They arrived at the camps the evening of the sixth day. Lilia smelled the camps before she saw them. She didn’t think that any smell could overpower that of the dogs, but the camps stank like a mass grave. They passed through a gate onto muddy ground that put Lilia in mind of a churned-up dung pile. The women did not untie her. They pushed her off the dog and into the cold mud.

Lilia landed on her stomach and choked on slushy mud. She rolled over onto her side. From the gate ran stone walls capped in iron spikes. The wooden gate was wound in sharp metal. The enforcers shut the gate.

Dirty figures squatted around campfires just outside makeshift shelters of old wood, stitched hides, and tangles of bonsa and everpine branches. Ice crusted the ridges of the muddy ground. The smell of the fires could not overpower the stench of unwashed bodies, and something fouler, more terrifying – the cloying stink of rotting flesh.

Three men crouching under the awning of the nearest shack were already looking over at her. Others had stopped along the outer edges of the camp to look – outright or surreptitiously.

Lilia saw something in their faces that scared her. It roused her from her misery. Motherless or not, if she did not move now, they would devour her. She twisted her hands behind her back and tried to tug at the loops around her ankles with her fingers.

These are Dhai, she told herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. There will be people from the clans here, novices sent into exile. They’ll be–

The men were first to move.

They started toward her like a pack of curious dogs. Then, some of the other spectators were moving: two matrons with sticks and a gaggle of scrawny children.

Someone grabbed Lilia’s ankle. She kicked out, but there were hands on her, pulling at her hair, her clothes.

She tried to curl up, bowed her head to protect it. One of the women tugged her short coat off as far as she could until Lilia’s bound hands prevented her from taking it. Then the pack of them, the men, the women, the children, and more stragglers, unknotted Lilia’s bonds, tore at them with teeth and fingers.

They pulled the ropes free. One of the women yanked the coat from Lilia’s body. The woman tried to run with it. One of the men gripped the sleeve, pulled. The woman hit him with her stick. The children took Lilia’s boots.