AN: I'm not sure who all will read and enjoy this piece. Mostly, I wrote it because Lark wouldn't stop appearing in other pieces I was writing. I'd be working along on something and realize that the main character had done something she'd have done, not something they'd have done. I even wrote in a side character that was essentially her into another fandom. So, I've taken the signs from the muses and am giving her her story. May the prickly war-bitch leave me in peace when this is done. Lykopis, Izi, Kati and Alda are all from Wolf Moon. It is HIGHLY recommended you read that first.

Chapter One: A Caged Bird

She'd been awake, watching her little sister sleeping when the first cries started. Harsh and keening, they'd woken a fear in her that was deeper than anything she'd ever felt.

"Brazi, wake up," she whispered, shaking her brother awake and pushing their sister into his arms. He was wide eyed, little older than eight summers, and more afraid of the Romans than any fireside story. "Go, take her to mother, and hide."

She slipped out the front door of their home, light eyes taking in the torches that lit bronze shields and made long Roman faces seem like memories from a nightmare.

"Zarana!" A familiar voice cut through the noise, and she turned, finding her friend there, eyes wide with terror. "The Romans come, Zarana. They took my brother; they took Kisib!" Zarana let the smaller woman wrap herself around her chest, tucked safely under her arms. Zarana shushed her as she cried. "They killed Adda," she whispered, voice broken.

"Shhh." Zarana coaxed her into silence, pulling her back into the home. "In the back. My Ana is there, she will take you." Her friend took a few steps into the darkness, knowing the home well enough even in complete black to know her way. She paused.

"Where are you going?" she asked, even as she took another few steps. "Zarana, come with me." The desperation to her tone told Zarana that she was only trying, one last time. It was an old fight between them. Mare was a soft woman, with little courage and less strength. Over the years they'd known each other, Zarana had heard that tone time and time again.

"I've got to find someone." She dismissed the thought of retreat. "I've got to-"

A sharp cry sounded outside, and a roar took up, one that was as familiar as her own name. The war cry of her people thundered, rising in voices that cracked with youth or with age. In that moment, as their combined rage swelled through her, she new every fear that had ever been known.

Her people were old, most bent with age with sons and daughters too young to know warfare. Zarana was one of the eldest at just seventeen summers. The Romans that rode them down were strong, able bodied, and single minded in their wrath.

She froze in the door, the scenes before her eyes passing almost as if unseen. Who could see, even if they'd eyes? Old blood was spilled and young blood was stolen, chained together, some too young to even stand. The life was forced out of the village of the dead.

"Girl!" a voice shouted at her, and she wasn't sure when she'd started hearing again. "Out of there, come now!" He shouted, sword in hand, face spattered with blood. His other hand gripped hard at her bicep, pulling her forward, where she stumbled in the dirt to his feet. Another went into the home, shouting something that she simply couldn't hear .

He reappeared in a moment, face twisted in anger. "There's someone in a cellar. They refuse to come out." That caught in her mind, and satisfaction curled up in her belly. Good, she thought. They'd be safe in the cellar.

"Burn them out," a man said from behind, her and she turned, something hard and unyielding growing in her like a great wave.

"No!" she screamed, launching herself at the man, who still wore his high-maned helmet. A long sword shone in his hand, decorated in gems and blood. The threat of it did not stop her. She managed to scrape her nails down one side of his face, over an eye and down the cheek before he pushed her back, hard into the dirt, a boot against her chest.

"Burn it!" he shouted, one hand covering his ruined eye as he screamed. Blood and viscous jelly spilled out between his fingers. "Burn it all!"

"No!" She was screaming, trying to dislodge the foot from her chest, but the pressure made it hard to breath. He was a heavy man, but her anger was a great thing. She screamed slurs she didn't know her tongue knew. In the end, he was heavier than her anger.

"You'll watch them die, girl," he said, pressing down harder with his foot and glaring down at her out of one eye. Breath was lost ot her, and her vision spotted as a torch was thrown into the old, wooden home. It caught quickly, burning up and crackling. Zarana tried to pretend that the high screams were from the wood, the blankets inside, anything but what she knew was the truth.

She lay there, lip and breathing in the smoke of the bodies of her family as the Roman's foot finally came off her chest. Someone was speaking to the three men around her, someone with a firm voice, demanding respect and obedience. As the keening cries stopped, she closed her eyes against all else that might come and vowed she would show him neither.

"This dark night, this dark night," she sang weakly, voice thick with the smoke and choked with tears. The dirge of her family was heavy in her mind. Who would sing them all to the other land, now? "With fire and sleet and candlelight. If from here away you've passed, may this song be your very last. If gone you be from family, I bid your soul be wise and free."

