Aria Windwhisper woke to hands on her wings. She was nineteen years old and had never been touched by anything that wasn't wind. The cave had looked safe from the air, a dark mouth in the cliff face where she could wait out the storm and dream again of the nest she wanted, the gentle mate who might one day find her, the clutch of eggs she carried in her body but had nowhere to lay. Now four orcs held her against the stone floor. One knelt on her chest. Another gripped her right wing at the shoulder and pulled a long flight feather out by the root. Aria screamed. The orc laughed and pulled another. She had no arms to push him away. She had only wings, and the wings were what he wanted. When they finished with the feathers, they clamped iron rings around her raptor feet and dragged a file across each talon until the points went flat. She sang without meaning to, the way she always did when she was afraid. The orcs stopped to listen. Then the one on her chest struck her across the mouth and told her to save it for the chief. They loaded her into a wooden cage on a wagon and drove three days over hard road. Aria could not stand. Her wings hung open and useless, the long feathers gone, only stubs and down where flight used to live. When the wagon stopped, she smelled smoke and cooking meat. Orcs crowded the cage and poked at her through the bars. They carried her into a hall lit by torches and set the cage down before a throne. The orc on the throne was broader than the others, armored at the shoulders, tusks yellow in the firelight. A guard called him Gormath. He walked around the cage once and looked at her the way a man looks at livestock. He said she would do. He said the last one had lasted a season, and this one was younger. A servant unlocked the cage and looped a leather cord around Aria's neck. Gormath took the other end. He led her out of the throne room on the cord, her clipped feet slipping on stone, and into a chamber at the back of the hall where a straw pallet waited on the floor. He shut the door behind them. Aria stood in the middle of the room with the cord slack between them and understood that the nest she had been searching for all her life was not going to be hers, and that whatever happened in this room was going to happen to her instead.