She finished her bread, sipped at her now cold tea, and stared into the fire until her eyes burned. The word “war” echoed in her chest, gathering weight.
When she stood to go, she felt Finn’s hand at her elbow, a small, sturdy anchor in a world suddenly without gravity.
They walked together, silent, the buzz of the hall falling away behind them. In the shadowed corridors, she thought again of the amulet, and of her mother, and of the choice she’d just made.
I want you with us.
She wanted that, too.
10
Saved by the Rabble
The cold bit deepest just before dawn, when the sky was still iron and the world was stitched together with mist. With no palace warmth to retreat to and no kindly servant to wrap her in furs or hand her a steaming cup, Alina felt every inch of the walk in her shins and fingers. The world outside the Caves was raw, wild, and new, and it took every scrap of stubbornness not to whimper each time a bramble snagged her cloak, or she barked her toes against a hidden root.
She trailed just behind Kael, his dark form moving with eerie silence over the uneven ground. Two hours prior, he’d told her to get her cloak and slipped out of the stronghold without fanfare or explanation, simply nodding for her to follow. Tamsin had watched them go with the suspicion of a warden handing out the keys to her prisoners but said nothing. There was a rhythm to Kael’s absences—one the others recognized without speaking. Alina had yet to learn it. She often found herself looking for him and being disappointed when he wasn’t there. She still didn’tknow where they were going, but knew he would tell her in time and was content to leave it at that.
She had always regarded creeks as picturesque, blue ribbons stitched through the countryside—a view from above, hands warm on a palace window. She’d never forded one in the blackness before dawn, boots already bruised and sodden. Although she had become better at navigating the rough terrain in the last few weeks, this was quite a challenge. Just as she stopped to calculate how to tackle the slippery stones, Kael quite casually took her hand, said “Hop!” and tugged her along from stone to stone.
He had her hand in a grip so solid she wondered if he could feel her pulse galloping beneath her skin. He didn’t look at her face, only braced his own stance, and tugged her forward with this gentleness she had encountered before and found so very alluring. When they had crossed, Kael waited until she found her footing before releasing her, and the absence of his touch left her strangely bereft. She let her hand fall to her side, flexing the fingers, pretending she didn’t feel the afterglow that lingered there.
As they pressed onward into the thinning mist, Alina found herself thinking about the strange physics of connection: how a steadying hand, a single moment of mindfulness, could ripple through her like a stone thrown into deep water. She felt oddly cared for by him. It was the most exquisite feeling. It felt right. It felt like home. When had she stopped denying it?
She trailed Kael up the embankment, watching the rise and fall of his shoulders. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he was just a few years older than she, that his calm was practiced and not innate. He moved like a shadow given purpose, but there were times, like when he caught her hand, that she glimpsed the living, breakable person beneath the carefully constructed legend.
Her mind wandered to the stories Marta used to mutter as she kneaded dough in the palace kitchen. Stories of people who lived and died by the touch of others, who could sense a lie or a kindness in the space between two hands. Alina had always dismissed it as nonsense, but now, out here, she wondered if it wasn’t the only thing that mattered. A wave of longing for the woman rushed through her, so strong that she was left breathless for a moment.
They climbed for a while in silence, pale breath drifting between them. Then, as the slope grew steeper and the trees thinned, Kael exhaled and spoke quietly. “Now that you’ve chosen our side,” he said, voice low and relaxed so as not to disturb nature’s silence, “I want you to see why we fight. Not just walls and weapons, but what we hope to build on the other side of this war.” He paused, tracing the rising path with his boot. “A world where those with Gifts, like us, and those without can live together in peace. Where no one is hunted for what they are, but instead valued for what they give.”
Alina swallowed against the sting of windburn. Her heart pounded in her chest not only from the climb, but from the promise in his words.
They crested another rise and Kael slowed. “Not much farther,” he said over his shoulder. Morning light filtered through skeletal branches, illuminating a glimmer of horizon. Woodsmoke drifted on the breeze, faint but unmistakable, and beneath it rose the warm, yeasty scent of baking bread.
Below them, nestled where three rounded hills met, lay a village. It was nothing like the capital’s rigid symmetry or the rebel stronghold’s harsh lines. Timber-framed houses leaned into each other as if for support, their thatched and shingled roofs a patchwork under the sky. A haphazard fence circled the settlement,cobbled together from branches, old wagon wheels, and shards of colored glass that caught the weak light. Thin gray curls of smoke floated up from a dozen chimneys.
