Hello all! I’m new to this, and to this subreddit. Still figuring out formatting. Hope you like it!
—–
The trip took three days. Three days and two nights of being chained to a wagon, walking alongside during the day and sleeping underneath at night. When Rin sighted a large settlement in the distance, smoke rising from many fires and yelling to pick up their pace was evidence that this was their likely destination. Looking at her captor, who had never supplied her with his name, Rin glared at the memory of her brothers being dragged to the edge of their homestead, of hearing their final pleas for mercy. The raiding band was no more than twenty warriors, but they had been more than enough to reduce her former village to ashes. The women had been lined up and judged. Rin was young, twenty two by her best guess, and her womanhood was obvious even in her plainclothes. Because her father had died when she was young she had managed to avoid marriage, preferring life in the family home to the unknown treatment of an arranged husband. A husband that might have taken her away from this fate, or protected her, or bargained for her freedom as others had been able to do. Promises of gold and tribute had secured the release of other women. Not Rin.