(Isla)
He came for me when the sky was still dark.
A knock at the door, two short ones, and then his voice saying it was time. I'd been awake already. I hadn't slept much. The bed in the room they'd put me in was a real bed, not the floor, not the blanket in the corner, a real bed with a frame and a proper mattress and a pillow and I'd lain in it for hours in the dark trying to understand what it meant that nobody was coming to chain me.
I kept waiting for the sound of Torvin's boots.
They never came.
I got up when he knocked and opened the door and he looked at me the way he'd been looking at me since the shack, that direct and unreadable thing, and said the horses were ready. I followed him through the pack house corridors and out through the front door into the cold dark morning an
