Meet Ayelet before The Covenant of Shihala begins in this short story!

“Do not run,” the peddler said, his voice dry and hollow. “Not when destiny calls. It is a thing cowards do, and you must not be that.”

Little Hada has no home. Newly escaped from her faceless slave master, she runs to the only home she's ever known. But life as a freed girl comes with just as many perils, and Hada soon discovers a home may be harder to find than she once thought.

She has faith though, in the little boy who lived down the road from her before she was taken.

Can she be saved when the mark her cruel master carved into her bone is cursed to bring ruin to her and everyone she loves?

After all, fate will not be ignored, and destiny has a strange way of coming to be. Even if it changes her into an instrument of the gods.

Or Ayelet.