Rynna hesitated.
No. She didn’t believe it. Even if they all came for her at once, the outcome wouldn’t change. She already saw the ending. And it wasn’t them left standing.
“If only it were that easy.” The words snuck out quieter than she meant, pulled from some place she hadn’t planned to touch.
Then her brows pulled tight. Her mouth flattened.
“I see.” She ground the words between her teeth. “Well. I guess that’s that.”
Her hands rubbed together, rough and rapid, a motion with no purpose, as if she could scrub away the conversation. The nearness. The stupid, fragile thread that had stretched between them just moments ago.
“Not forever.” He stepped in, reaching. “Never forever. Just a couple of years. Give them time to forget their fear.”
She wrenched free from his grip, snatched her sheathed sword from the nearby table, and grabbed her boots in the same motion. Then she walked out into the gray hush before dawn, the tent flap closing shut behind her.
He didn’t chase her.
Across the camp, Empty Night lifted her head from the hay. Her ears twitched once, then again, before she moved, hooves tracking through the packed earth.
Rynna pulled on each boot with quiet purpose, leather straps tightening beneath her fingers, one after the other. Her sword followed, guided over her shoulder, the scabbard sinking into place against her spine.
Around her, the camp stirred. Tents flapped lightly in the breeze. A cough. A shift of fabric. But no one stepped out.No one dared.
“Fine.” She shook her head, her mouth curving into a shape too bitter to be called a smile.
She stepped over the camp’s fire ring, now only charred embers, her fists tight at her sides. The mare watched her come, ears flicking once, then again, before she dropped her muzzle, offering the thick fall of her mane without a sound.
Rynna didn’t slow. Her hand closed around the dark strands, muscles flexing with familiar tension. And in one smooth motion, she launched upward and settled onto the mare’s back, the worn blanket molding to her shape as if it remembered her.
Her gaze swept the tents one last time—the loose scatter of canvas, the faint heat still rising from half-buried embers, the trampled earth marked by a night’s worth of footsteps. Something in her quieted, like a flame drawn low. Nothing here was meant to last, but for a moment, she’d almost let herself believe it could.
She turned her head and spat, the saliva dark against the dirt.
“Immortal cowards.”
Then, louder: “Let’s go!”
Empty Night’s nostrils flared at the sound of Rynna’s voice and shifted her weight forward, one hoof striking hard against the ground. Her body followed, moving into a heavy trot with growing urgency.
Rynna leaned in, and the mare stretched into a faster gait, each stride longer, stronger.
Then the gallop came—sudden and full—like thunder peeled open across the plains, driving them toward the river, into the cool wind and the waiting quiet beyond.
Wind tore past her ears, loud enough to strip thought from sound, and for a while, the ache behind her breasts dulled beneath the rush.
When they reached the silty blue edge of the river, Rynna leaned back, fingers tightening in Empty Night’s mane. The gallop melted into a trot, then a walk, the mare’s hooves crunching softly through gravel and dry reed. The quiet settled around them in layers.
Smoke smudged the sky to the north, thin black threads rising from what remained of the village, pointing toward the pale glimmer of the inland sea beyond. She didn’t need to see it up close. She knew that stretch of land too well. They’d already razed it, taking its spoils.
West was no better. That road stank of old ash and past sins. She’d ridden with the others there, as well, burning fields until the soil turned to glass.
A shape caught her eye along the water’s edge—bones, long picked clean, ribs splayed wide, skull half-buried in silt. No flies. No tracks. Whatever had died there had done so alone, and nothing had dared touch it since.
She stared a moment longer, then turned her eyes south, her thoughts snagging on something Vorian had scoffed earlier:“This supposed Queen does not care for her people.”
It stuck.
There’d been rumors, murmurs around campfires, of names muttered by merchants before their mouths closed for good. A Queen who called herself divine, ruling beside a Consort-King. These lands, the ones Rynna had left for dead, were said to lie under that throne’s shadow.