The words caught in her throat. She couldn't make the next lines come, anger and fear both at and for herself welled up in her chest. If she couldn't sing them away then would their souls walk the earth forever, as the old ones said?

"What's it matter?" The man with the ruined eye shouted, shaking her from that place beyond recognition. "Kill the bitch and let it be the end."

"My wife asked for a new present from the savage lands. She's begged me for a new maid that can sing," another said, the one who's voice brooked no argument. "I'll give her the pretty and be done with it. Besides, the bitch is cold enough when I'm home. Maybe a toy will warm her frozen cunt. Tie her with the rest."

The words were heard, but they meant nothing to her as she was bound, hands and feet, and forced to walk with the children behind the Roman horses. A few, barely old enough to walk, stumbled and fell time and time again before Zarana turned, crouched low and let one of them climb onto her back and another up through her arms.

It did not matter that her bare feet bled or that the added weight of a child in her arms caused the ropes to cut her wrists deeply. The world held no pain, no pain true enough to touch her again.

-A Caged Bird-

They stood her up on a small pedestal, where she stayed for several hours as they scrubbed her skin with a course brush and combed her hair with a shell-toothed claw. The weight of her heart kept her rooted here, staring sightless at the wall. Her mistress stood there, she knew, somewhere between her eyes and the wall, but she couldn't see her.

Zarana had been presented that morning by Batarius, a commander in the Roman legions. His wife, Maggiora had been ecstatic, demanding she sing on the spot. Covered in blood and soot and filth, Batarius had insisted Maggiora let her first be bathed, if only to spare their noses her smell.

A smell she would welcome back over the scent of perfumed water and a sand-like mess they scrubbed into her skin until it was bright pink and smelled of flowers. The callouses on her hands were shaved off, the same as those on her feet, and she was wrapped in a gossamer pale yellow gown, the same gown that all the other house slaves wore. They twisted her hair up into tight curling pieces and settled little golden flowers in her hair.

"They're to indicate your station as the lady's new maid," one of the young slaves explained, petting the little golden flowers with envy. "Do not lose them, or the mistress will be angry."

Zarana had nodded but her jaw stayed shut, as it had been since that day so many weeks ago, in her village.

"You will call me Domina," Maggoria said, standing in front of Zarana with her hands clasped and an unholy smile on her lips. "It is my will that you will see to, my every whim and in the time that you serve me, should I be pleased, you will be rewarded." She paused, taking in the other house slaves, though none as highly elevated as Zarana, with her little golden flowers. "I freed my personal maid last summer. She'd fallen in love and wanted the chance to raise a family. I was good to her, as I will be to you, if you provide me with appropriate service. She was beside me twenty years, since she was a child. If you serve me so, perhaps you will earn your freedom."

Zarana nodded, recognizing the words, what they'd mean.

"I give you the mark of my ladies, Zai." The woman nodded to someone behind her, and blinding pain ignited into her shoulder. She screamed, the sound echoing in her own ears, and in the next moment, it had lessened. Twisting to see, there, on her back, was the mark of a bird, rising over the sea. The symbol was maddening, a bird, the most free of all creatures, spreading wing and taking off over water, where man cannot walk.

Her family would never know such freedom. She would never know such freedom.

Something hardened in her as she stared at the ruined skin. It was a wicked thing that rose in her, along her tongue and in her eyes and through her spine. It was the same thing that had risen up and let her gouge the eye from a Roman soldier. She straightened on the pedestal, set her jaw against any future pain, and resolved to do nothing this woman asked of her.

"Thank your Domina," the little slave girl whispered, voice urgent at her elbow.

"No," Zarana said, relishing in the way the woman's smile slipped away.

"What?" Maggoria said, taking a step forward and accepting a thin rod from one of the house guards. Zarana eyed the weapon, knew the pain that it could cause, knew that freedom lay in her tongue.

She parted her lips, rolled her voice against her throat, and screamed.

"Rus!"

The lash fell across her arms, legs, against her stomach and flanks. She stood, blood dripping off of her fingers and down along her legs to the floor below. She felt a weakness in her limbs, a new type of agony that she'd never before known, and as the lash came down again against her cheek, she laughed.

Someone stopped Maggoria's arm not long later, and Zarana could hear the commander's voice chastising the woman.

"If you damage her face, we'll get nothing at slave market," he hissed, eyeing the mess that his wife had made. "Scarred like that, we won't get the gold it cost to bring her here."

"I don't want her sold," Margorria hissed, turning her eyes toward Zarana. "I will get my lark to sing for me, like she sang for you on the battlefield."

