Anna stirred, she opened her eyes to find she was alone, lying on a bed in an empty room. Quietly, she pushed herself to sitting position and, she flinched at sharp pain in her head. Migraine. She held her forehead. The first fleeting minutes, she tried to control the throbbing pain in her head. “Where am I?” she asked herself. And then she remembered how it all started.
…It was at Nezmae. She had descended from the wagon and told Miel to carry on, and had offered herself to buy them enough time to escape the village. She had done exactly so by attacking the invaders, aiming at them with her arrows from behind a tree, until their leader spotted her from her hiding spot. She had taken to her heels, until an arrow pierced her calf…
Anna jolted back to the present. She dragged the blanket t
