If you guys don't want to go to the link I can try to post the excerpt in multiple comments.

Wren stared at the prostrate body of the man on the gurney. A new pair of wings jutted from his back, feathers matted with blood. Two huge gashes crawled up from where they'd emerged and over his shoulders. His face was covered with a sheet to protect it from the sun, and beneath it he barely moved.

The crowd parted as the winged guardsmen carried him past. The women whispered to each other in words too low for Wren to hear. They jumped out of the way as the gurney got close, as if the wings were contagious. Wren shuddered and backed up a few paces. She knew she wouldn't catch it, but the sight of the blood made her stomach turn.

They passed through a few more tents and out of view. Wren went back to her usual wanderings, trying not to think about it. She'd never seen anyone fledge before, not for real. She'd heard whispers from the women in the caravan, or stories from her friend Armand, who told her about everything that went on in the guard. Seeing it was another thing entirely. Like seeing a dead body ready for burial.

The women stopped their chattering and dispersed, and Wren blended in with them until she was out of sight. This place made her feel like an ant tossed into a sugar bowl, out of place and unwanted. Ten thousand people called the caravan home, and the desert of Terres stretched on for so many miles around them that most people had never been anywhere else.

She tried not to make eye contact with anyone as she walked back to her family's tent. She didn't have friends here save for one, and she liked it that way. She'd tried, at first, to find other companions. But it was invariable in a place like this, where they wandered and stopped for no more than a month at a time, that everyone would eventually leave.

Of course, some stayed. Families who ran the markets--like her parents did--could make a living off the caravan, if they were prudent. Most weren't. Most budgeted poorly, had their stocks dry up, lost all their customers, then left themselves. It was to be expected in a place that attracted people who couldn't find a place anywhere else. She couldn't take that risk. She'd only kept the one friend around because he was a guardsmen and therefore could not leave.

She eventually picked her way to her family's tent with minimal conversation past a required 'Hi' here or there to one of her mother's regulars. The tents were pitched like patchwork, laid out with no particular rhyme or reason, with an occasional traveling wagon interspersed in between. It made it easy to avoid contact when she wanted to.

No one was home, which made Wren glad. They'd be busy at the marketplace, or packing their wares to leave at the end of the week. There was nothing she wanted more than to be alone, after the previous night's conversation with her mother. It seemed to be happening more and more often, talk of marriage, and it made Wren's skin crawl.

She ducked inside and breathed in the smell of old leather and dry air. It was comforting, like home, even though this place wasn't home. This place was the farthest thing there was from home. She pitied the man on the gurney, who was probably a long way from wherever he came from and probably just as scared as she was, when she'd arrived.

For the third time that week, tears welled in Wren's eyes. In four years it hadn't gotten better. Her heart still called back to the tiny village she once called home, a home she could never go back to. She longed to see the vast flats of nothing, ready to be chipped away and made into salt. She would do anything to smell the drying furnaces where they laid it out in racks, or to dip her hands in their one water pump.

But never again. That was gone now. She'd never get it back. Wren wiped her eyes and pulled a torn cloak off the shelf, then picked up a sewing needle. There was no point in dwelling over things you couldn't change.