Magali could see a great plume of smoke rising up into a purple twilight sky, winding earthward to a tiny pinprick of orange light somewhere far to the west, somewhere close to Nyssos. A caravan had passed through the village this morning from the capital, bringing word that Sashul Davorgada had died. She watched that distant pyre flicker and churn against the looming night setting in from the west for a brief moment, but ultimately paid it little mind and continued on her way. For as the Sashul paid little mind to the goings-on of the peasantry, the people of the Rainlands were largely ignorant of their Sashul.

The village was settling down for the night as she strolled though the disorganized smattering of wattle-and-daub huts that comprised this countryside hamlet, a ratty old basket of woven dumir reeds cradled in the bend of her elbow. The men of the village were returning to their domiciles with hoes caked in dirt or nets of wriggling fish. Cooking fires glowed from within the huts with a warm and inviting light as she strolled along the filthy, muddied ruts. The smoke was infused with the smell of boiled ashroot and lentils, which mixed with the rancid odor of human squalor that clung to this village. The smell reminded her how hungry she was, yet made her stomach churn; the odor of the town was both compelling and repulsive. Equal measures of compulsion and revulsion, Magali thought, was an apt summary of her feelings for the hamlet she called home.

She lived in a village that passing merchants and travelers typically called [i]as Kul[/i] - the Ford in the Salished tongue, as the town was situated on a bluff overlooking a shallow stretch of the winding Tashgad River. But to the peasantry that inhabited this village, it was simply home, and any of the hundreds of other nameless villages that dotted the Rainlands might as well belong to distant and exotic kingdoms as far as the people of this hamlet were concerned. There was no need to name this place, no need to distinguish it from its neighbors, because nearly everyone who lived in as Kul had been born there, and almost all of them would die there too.

Magali's father had been one of the few to escape this place. She was but a little girl when the Sashul's men rode into the village and called the young men of the village to arms for a foreign campaign against a pirate stronghold on the Sullied Coast. Her father either died fighting the pirates of Sirtu or amassed enough loot from the capture of that fortress to make a new life for himself, because the day he marched off to Nyssos was the last time she had ever seen him. Whatever his fate, Magali was sure it was better than the short, difficult life that the peasants led here.

When he left to fight in the Sirtuan Corsair War, Magali's father left behind a wife, two sons, and two daughters in unenviable circumstances. Being a solitary peasant woman was a difficult proposition on its own, to say nothing of having four additional mouths to feed. It was not unheard of for widowed mothers in this village to throw themselves off the bluff or drown themselves in the Tashgad to escape the unbridled wretchedness that their lives had become. But Magali's mother was a tougher sort of woman than them, and she had resolved to feed her children whatever the price.

Her mother had just shooed her children out of the hut, as she always did when she was having [i]guests[/i] over. Magali was a young girl who had only seen the ebbing of her fourteenth monsoon, but she was plenty old enough to understand what that word was a euphemism for. The younger children typically played around the village when this happened, blissfully oblivious to the shameful acts occurring within their own home. Magali, however, took pity upon her mother and had decided to help her feed the family in whatever small way she could - that she might prevent her mother having just one visit from the guests. To that end, she would be catching mudcrabs.

The huts of the village were built up to the very edge of the bluff, where Magali looked down to the river below. It was a sixty foot drop to the babbling Tashgad; a sheer drop to someone who didn't know the way. But if one looked carefully knew where to look, there was a narrow, winding goatpath that could be followed all the way down to the reedy banks of the river. With her basket clutched firmly in her left hand, and her right pressed against the silty wall of the bluff, Magali descended the narrow path down to the river.

Though she had braved this path down dozens of times before, the descent was still harrowing. Pebbles and bits of grit scattered under her muddy, calloused feet, falling off the goatpath and tumbling all the way down. Night was descending fast as well, making it that much harder to find the footholds and avoid the weak ledges that crumbled underfoot. With diligence and care, Magali made it all the down to the riverbank intact.

The Tashgad River was wide and shallow here, saturated with sand and mud. The river gurgled and churned over the gravelly riffles and sandbars. Mats of dumir reeds grew tall and thick on the sediment-laden riverbanks and sandbars, where Magali knew she would find her quarry. She drove into the reeds in search of mudcrabs. Cold mud squished between her toes and splattered up to her calves as she combed through the reeds, prompting Magali to roll her jute-woven pants up above her knees. Even at her young age she had acquired an attractive, womanly shape; her legs were lithe and muscular, running up to a wide waist, with pert lumps already developing beneath her coarse linen shirt. Already she had become accustomed to unwanted attention from the boys of the village. A few moons ago, Magali had been cornered by a pair of older boys as she was climbing up the bluff after looking for mudcrabs one morning. 

