Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

where the Grand Market was held on Sundays:

Fear and work weren’t all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn’t see my mother and my father for ten years, that I’d never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon’s girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn’t recognize at the end of it. At least while I was chopping and sweltering away in front of the ovens, I didn’t have to think about any of that.