Free Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) by Matthew Medina

the
crawlspace after her days of begging had been harrowing, full of
terrifying dreams and sleepless nights. And the rats. Always, the
rats.
They would squeak at her as soon as she returned to the
crawlspace each evening, warning her away from their nest most
likely. If she’d had anywhere else to go, she would have given them
back their territory, but she had no choice now.
Oh, she had considered wandering from building to
building, scouting for a new place to rest at night, but her head
always returned to her secret lair hidden behind the walls because
she knew that there were worse things than rats out there in the
Seat.
So once she had resigned herself to the fact that she was
going to remain in the building, she determined that she would
have no choice but to deal with the rats. And she knew that the
situation between them and her would need to change soon. Her
level of exhaustion was affecting her during the day, as she found
herself nodding off at inopportune times, which was deadly for a
young girl alone in a place like the Seat.
She had seem them everywhere in the Seat back when
she’d still had her eyesight. She had always thought that they
looked harmless, honestly, but she also knew that if she was going
to remain living in the building, it was either her or them. She was
the one moving into their territory, so she knew that the odds were
going to be stacked against her.
And so she began to focus some of her daytime activities
around finding a solution to the problem. When she was idle, she
tried to formulate a plan of attack to get rid of the pests and when
she wasn’t, she was scavenging through long-picked over ruins in
the hopes of finding something she might use to trap the creatures.
She didn’t want to kill them if she could help it, but she very well
knew it might have to come to that. She hoped though, to be able
to catch and relocate them, or if that wasn’t possible, to find a way
to drive them away.
Most of the ruins in the Seat had already been cleared of
anything valuable by generations of scavengers, but Catelyn’s
needs were much different than most, and she hoped that she
might get her hands on materials she could use to build a
rudimentary cage.
Days of looking hadn’t turned up anything useful, and the
nights had been a constant battle of wills between her and the
established residents. Thus far, they were winning.
It was during one of those first nights in her conflicts with
the rats when Catelyn, despite her complete blindness, began to
sense something as the rats scurried past her feet, nipping at her
toes and ankles. As always happened when the rats made one of
their assaults, Catelyn was standing in the attic, her back pressed
against the wall, her ears tightly focused to any sound. She’d
learned in prior encounters with them that if she simply stood still
they would make their threats, then grow tired of squeaking and
turn to watching her in silence, and she could at least have a few
prayers of peace and quiet in which to sleep.
They were still screeching at her, but it was getting better,
and she felt like she could almost feel them getting bored, tiring of
their verbal assault. It would end the moment she moved around
too much, so she tried her best to remain in one place, and used
that as an opportunity to hone her sense of hearing.
She had become intimately familiar with the squeaking
each of the rats made, and after the first few encounters with them,
she became convinced that she could tell the rodents apart by the
sound of their squeaks.
She believed that she was able to distinguish three
separate individual rats. Each of them “spoke” to her in a slightly
different way, and after getting to know them and their habits
around her intrusive presence into their home, she began to assign
them different personalities and even named them to make it
easier to tell them apart.
Bossy was the name of the rat who she imagined was
calling out orders to the other rats. His