Empire of Ashes

Chapter I - Chains and Bones

They told me I was a slave now.

I didn't care. I didn't care when they clamped shackles around my wrists and a collar around my neck. I allowed them to tug me around like a dog on a lead because I simply didn't care enough to fight back.

It didn't matter anymore. Nothing the Anglian soldiers could do compared to watching my village burn. To seeing my little brothers and sisters butchered like animals. Children that young weren't useful, you see. Not worth the food it took to keep them alive, according to these men. But an eighteen-year-old girl? Surely there was something I could do. Several somethings, in fact.

So there I was. The survivor. The lucky one. One battle-hardened soldier had stood on ground soaked with my family's blood and held me still while another had beaten me almost senseless. I had mewled and begged until they were convinced they had broken me, else they would have kept going until they had really succeeded.

I remembered only snatches of the aftermath - of being led through the smouldering remains of my village, of the neighbours who had been left out for the crows, and then of the icy weight of a collar being clamped around my neck.

It was memories like those which gnawed at me now, wearing me down to the bone. I spent more time reliving those few hours over and over than I ever did in the present, but ... it was easier that way. The collar had been suffocating at first. Now that I was letting myself drift, I scarcely even noticed the steady throbbing where the iron rubbed against my raw skin.

As I scarcely noticed my surroundings. Putting one foot in front of the other was so laughably easy that I could leave my body to get on with it for days and days on end. I would come visiting to eat and relieve myself and curl up for the night, but that was all, and even that felt like too much.

Until the moment we came to a grinding halt. I let myself return for a moment, then, because stopping was not a common occurrence. Normally, we would walk until someone fainted. Fear rippled down the slave column. I could smell it on the afternoon breeze, could feel it in the way my shoulders tightened and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Something was afoot.

None of us breathed a word. The soldiers had made it abundantly clear that they prefered us silent, and it was never wise to give them an excuse to beat you. They had reason enough already - we were Cambrian, and they were bored.

There were slaves on both sides of me, in front and behind, and I was not the tallest girl ever to walk the earth, but I could see enough. We were at a crossroads. To my left was a small, muddy lake. To my right, woodland so dense that the plants were having to claw their way up the tree trunks for even a glimpse of sunlight.

Neither of those things interested me once I saw the men waiting for us on the road ahead. There were four of them. All on horseback, all with swords belted at their waists and shields strapped to their backs. Warriors, not soldiers, because there were no uniforms to be seen. They were a puzzle which some tiny, tiny part of me wanted to solve.

Footsteps on the road, growing louder with every passing second. The knot between my shoulder blades tightened. We were chained in lines with scarce enough slack to take a step, but they turned us sideways to face the captain of the soldiers as he prowled down the line. It was him who had given me that first, ruthless beating, and I would have hated him if my heart had not been so horribly empty.

"I want a full dozen. The best of them," he said.

Panic erupted in the line. Most tried to hunch over, to make themselves look weak and sickly. The slave column was hell, but it was likely that the fate of those chosen would be worse still. I just kept my head down, staring at the mud. To resist selection would imply that I still cared what happened to me, and I didn't.