The Lone Girl

She was shivering from the cold.

Not even twenty years old the red haired girl with the green eyes was totally exhausted.

The long walking in the difficult terrain and her desperate efforts to make fire every night was exhausted.

Lost inside this hostile mountainous region she had wandering for weeks without finding a way to cross this this steep clifts or icy cold rivers.

Despite the fact that the pale white skinned girl was from the north she wasn't anywhere near her homeland .

She was well dressed in white animal furs with her feet protected by leather boots which could keep her feet warm even in harsh conditions of the most steps and mountains of the north.

But this winter the cold was harder than other previous years and she was freezing to death.

Inside the small carefully camouflaged hut ,that she had made ,she didn't dare to light a fire during the day.

She will be spotted sooner or later.

And she knew that her enemies wasn't far.

She was cleaning her small sharp knife with a piece of cloth when the first tears appeared rolling down from her pretty face.

"I have to get out of here ", she thought as her tears fell in the ashes of the fire.

She had only found some strawberries and nuts yesterday night as she carefully searched the nearby bushes for food.

Her traps not so well made didn't caught anything again.

But she saw her enemies few nights before.

It was a dozen light armoured riders from the nomadic tribes of the steps.

They rode their small but well built wild horses searched the forest area between the two rivers that they recently spot some tracks.

She could see their faces .
They were savage warriors from the most fierce clan of the step.

"The Scale Clan ... the hunters of the wasterlands ! " she whispered as looked them from her hiding place behind some boulders with her voice trembling from the cold and fear.

They were slave hunters and they have seen her few days before in a hunter settlement many leagues away from here.

They didn't dare to take her then.
No in front of others at least.

The empire had banned the slavery of white people inside her borders.

But in the wilderness the rules were followed only if the imperial soldiers were near.

If not they did what they used to do for thousands of years before the empire.

But they had an other information about her identity that made them more eager to continue the hunt.

She wasn't an ordinary girl.

Somebody offered them a lot of gold for her but without revealing the reason.

She left running after she saw them passing.

Then the disaster for her happened.

As she was descending the rocky hill she lost her balance,slipped and her feet trapped in a small opening between some rocks.

She almost screamed in pain then but managed to freed herself and head back in her hut.

But now she was limp.
She tried to bandage her injured feet and the pain had almost gone but only if she was still.

She looked again with despair her wound.

The blood again changed the colour of the bandage's to deep crimson.
This was a colour that she was afraid from childhood.

And now she had a good reason for that.

Without proper treatment her injuries will be infected sooner or later.

And she couldn't run now.

She knew that any weakness there could be fatal.

The predators that always watching were constantly searching for the weak and the unlucky.

And then she heard it.

A low distant growling ,possibly from an mountain hyena , filled the air with fear.

And then an other one this time even closer to her camp.

" - Oh no ! ... They are coming ... ! " ,she whispered anxiously to herself.

The hungry beasts could smell her now !