Swallowing a last, savory bite, she decided to let him have the truth of it. If she could have just this night to be free and for him to put her back in the collar tomorrow to earn the price she was worth, then she would have this night of freedom with the only thing she had ever truly owned: her name. “Dnara. My name is Dnara.”
The trees rustled overhead as Athan smiled in response. His eyes said what she had not; lifelong slaves carry no last name, but he would not make an issue of it. Standing, he made a show of bowing in a noble way that belied how he had probably never known a day of great wealth or bloodborne luxury. “An honor and a pleasure to meet you, Lady Dnara of the Thorngrove. Now, how about some winterberries?”
Wiping her chin, she could not remember the last time she had smiled. But here, in this strange dream of flute song and friendly company, a smile did appear. If she was still face down in the mud and dreaming, or even dead and this be the gods’ final trick, so be it. Tonight, she would eat her fill of sweet meat and winterberries, she would let Athan have her name, and with the wind in her hair, she would smile.
3
With the sunrise came the truth. It had not been a dream. She had not died in the mud. Her keeper’s collar no longer ringed her neck, and thin white scars covered her arms.
Dipping her arms into the water from the river’s edge, she washed away what remained of the dirt and thistle-drawn blood. Against her olive skin, the scars stood out with an ethereal quality not matching the thick, raised scars on her back. Her keeper had not a gentle hand when it came to the whip. In contrast, the scars on her arms appeared as if delicately carved in a single, masterful stroke that would’ve taken an artisan a lifetime to complete.
Withdrawing them from the water, she watched as beads dripped back down into the placid rock pool at her feet, set apart from the wide, meandering river beyond. She had done what she could to wash her clothes, but without a tailor’s kit, they were beyond repair to even her practiced mending hands. She scratched at her scalp and pulled out yet another briar, along with several long black hairs. If there was one thing she missed about the mages’ tower, it was the bathhouse.
Using a stick, she tried to comb the tangles from her hair before giving up. Pulling her hair away from her neck, she twisted it up into a bun and secured it with the stick. Somewhere along the way, between almost being incinerated and being knocked into the mud, she’d lost the broken silver ladle handle she’d been using as a hairpin for years. She’d liked its rose pattern, and had felt proud of saving it from the garbage heap.
Casting her gaze northeast along the river bank to the thicket from where she’d come, she supposed she could go looking for it. It was not as if she had anywhere else to go. A foolish thought, to go back the way she’d come, but going forward felt no less uncertain.
“Ready?” Athan’s voice called out before his light footsteps could be heard approaching on the soft grass.
Dnara startled from her thoughts and stood to look at him. As last night, she attempted to offer a smile in return for the kindness he had shown and the meal he had shared. Unaccustomed to it, the corners of her mouth twitched uncomfortably with the effort. The unpracticed smile fell from her lips as she spotted the familiar metal ring in his hand.
She took a step back into the water and he stopped in his approach. Following where her wide, frightened eyes lingered, he held up the collar and offered it out to her. “I thought to chuck it in the fire with the remains of the briarbear, or perhaps to bury it, but then thought that decision is not mine to make. So, what would you have us do with it?”
Her heart calmed as the water lapped at her heels. He did not mean to put it back around her neck and sell her. Stepping from the water, she took it from his fingers, but she had no more an idea what to do with it than him.
“We could sell it,” he suggested as she lingered at the water’s edge, staring down at the metal collar in her thin fingers. “Might raise some questions about how we obtained it, though. And then there’s the fact that it’d just end up around some other poor sod’s neck. Uh, not that you’re a poor sod, or...” He cleared his throat and looked past her to the river. “The spell crystal’s cracked, anyhow, so we’d be selling it for scrap value, not a starstone tithe.”
Dnara stared at the band, the low shimmering hum she’d grown used to over the years now silent. She didn’t know what it might be worth in scrap, nor did she care. To her, its only worth lay in the memories it carried, memories she would sooner forget. Turning to the river, she flung the collar into air and watched in giddy delight as the river swallowed it whole with a gulping plunk.
Behind her, Athan let out a laugh. “Well, that’s that, then.”
She laughed with him. It felt strange, to laugh. Her own laughter sounded foreign, like the way some men sounded when they came to the tower
