“I’m not your wife!” I screamed through tears and snot. “Let me go, I’m not your wife!”

I was rewarded for my rebuttal with another heavy slap, across my right cheek this time. My teeth pierced through my lip at the impact and blood trickled slowly down my chin. I glared under my lashes at the Mountain Man, and watched incredulously as his eyes followed the blood. My heart stopped at the brightness in his gaze. The lust had deepened. I swallowed back a rush of vomit.

Mountain Man reached out and touched the blood wonderingly. “Yer ma wife,” he growled, pushing his face in mine. I closed my eyes, holding in my breath so I didn’t have to inhale the stink off him. “I find ye. Ye be ma wife.”

Brint had warned me, I shook. Brint had told me there were people out here gone crazy with the isolation.

“I’m goin’ huntin’. But I be back. I be gone a while. But I be back, wife. I be back and feed ye wife. And then ye be seeing to my husbandly needs.” He stroked himself and I turned away sharply, biting back screams and denials. Little whimpers escaped between my pinched lips.

I shuddered at the feel of his fingers soft on my face. Then they gripped hard, jerking my head around to face him. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know his face was inches from mine. His lips came down wet and hard on my mouth, his beard scratching my face as I struggled against him, my lips tightly closed. A large hand encircled my neck and squeezed. I gasped, giving him the opening he needed. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. I gagged on the foul taste of him, his rancid stench clogging my senses. No matter how much I jerked my head this way and that, he followed, his lips drinking me in like a fish gulping for air. The skin around my mouth was raw from his beard and wet from his fetid saliva. I was running out of air, close to hyperventilating when I felt his hand squeeze my breast.

Fury. Fury at myself and my stupidity. At this man, this Mountain Man who thought he could just take me like I was a deer in the woods. It coursed through me in an unthinking rush. Instinctively, I brought my tied hands up, suffusing as much strength and force into the upswing as I could, and nailed him between his legs.

He broke away from me with a strangled shout and fell back, clutching where only minutes before he’d been stroking. I immediately vomited on the crude wooden floors beside the pallet. The room now reeked with the vilest of human stench, and I emptied what was left in my stomach.

I struggled to draw breath, the room spinning around me. I had to get out of here. I had to.

I thought of my kidnapping by the Iavii people. Of Kir’s rookery gang. None of it had been so bad as this. Nothing this horrific had happened to me in a long time. I didn’t think anything could match watching my parents and brother die. But if I stayed here. If this man used me and broke me…

I sobbed, tears blinding me as I drew my tied hands down onto the floor and used my upper body to drag myself along the wood. The door was just there. I could get to it.

A bellow echoed around the shack and I was jerked back like a rag doll, thrown against the back wall of the hut, a sickening vibration shooting through my body as my head made impact. I slumped back on the pallet and watched through blurry eyes as the Mountain Man approached me, his face blazing with hatred, lechery and anger. I became a little more alert at the sight of the large hunting knife in his hand.

“Bad wife,” he growled, brandishing the knife at me. “Teach ye a lesson I will.”

I beat at him uselessly with my tied hands as he grabbed me by my shirt front to hold me. And then he tore the shirt open, revealing the curve of my breasts.

“No!” I cried out and swung my hands back up, catching his jaw. The Mountain Man barely blinked.

“Yer goin’ to behave.” He pointed the knife right in my face and I glared back at him, ignoring the hot tears rolling down my cheek. I took deep breaths as he smiled at me. I let a shaky calm envelop me. If this was to be my end, then I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of enjoying my fear. I jutted my chin out defiantly.

The Mountain Man tut-tutted and gently placed the tip of the blade at the bottom of my throat. I shivered at the menacing cold touch as he gently drew it down my skin, scratching me, until he came to the rising curve of my left breast. The blade pressed deeper and I muffled a cry of shocked pain. He scored a shallow cut along the top of my breast, watching my expression the whole time. I felt blood trickle from my wound and clenched my jaw to keep from looking at what he’d done to me.

Mountain Man pulled the blade back, grinning the entire time, his eyes alight with excitement. The knife disappeared into a pouch on his hip and he stood up. He was huge. Massive. His entire shadow cast me into darkness in the shade of the shack.

