"M... miss, please have some fish soup."
"It doesn't taste good, but it'll help you regain your strength. The women in our village all drink this soup for a while after they get married."
A frail little girl held out a bowl of fish soup, thick with the smell of fish and medicinal herbs, to Laena, who had just awakened.
Borros had abducted this girl from a nearby manor specifically to attend to Laena. Though she was already twelve or thirteen, poverty had left her thin and undersized.
Laena barely managed to prop herself up, but the waves of tearing pain between her legs made her eyes blaze with fury.
She took the bowl of fish soup from the little girl and, fighting the urge to vomit, gulped it all down.
"Borros!"
Roughly wiping the soup from her lips with her hand, Laena spat his name through clenched teeth.
"You won't control me like this! Never!"
Eighty or ninety percent of Riverrun's buildings had now been reduced to shattered ruins. Only parts of the slums in the corners of the city and the stone arch bridge across the river had survived, far from the bustling center. But even those who had survived in Riverrun had all been fed to the dragons by Borros.
The few people now moving about Riverrun were all servants Borros had abducted from nearby manors to attend to his daily needs. He had crowded them all into Riverwatch Tower on the still-intact stone arch bridge across the river.
It was here that Borros, his whole body severely burned, had drunk himself senseless to ease the pain. Whether it had been an accident or he had deliberately used his drunkenness as an excuse, he had barged into Laena's room that night and taken her virginity.
There had