristine white walls rose up at least ten stories high. They were so tall that I couldn’t see inside, but as we approached the gates from the west, the massive stone doors slid open just enough to let us through.
They’d been expecting us.
I didn’t like that. Not one bit.
* * *
The robed man and I rode deep into the center, passing through three more walls that were built just as tall as the first. Each one was nearly eight feet thick and extraordinarily strong. It was unnerving to travel through each one and my hopes of escape soon began to dwindle the further along we went.
That wasn’t the only thing though.
As soon as we entered into the first section of the city, people began to gather on the sides of the dirt road, watching the two of us pass by with angry looks on their faces. Strangely, they weren’t directed at the man who held me prisoner. Those furious glares were locked solely on me and I didn’t know why. Some of them shouted insults my way, others jeered, and once word spread of my presence, people began to throw things at me. A rotten tomato splattered against the back of my leg. Soon enough, I didn’t know what hit my body, but it didn’t take long for it to start to hurt.
I felt like I was being led to my death. I tried to keep my face hidden. I didn’t want them to see my eyes. Things always got worse for me when people saw them.
Shortly thereafter, men on horseback began to follow us and it soon became clear that they were there to escort us deeper into the city. They were armed with bows and arrows, several with longswords and many more with curved blades. The thick leather armor that surrounded their bodies was beautifully crafted and probably very expensive. As we passed through each inner wall, more men gathered around us and the people on the edges of the street soon began to draw back. The further we traveled, the less angry the faces became, and when we passed the final ring they changed into something else entirely. Here, they looked at me in wonder and reverence. The people also appeared to be much richer and more elegantly dressed in satins and silks, rather than the dirty faces of the poorest inside the outer ring.
The people inside the center were valuable and I wanted to know why.
We rode straight to the very center of the city to a building that rose several stories into the sky. It was formed out of the same stone that built the walls: thick, strong, and pristinely white. At its entrance were two large heavy wooden doors that were at least thirty feet tall. I turned my head as much as I could to study the intricate carvings that covered them because they were quite beautiful.
Someone had painstakingly carved the images of the gods into the surface of the wood.
I could see the renditions of each one in various positions. Animus, the god of death, standing at the head of a long boat. Zymos, the god of war, ready to charge into battle. Edia, the goddess of tranquility, staring down into the ripples that cascaded over the surface of a lake. Oslin, the god of the fates, holding a balance, and even Ragnarök, the god who ruled them all, looking down on every one of the lesser gods as if they were beneath him.
The doors slid open, and a group of men walked forward, dressed in simple white robes with their palms pressed together as if they were praying. I watched them carefully and they didn’t even look at me as I lay there slung over the back of a horse. It appeared as though they were priests of some kind, but I couldn’t be sure.
What the fuck had this bastard dragged me into?
“It’s good to see you, Recruiter. As always, the Temple of the Gods welcomes the Cult of the Blood Moon here,” a silky voice murmured. It came from somewhere in the middle of the white-robed men. I looked back at my kidnapper, realizing that they were referring to him, and I got the sudden sinking feeling that this man was more dangerous than I’d given him credit for so far.
“I feel the same,” my captor answered. “I’ve brought you something quite special this time, but she’s going to cost you a fair bit more than all the others.”
I wanted to drive my knife deep into his eyeball right after I kicked him square in the balls.
“Have you now?” the man answered with interest, and one of the priests stepped forward. He glanced in my direction and I decided that I loathed him even more than I hated this man they called the Recruiter.
My abductor swung down from the horse and reached for me, untying the stays that held me fully immobile to the back of his horse.
As if I weighed no more than a bag of feathers, he lifted me off the horse and placed me upright on my feet. With my ankles and wrists still lashed together, I couldn’t run, but that didn’t much matter now that I was inside the most formidable fortress of a city that I’d ever seen in my life. I was going to be taken wherever they wanted. All I could hope for was that they weren’t going to kill me.
I stared back at the priest now, fully taking in the hard lines of his face. He was older and his brows showed the lines of time. He was either in his late fifties or early sixties and the skin of his neck appeared to have been melted in a fire long ago. Merciless dark brown eyes searched mine and his thin pink lips turned up in a smirk that told me he was interested in far more than I was willing to give.
“Her eyes…” he began.
“That’s right. Reminds you of someone, doesn’t it,” my masked prison keeper replied, and I stilled.
“By the gods, Edia is said to have eyes the color of amethyst,” the priest breathed with an excited sense of disbelief. I swallowed my anxiety as much as I could, afraid of what that revelation might mean for someone like me.
“That she does,” my captor answered, and his voice trailed off in a way that implied that he was thinking of a great many other things. I felt so uneasy and out of my element. Every instinct inside of me was telling me to run.
The wind shifted and my hair whipped around my face. The priest stilled and his grin grew even wider. My blood ran cold. I really didn’t like the way he was looking at me now like I was a piece of meat on a plate.
“She’s an omega as well,” the priest gasped with open excitement now.
“She is unmarked and unmated, a virgin omega with the eyes of a goddess,” the Recruiter corrected, and the priest chuckled with glee.
“The city of Rosethorne will take her,” the priest answered cheerfully.
“She comes with a very high price,” the Recruiter countered.
“And we will pay it, whatever it is. It is fate that brings you to my doors today, Recruiter, and it will be the goddess that protects the people of this city with a gift such as this,” the priest answered in a way that said everything and nothing at all.
“Why don’t we sit down over a tankard of your delicious raspberry wine and talk about what an omega like this will cost you?” the Recruiter replied.
The priest grinned.
“I’ll have the servants bring us a fresh cask,” he added.
“I look forward to it,” my kidnapper replied, and a flurry of activity rushed from inside the temple doors. The rest of the priests surrounded me, lifting me cleanly off the ground and carrying me inside. They ignored the fact that I was covered in rotten food and gods know what else.
Someone was kind enough to wrap a blanket around me, but I wasn’t sure who.
They rushed me off into the temple while the Recruiter and the priest ventured off somewhere else.
I searched for a way out as they carried me into the unknown, but I found none.