Kael’s voice softened, tinged with something like pride. “Welcome to Fenbridge.”
They picked their way down the slope, careful not to slip on the frosted moss or scatter the loose stones that dusted the hillside. The air was brisker here, carrying the mingled scents of ash and livestock, and Alina found herself clenching her fists inside her mittens in the futile attempt to keep the chill at bay. Each step closer to the village felt like entering a storybook illustration come to life: from the way the roofs glistened under a shell of rime to the rhythm of smoke rising in sync from a dozen chimneys, underscored by the distant, uneven chorus of morning activity.
She had never realized that peace could be so clamorous.
The sounds multiplied with every stride. Laughter echoed down the narrow main lane, colliding with the hammer-on-anvil percussion from the blacksmith’s yard and the anarchic bleating of goats penned behind a fence of tangled willow. A pair of jays argued over a crust in a bare-limbed tree, their shrill voices puncturing the human bustle. To Alina, it was chaos entirely unlike the palace she was so accustomed to, where every hour and every corridor was governed by protocol, where silence was its own kind of law.
At the very edge, where the formal path merged with the muddy outskirts of the village, a woman in a patched blue dressleaned out from her second-story window. Her hair, streaked with silver and wild as a hawk’s nest, was tied back with a length of red yarn. The woman’s face, broad and fissured from years of weather, transformed instantly when she spotted Kael.
“Oi! If it isn’t the prodigal!” she shouted in a dialect Alina could only half-understand, but the meaning was clear enough.
Before Alina could process the exchange, the woman vanished from the window, and a moment later she emerged at the crooked front gate. Kael barely had time to salute before the woman—Hella, he would later tell Alina—was upon him, arms open, voice booming. She embraced Kael with the unselfconscious affection of someone who had nursed him through fever and broken limbs, a rib-cracking squeeze that lifted his boots clean off the ground. He made a show of groaning under her strength, even as he hugged her tight in return. For a second, Kael was transformed from rebel captain and wanted fugitive into something raw and familiar: a son, a brother, a boy who had once belonged somewhere.
“Thought we’d seen the last of you,” Hella scolded as she released Kael, looking him up and down as if to inventory missing parts. “And who’s this fine sparrow tucked under your wing?” Her gaze shifted to Alina, eyes narrowing not with suspicion but appraisal, as if she could suss out every secret just by squinting hard enough.
Kael placed a gentle hand at the small of Alina’s back. “This is Alina. She’s a friend from the city.”
Alina braced herself for the kind of scrutiny she’d grown accustomed to since her exile: skepticism, wariness, the calculation of what trouble she might bring. Instead, Hella snorted, wiped her hands on her dress, and seized Alina’s in hers. Her grip was sostrong Alina felt the bones of her knuckles grind together. “Those city girls have soft hands, but hard heads,” Hella declared, meeting Alina’s gaze for a heartbeat longer than was strictly polite. Then she winked, as if to say, ‘I see you.’ “Well, come on then, don’t stand gawping like a goose. Get inside and thaw out!”
There was no room to protest; Hella’s hospitality was a current that swept them both through the wooden gate, across a muddy threshold, and into a kitchen flushed with heat and the smells of coriander, roasting root vegetables, and fresh bread before either of them had a chance to open their mouths. Bunches of dried herbs and colored glass bottles hung from the wooden ceiling beams, while jars and crockery crowded nearly every surface. Hella shooed Kael toward the hearth—”You look half frozen, lad”—then bustled about fetching mugs and bread and a sliver of sharp white cheese. She slid a steaming cup into Alina’s hands and watched, arms folded, until Alina took an obedient sip.
The tea was scalding and bitter, but it banished the ache from Alina’s cheeks and fingertips. She blinked at Kael, who had already settled back into the rhythm of the house, his shoulders relaxing as warmth and memory seeped into his bones. She realized, then, that this kitchen was more sacred than any church or chapel could ever dream of being. It was a place of unguarded laughter, of stories told over chipped mugs, of scars compared by the light of the hearth. Alina had never once sat at the palace’s enormous dining tables and felt anything like this.