He tugged at his trousers and licked his lips. “I like red on ye, wife. It’s good. When I get back, I be bedding ye ma wife. Bedding ye with a little more red.”

At that he abruptly turned and left, picking up some crude hunting gear I hadn’t seen before. It lay near the door. The door opened and I searched it greedily for a lock. It slammed shut behind him and I heard his footsteps disappear. Struggling to draw breath I heaved a sigh of relief, not only to be alone, but because… there was no lock on the door!

At his sudden departure, the realisation of what had just happened to me and was going to happen to me if I didn’t get out here, came rushing in like a storm against the cliffs in Silvera. Terrified sobs broke out of me in rib-cracking force, and I shook and shivered, damning my stupid pride and fear that had made me come up the mountains without Wolfe.

“Stop it,” I bit out angrily, impatiently brushing the tears from my face with the tips of my fingers. I couldn’t just sit here wallowing. I had to get out of here. The longer I stayed the more likely he would return. If that happened we were all doomed. Haydyn was doomed. I had to get to that plant. I had to get back to Haydyn. And when she was awake… I’d tell her all that had happened. All that I had discovered. That there was good and bad people all over our world; that background, upbringing, proximity to the Dyzvati evocation made no matter. I’d lived my life with blinkers on, convinced that my harsh jolt out of innocent childhood somehow made me wiser than the rest. But I wasn’t. I was still a child who’d only been thrust into womanhood on this journey. This journey to save Phaedra from losing the evocation. This journey that had taught me – I sucked in a painful breath – we didn’t need the evocation. What we needed was a stronger government. We needed to take care of our people no matter the province they belonged. The evocation wouldn’t change the issues that made people act out as soon as its strength waned. But perhaps a better governing of them could get us closer to fixing the issues. Getting closer to ridding the world of men like the one who had come upon me and taken me as if I were a body without a soul…

All this I’d tell Haydyn… if I ever got out of this.

With renewed determination I thumped my bound hands down onto the floor, ignoring the bites and splinters from the wood. I began to drag myself along the ground. I didn’t have great upper body strength but I might have managed more easily if it weren’t for the stinging pain of my feet and the throbbing cut on my breast needling my brain, trying to slow me down.

I made it to the door, but I was already soaking with sweat. It took me another five minutes to wobble up onto my feet so I could pry the door open. As soon as it opened and the fresh air of the forest rushed against me, stealing me from the stink of the shack, I was submerged in dizziness. I leaned against the doorframe to collect myself.

Finally, I opened my eyes. My magic reached out to me, beckoning me back onto the path. If I could manage to hobble far enough away, perhaps I could find some way to untie the ropes. Carefully, concentrating, I balanced my body just right and hopped down onto the first step out of the shack. I wobbled a little, making my heart pitch in fear, but I was still standing. I took another breath and hopped again. This time I lost my balance and went crashing with a painful oomph onto the forest floor. A little winged bug stared up at me before flying off. I growled in fearful frustration and tried to pull myself into a standing position. Five falls later and I was back up.

That’s the pattern of how the day went. I couldn’t even remember how far I had fallen, hopped and dragged myself to. I kept freezing at every sound in the forest, trying to hear over the blood rushing in my ears. By nightfall, I was covered in sweat and mud and forest. But with no coat and a ripped shirt, I was thankful for the heat of the exertion. The shack felt long gone now, but still I remained terrified. I had no idea how far I’d come.

Night had fallen a few hours past when I heard a loud snap of a tree branch. I stilled, my heart fluttering like a snared animal. I glanced around sharply, trying to see movement in the dark. A large plant rustled and I whirled around. I could feel eyes on me. Boring into me. Trapping me.

A rush of warm fluid slid down my leg inside my trousers.

The rustle sounded again, another crack of tree.

Beady eyes appeared in the dark, low to the ground. I let go of my breath, my whole body sagging as some kind of possum darted out of the bush and away from me. Realisation dawned and I looked down in the dark at my trousers. Already I could smell the stench of urine.

Silently, I began to cry.

***

I made another mistake.