-A Caged Bird-

"Out of my sight! I want that creature gone!" Maggoria was in rare form, her dress torn down the side, blood coloring the pale purple. Zarana stood a few paces off, her delicate yellow dress stained with blood that dripped off of the cheese knife in her hand. She'd been meant to cut up Marggoria's food. The knife had slipped nearly six feet. She felt the warmth of blood sliding between her fingers, knew it's weight for the first time.

"Shall I call the-" It was a question that tired all of them. For three weeks, the house guard had been asking if they should call the slave merchant. Ship her away, make her someone else's problem. Zarana both craved that and willed it not to happen. She'd been taken for Marggoria. She owned the woman a debt, after all, a debt that was yet to be paid. She'd started already, with the blood under her fingernails. It would be a pity not to finish.

"No!" Maggoria roared, hand clamping down on the knife wound at her side viciously. "Fetch me a doctor, and lock her in chains. I'll deal with her tonight." Zarana didn't fight the two house guards that gripped her elbows and drug her from the room, twisting her wrists behind her and making her drop the knife to the floor with a wet clatter. They did not take her from her home. They did not harm her, other than what was ordered.

She stared impassively out of the cell beneath the estate as the door shut, the metal bars sealing her inside. She sat in the dirt at the far wall, a small torch in the hallway her only light. In time, that too would burn into nothingness as it had for the last three nights. She found the discomfort of the cell more comforting than the creature delicacies of her slave quarters, beside Maggoria's own. The Roman woman had attempted to buy her behavior, her good service, her tongue and her well wishes.

She'd purchased nothing with her blood or her coin.

There were others in the cells beneath the estate. Those that would not obey were forced there, among those that were kept for their willful disobedience, their refusal to submit, to lay down and die. She heard their shouts the first time she was lead down the hall. The guards had placed her between them, shielding her with their bodies, almost as if they were trying to protect her. She'd peered into the cages, seen the men there that gave pause and took her measure as she passed.

She was found wanting that first day. That night, she'd loosed her throat and sang to them the dirge of her family, the last words sang to their souls in case the next night they were no longer in their cells. Some of them shouted at first, demanding her silence. As the night passed, and they listened to her words, their outrage faded. Now, as she sat in silence, they called to her.

"Ey, Lark!"

"Sing's t'sleep, girl!"

"What'cha do, girl? Covered in blood."

They'd taken to calling her girl or Lark since that first night, and she'd have lied if she said it wasn't settling. Maggoria called her a bastardization of her real name. The other slaves mimed their mistress, their domina. The word made her sick. A woman with little skill and little beauty and even less compassion, and she coveted all that was as she wasn't.

It was why the Domina cried for her words, her voice. The woman would never hear it, but she would hear of it. She would hear the guards whisper about it during the day, how the silent slave would sing out for the gladiators at night, once their cells were closed. She would hear and covet and the lash would fall for it.

She would covet for the rest of her life.

-A Caged Bird-

The last fell for a final time, striping her face and letting blood run from a cut eyebrow down across the angle of her jaw. She'd fallen to her knees ten blows prior, no longer able to stand. Maggoria had given up wielding the weapon herself and had called one of the slaves beneath the manor, one of the gladiators, to do it for her. His blows might have stripped flesh far more deeply, but they were struck with far more kindness.

She knelt in her own blood as Maggoria stalked around her, face scrunched up in disdain and frustration.

"Take her," Maggoria said firmly. "Take her to one of the gladiator cells. At least someone should get enjoyment from her." Zarana did not flinch. She did not smile or cry. The threat had been coming for days now. Be of use, give Maggoria what she wanted, or there would be more brutal punishment than a lash.

The guards were delicate with her as they pulled her from the ground, supported her down the hall and stairs, through the underground tunnels that made up the cells. It was four gladiators to a cell, and in the darkness, Zarana did not know whose they stopped at, but the door opened, she was left on the ground, and soon enough, their training for the day would cease. They would return to find their gift from their Domina.

She wondered if rape would be as painful as listening to her family's dying screams.

In the tunnel, as the last of the sunlight filtered in from a high window and the steps of the gladiators sounded on the stone steps, she sang. She sang for a little girl that had grown up on a wind swept plain. For her smile and her courage, her strength and her pride. She sang for that girl's family and friends, for the dead and carrion. She sang even as the guards opened the gate, let in four men, and locked it behind them.

As the night drew on, and they settled down to the dirt in their sleeping spots, Zarana sang on, propped up against the wall. She closed her eyes, forcing the last of that girl's tears from her eyes. She forced the final lines to the dirge past her teeth, lines that she hadn't allowed herself to sing since she'd been unable that day outside of her home.

It was fitting, after all. The final words of their family's dirge for the final member of their family. Zarana lay in the cell that night afraid of men that had not touched her, but it would be Lark that woke the next day, stronger and untouchable.