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Freya

It was so dark outside, but I had to run beneath it in spite of this. Gasher Crane and his son Boris, with his fat neck were in hot pursuit, their cries slurred by cruelty and cheap whiskey.

“Come back here and have your beating like a good girl, you ungrateful wretch! Feyra!”

The cold mud of the fields was under my bare feet as I put distance between us. An hour of running had left my lungs on fire; sweat and the autumn chill had made my cotton dress cling to me. The hem was in tatters and I was without the cracked shoes they had made me put up with for three winters. Wild bramble had put blood on my shins but I hardly noticed. There was a terror in my gut, primal and raw, and an urge to put as much ground as I could between myself and the farms.

They meant to sell me.

I tripped over a root and let out a bitter little laugh at the thought of it. Sell me as one would a heifer or a bag of grain. All because the Baron Eder, that old ruin of a man with his greasy wrinkles who couldn’t be bothered to turn into so much as a mouse, had set his eyes on me in the market a month past and wanted a bride of a certain age. And Gasher, the greedy swine, saw an opportunity to put some coin in his pocket.

A thousand of them.

Mertle had told me as much this afternoon when she put the iron skillet to my face. “Wash up real nice and put a smile on, you stupid girl,” she’d bellowed, “the Baron and his lot will be here at first light to make the collection.” The papers were signed. Gasher had already put away a fifty coin deposit and a bottle of brandy.

So I put my back to it and ran. And if they caught me I knew there would be no quarter shown. They would put chains on me like a hound and haul me back to the house where I have been in service since I was six.

Cresting a hill I took in a great breath of air, the wind raking through my hair, long and dark and lousey from Mertle’s refusal to let me have clean water. Off in the distance was the smudge of the Whispering Woods against the horizon. Forbidden, everyone would tell you. Old and deep, with bandits and outlaws and things not entirely human making their home in there.

What was there to lose?

To the left was the main road and the chance of running into the Baron’s men. To the right the farmlands of the next town over, where all of Gasher’s “ward” was known to them and they would do their honourable duty and see me returned. The woods were the only option. The Cranes were too superstitious to venture in after dark and risk their souls.

As for monsters with fangs and claws I didn’t give them the time of day. I had my whole life to know the likes of Gasher and Mertle and Boris. Those were the ones to be afraid of.

“I see her! Making for the damn woods! You fool, it is a dead end!”

Another shout from behind, nearer now. I did not deign to see who it was, just drove on, my body in revolt. I was wiry with endurance from years of hard work and not enough to eat, no muscle to speak of, but my spirit was not to be broken. I would not be sold. There has to be more to a girl than what they made of me.