Sometime during the late night, perhaps early morning, my mind blank with agony and exhaustion, I had fallen again. I had only intended to take a minute to collect myself. But when my eyes finally peeled back open it was because a stream of sunlight was begging them to.

I blinked, confused. Where was I?

“Finally, ye be wakin’.”

The nightmare that had unbelievably been real, came rushing back at the sound of the Mountain Man’s voice. I closed my eyes as I was roughly turned around, the taste of dark soil on my lips.

“Open yer eyes!” he bellowed in my face, the putrid breath bringing back memories of the day before.

Not wanting to, but somehow needing to, I did as he demanded, opening my eyes to see his ugly face inches above mines, his large hands gripping my upper arms.

His eyes blazed with rage. “Ye goin’ to be gettin’ it bad, wife, for runnin’ off.”

I was dragged up into his arms. It took me a minute to wake up, but as soon as I did I started struggling. I was in so much pain already, his pinches and slaps didn’t stop me from giving him hell as he strode in long lurches back to his shack.

The magic screamed at me again, as he pulled me from its path.

When the shack appeared, I stopped struggling, slumping in his arms. We had walked perhaps thirty minutes using his long strides.

It had taken me hours to get thirty minutes away from this beast.

I gave a roar of rage and clobbered my bound hands against his head in impotent wrath. He snarled back at me, giving me a wounded look as if he were the victim, and not I. The fact that this man was clearly deranged made it worse. There would be no reasoning with someone like him.

I was thrown down on the pallet, as he slammed the shack door shut. The stench of dead meat filled the shack, and I gagged at the carcass of an animal in the other corner of the small room. But the carcass was the least of my worries.

My heart froze as the Mountain Man began undressing. I struggled away from him, my back pressed against the wall of the shack, my eyes frantically searching for a weapon as the Mountain Man loomed over me na**d.

Fuck the chafing! I pulled my wrists back and forth frantically, desperate to be free. I could hear him laughing as he lowered himself to the ground, but still I kept rubbing my wrists back and forth, growling and crying at the agony as I ripped my wrists raw, the wetness of blood joining the savage sawing. Saliva and tears dripped off my chin as I refused to look at the man before me; refusing to give in.

I slammed back against the wall, wide-eyed as he crawled over me, straddling me. I looked into his face with so much hatred I hoped it incinerated him. His stench overwhelmed me as it had the last time, and my stomach lurched in response. His stale sweat and bad breath would have been enough to make me sick, but the odour of blood and old meat swam out of him as well. He smelled like death.

I closed my eyes and pushed away from him as his hands pawed at me, the muscles in my body twanging and twitching like the taut strings of a lute.

“Ye better start playin’, wife, or I’m goin’ to get mad.”

Despite his threat, I couldn’t stop flinching from his touch; I couldn’t have even if my mind had told me it was the safest thing to do. Instead I incurred his anger over and over again, pushing and struggling and jerking to get him off of me. One of his huge hands slid down over my face, and he pushed me, slamming my head off the wall. The minutes after that were distant and unclear. My head lolled on my shoulders, and I could only see and hear images. I swore I heard Wolfe’s voice, saw Haydyn’s face.

But they weren’t here.

As the present came back to me, my situation had worsened. I was flat on my back on the pallet, the Mountain Man still straddling me. My shirt had been ripped completely open by the knife in his hands. I was covered in little shallow cuts.

I gave a garbled cry and swung at his head with my hands, a weak hit, but enough to give me a moment to summon my energy. I bucked under him, trying to throw him off. I swung at him again, causing him to jerk away, giving me the momentum I needed to shake him off. I screamed like a banshee the entire time, using it to draw my adrenaline into usefulness.

The Mountain Man roared back at me and clambered over me, the knifeless fist swooping down and connecting with my face. I felt blood gush out of my nose, my eyes watering, and I fought down more vomit. He used my disorientation to unbutton my trousers.

“No, no,” I mumbled, tasting the bitter copper of my blood. I shook my head. No. I began to hyperventilate as his body drew flush with mine, his face hovering above me with lascivious eyes and a lusty grin. I threw up again.