"Take off your shirt and let us see your tits," the younger boy demanded.

"Go to hell," Magali snarled.

"I'm not interested in getting any of [i]that[/i] lip," the older boy retorted with a malign grin. "Just let us have our way with you and we'll be gentle. It should be no problem for the daughter of a whore, after all."

Magali went into a fury upon hearing that. Without warning, Magali seized the older boy by the left arm and cast him off the goatpath down the bluff. Had the boy fallen from a greater height, and were there not deep mud and dumir reeds directly below him to break the fall, the boy would have surely died. Instead, the two ruffians went on to give Magali a wide berth, and the village boys never bothered her again.

The sky's twilight glow was quickly fading; night was quickly descending upon the land and it would be difficult to see anything in the thick reeds before too long. With wide sweeps of her arms, Magali parted the reeds and scanned the fibrous reed stalks for any sign of her prey. In the corner of her left eye, she saw a flicker of movement - a mudcrab fleeing for cover among the reeds. Magali sprung forward, parting the reeds away from her face until she saw the creeping thing scurrying away. She stooped down and cupped her hands over it before. When she was sure she could feel the mudcrab squirming under the weight of her hands, she scooped it up and held it to her eyes. They were ugly little things, more akin to a prawn or louse than any true crab. Their taste was also inferior to a real crab: terribly gamey, with an aftertaste all too reminiscent of rotten fish. But meat of any sort was hard to come by for a peasant, and even a few of these mudcrabs would be a hearty supplement to their meager helpings of boiled ashroot.

Magali was able to hunt down another four mudcrabs before night fell in earnest and it was too dark to see anything in the reeds. A successful hunt by any measure. Content with her prey, Magali made her way back up the bluff, stopping every so often to keep the wriggling mudcrabs from crawling out of the basket. The climb was slow and cautious now that there was only starlight to light the way. By the time Magali returned home, the visitors would surely have left and her mother would be cleaned up. After some time, she had made her way up the bluff and back into the village. The cooking fires inside the huts had died down to low embers now, giving just enough light for Magali to find her way back home.

There were horses tethered to the weedy qaubir tree growing just beside her mother's hut - the first sign that something was amiss. Nobody in the village owned a horse; mother's visitors were travelers. And not just any country horses either - thoroughbred Shiqors, stable-shod and fitted with leather saddles worth more than what most peasants could expect to earn in many years. These were not simply travelers looking for a cheap lay, the riders of these steeds had to be wealthy men from one of the cities, a sort who had no business bedding with peasant women.

And then she heard her mother sobbing.

Magali practically dropped her basket of mudcrabs before skirting around the front door to the window at the back of the hut. Her mother typically draped a cloth over it in order to keep the neighbors from spying in on her salacious work, but Magali drew it back just enough to see what was going on inside.

There was a pair of men standing about near the cooking hearth, both clad in leather cuirasses with bands of iron bolted upon the leather. Dark blue robes - the sort wealthy men from the cities wore - draped down from underneath their leather chestpieces. They were a martial sort to be sure, but they were definitely not the Sashul's men. They looked on at her mother, curled up in a heap at the bare dirt floor, sobbing piteously.

"You must stop your crying, woman," one of the riders said. "You mustn't alert [i]her[/i] to our presence."

Before Magali could process what the man had said, a pair of gloved and meaty palms seized her by the shoulders. She let out a piercing howl into the night as the man behind effortlessly hoisted her up and slung her over the shoulders like a sack of ashroots. She kicked and squirmed and writhed and bit against the giant of a man who had taken her. But her best efforts to escape only elicited a gravelly chuckle. Her bemused captor took her around the hut and barged inside.

"I found her!" Magali's captor bellowed as he presented the girl to his two companions as a hunter might with a prize boar.

"Excellent," the most opulently-dressed of the three riders exclaimed - a young man with a nascent beard that he could only manage to braid two or three times. "I was afraid she may have been frightened off by her mother's lamentations, but I am pleased that is not the case. This profession is so much more pleasant when all parties are cooperative."

"... and isn't she marvelous," the leader cooed, brushing Magali's cheek with the back of his finger. Magali nearly bit down on his finger, but the rider withdrew his hand before she could even attempt it - as if he knew exactly when to retract his finger out of experience. "What a soul she must have... I take it her womanhood is still intact?" He said to Magali's mother. Her face was swollen with tears, and she could only respond with a wild nod between her croaking sobs.

"Mother!" Magali screamed, "what are they doing?!"

"I'm so sorry," her mother croaked in between sobs, "I'm sorry, so sorry!"

The leader of the riders drew a leather bag the size of a fist - jingling with more silver elish than the big rider could hold in one outstretched palm - and dropped it onto the dirt floor.

"We'll take her."