The wind carried grit and the smell of old blood.
Two women walked across the barren plain, their boots scuffing against cracked earth that had not seen rain in three seasons. The sun was a white bruise overhead, pressing down on them, leaching color from the world until everything was shades of brown and grey and the pale yellow of dead grass. The older woman led and the younger followed. Their shadows stretched behind them.
Iftaya had been walking for seventeen days.
Her chains hung at her hips, coiled like sleeping snakes, their iron links warm from the sun and the friction of her hands. She had forged them herself, in a fire that had burned for three days and three nights, using ore she had smelted from rocks she had pulled from a river that no longer flowed. The chains were extensions of her body now. They moved when she thought about moving them. They struck when she thought about striking. They had saved her life more times than she could count.
