Disclaimer: I own nothing of Tamora Pierces work.
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Chapter 1: Beginnings
They kept coming. The tears, the grief, the anger, they all came spilling out of her like a storm, wave after wave of suffering and hurt racking her slim body, spaseming in pain. Ripping a long strip of her petticoat, she struggled to mop up the rivulets of crimson blood that were slowly trickling down her shoulder.
"Woud'n a even been this bad if I'd the mind ta keep quiet." she whispered to herself, scrubbing away the now drying blood from her hands.
Whipping her tears on her sleeve, she tried to clear her mind. Her hands shook as calmed, her sight stopped spinning, her heart slowed, her breath becoming even. She had used this meditation exercise many times before, after every painful abuse. With practice she had even learned to almost completely ignore the pain the wounds had inflicted on her body and mind. She let out a long sigh as her fear slowly ebbed away.
"Now what am I going to do?" she asked herself.
Looking at her shoulder she saw that the blood had slowed and was all right to tend to now. Carefully untying her sash, she carefully started wrapping the wound.
"Why?" she breathed, trying to understand the reasons for her suffering.
For what felt like the hundredth time, she tried to sort threw her muddled thoughts and find something, anything, that may unlock there reasoning for her imprisonment.
'So that's what I Am.' she thought, finally after seventeen years of neglect, anger, and pain, she had come to that simple conclusion. She stared blankly at the walls, she finally saw what they really were, the bars to her cage.
She put her head between her knees and breathed deeply, trying to stop the brief waves of nausea. In the seventeen years of her existence, or her captivity as she now knew it, she had never felt the impending feeling that was now sweeping her senses. Something akin to danger darkened her sense of place.
"Something's wrong." she whispered swaying to her feet. Brushing her long mane of unruly curls from her eyes. The air itself hummed, and then the scent reached her. Burning wood.