Willing

Prologue

Josie’s chest felt like someone had tied a rope around it and was pulling at the ends.

She didn’t want to disappoint Daddy. Not again. She tried to breathe shallow, to be quiet so he couldn’t find her, but he always did and he always told her what she did wrong so he could. She tried so hard to hear him moving among the trees, but she never could. He would just appear, and he would be frowning.

“You broke a twig on the other side of the tree.”

She jumped, even though she’d been expecting the sound of her dad’s voice. Spinning around to face him, she fell into the fighter’s stance he’d taught her on her eighth birthday.

His pale green eyes, just like hers, narrowed, and without any warning one of his feet shot out toward her. Leaping as high as she could, she avoided the kick. Bringing her fist down on his extended leg, she swung her own foot in a high arc to connect squarely with his side.

Air rushed out from his lips, telling her she’d made good on the kick to his kidney, the one he told her even a little girl could use to hurt an attacker.

His hand came up to where she’d kicked him as he stepped back from her before she could make another pass at him with her hand or foot. “Good job. You’re fast Josie-girl.”

Standing tall, his thin lips smiling, his eyes warmed, and the tight feeling in her chest disappeared.

“Thank you, Daddy.” She loved it when her dad smiled at her. “But how did you know I’d broken the twig? It could have been a deer, or something.”

He picked her up and squeezed her. “I just knew. You’ll learn to rely on your instincts, too, one day.”

She hugged him back, feeling happy and warm, but she didn’t think she would ever be as good a soldier as her dad. She tried, though. It made him happy, and since Mama died, there wasn’t much that did. She tried very hard not to think of Mama or how it felt to be tucked into bed with a gentle kiss and a bedtime story.

Mama had been soft, but Josie had to be hard. Daddy said so. He said she was ten years old now and too old for bedtime stories, but he let her read at night. Once a week he took her to the library in town at the bottom of the mountain and let her check out as many books as she wanted.

She liked the old fairy tales—the ones without pictures—but they were all wrong because the princesses never knew how to fight. Girls had to know how to fight. Daddy said so. Josie figured she could beat some of those evil knights and dragons easy, but she liked reading the stories anyway.

“It’s time for dinner, Josie. We’ll go back now.” Daddy set her down and ruffled her hair. “All right?”

She nodded and smoothed her hair with her fingers. It was short because he said all soldiers wore their hair short. She thought sometimes she’d like long golden hair like a princess, but her hair was dark, and she wasn’t a princess anyway. She was a soldier. Not as good as Daddy, but better than some of the men that came through his mercenary school.

She put her hand in her dad’s and walked beside him, trying to match her stride to his. “None of your men found me.” She was proud of that fact.

Daddy smiled again, squeezing her fingers. “No, they didn’t.” Then he got serious and mean looking. “They’ll hear about that tonight.”

She shivered, glad she was just his daughter and not one of the soldiers who paid him to teach them how to fight. Daddy might get mad at her for being sloppy, but he never yelled at her, or made her crawl face down in the mud, or march in the icy stream that ran behind the compound, like he did the men he trained.

She was going to be the best soldier that ever lived when she grew up, but she was going to learn how to do it before Daddy figured she was old enough to be disciplined like the other soldiers. By the time she was grown up, she was never going to make mistakes, and even Daddy wasn’t going to be able to find her when she hid in the forest.