“You’ll stay for the festival, of course,” Hella announced, not as a question but a statement of fact. “Wouldn’t be a proper return if you didn’t.” Kael nodded, looking almost sheepish, and mumbled something about helping with the lanterns. Hella cackled and clapped him on the back, then turned her attention to Alina. “Andyou, my dear, will help me make the honey cakes. City girls need to learn a thing or two about hands and dough.”
Alina nodded, wordless, her heart a mess of confusion and longing. Hella’s embrace, the simple act of being folded into a stranger’s everyday life, was something she had never thought to envy.
They left the kitchen after some time with the promise to be back to help with the baking and stepped into the heart of the village. The square was not a square at all, but a rough oval ringed with houses, a well, and a scatter of market stalls. Preparations for the Festival of Lights were in full swing: strings of colored paper lanterns stretched from roof to roof, and children darted about with armfuls of dried reeds and silver-painted bunting. The air was thick with anticipation and the scent of pine from half-constructed bonfires.
A gang of children, faces smudged with soot and cold, seemed to be playing an elaborate game halfway between wrestling and tag. They swarmed around Kael when they saw him, shouting his name, grabbing at his coat and boots. One boy, smaller than the others and quick as a weasel, attached himself to Kael’s leg and clung there, refusing to let go even as Kael stumbled in exaggerated defeat. He eventually pried the child loose and set him atop his shoulders, where the boy roared with triumph.
Alina could not stop watching Kael—not the rebel but the man, the boy, the living contradiction she still could not fit into a single box. He laughed here. He allowed his hair to be mussed, his cheeks pinched, his dignity assaulted by the sticky hands of children. He was totally and utterly transformed. Freed. He belonged, in a way that made her feel both warm and hungry.
But it was not only Kael. Alina turned, taking in the entire square, and watched as dozens of moments unfolded at once. A baker, forearms dusted in flour, leaned from his shopfront to trade insults with the cobbler across the lane. An old man, toothless but merry, sat on the well’s edge, carving a bird from willow wood and telling a story to anyone who would listen. Two women in matching aprons decorated a lantern with pressed flowers, arguing good-naturedly over which ones would burn brightest. Everywhere, people were touching, shoulders bumped in greeting, hands clasped in laughter, arms slung around waists in a choreography of comfort.
It was so different from the palace, where even affection was measured and prescribed, where every gesture was calculated for effect and surveillance was the air one breathed. Here, people held nothing back. When Alina caught someone’s eye, they nodded or smiled, or simply stared with frank, unblinking curiosity. No one, not a single soul, looked away in fear or disdain.
They wandered the village for an hour, maybe more. Kael showed her the schoolhouse, a one-room cottage painted blue and filled with mismatched desks. He pointed out the healer’s hut (“I’ve spent more days in there than I care to count”) and the smithy, where a young woman with arms like tree limbs pounded out horseshoes and axes as if it was nothing special that a female would do that. Alina almost tripped over her feet, staring. There was a communal bathhouse, a meeting hall, and even a rickety little library stocked with books so battered they had to be tied shut with twine.
With every new corner, Alina’s sense of displacement lessened and she started to see what Kael saw: the beauty in the imperfections, the strength in the chaos, and the way a place couldbe held together not by walls but by the stubborn insistence of its people. She found herself drawn to the way every person seemed entirely themselves, reveling in the undignified reality of life so unlike the artificial nature of the palace.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
She followed his gaze. At first, nothing seemed unusual. Then, she noticed the subtle details: the way a woman drawing water from a well flicked her wrist and the bucket rose on its own, water splashing over the sides in a perfect arc. How the baker, when dusting loaves with flour, made the powder settle in even stripes, as if by invisible hand. The child, who, after tripping and scraping his knee, watched the skin close and pinken as his mother whispered over it.
“They’re all Gifted,” Alina said, awed.
Kael nodded. “Most. Some aren’t, but it doesn’t matter here.”
He led her to the square, where a group of men and women gathered around a fire pit. The logs snapped and popped, the heat a welcome relief. Someone handed Kael a mug; he sipped, then passed it to Alina. The drink was hot and sweet, some kind of spiced cider with a sharpness to it.
As Alina drank, she watched the people. No one hid their abilities, but neither did they flaunt them. A blacksmith heated his forge with a gesture and then pounded metal with ordinary muscle. A child conjured a small flame to light her father’s pipe, then snuffed it out with a giggle. Here, magic was woven into the fabric of life. It was no grand spectacle, but a simple fact of being.
Kael sat beside her on the bench. “This is why I brought you. I wanted you to see what’s possible.”
She bristled, instinctively defensive. “You mean, to show me how the world would be if my family hadn’t…?”
He shook his head. “No. Not blame. Just truth.” He pointed at the square, the laughing faces, the easy mingling of Gifted and those without magic. “This is what freedom could look like. Not just for us, but for everyone.”
Alina looked at him, searching for the old intensity, the bite of sarcasm or calculation. She found none. For the first time, she saw hope in his eyes, real and true, and not just a strategy.
“How do you keep it safe?” she asked, voice low.
Kael’s smile flickered. “We don’t, not really. When strangers come, the villagers hide the Gift. There are patrols—my people, sometimes, sometimes just friends. But mostly, we trust. We trust the secret will keep, and that if it’s ever broken, we’ll find a way.”
She studied the villagers’ faces, the firelight dancing over skin and laughter. It was more than she’d ever believed possible, and far more than she’d been allowed to imagine. The palace had taught her that the Gifted were dangerous because they were unpredictable, wild, impossible to contain. Here, she saw the opposite: magic braided into daily life, as ordinary as bread and gossip.
She sipped her drink, feeling the warmth spread through her. Above them, the sky was a thin blue, the winter sun beaming down on them, for once letting itself be felt. In the distance, a bell tolled, calling the village to prayer or work or both. The people rose, stretching and joking, and drifted off to their daily chores.
Kael stood. “Come. There’s more to see.”
They walked past the school, the tiny apothecary, and the mud-brick kiln where a boy with burn-scarred arms shaped clay into pitchers and cups. Her eyes grew wide with wonder at the contrast between this vibrant place and the oppressive walls she once called home. Here, the sun bathed the cobblestone streets ina warm, golden light, and the air was filled with the gentle murmur of conversations and the distant clatter of market stalls. There was no need to conceal herself in shadows or navigate the sharp edges of resentment. People moved with a relaxed purpose, tending to their daily tasks with an unhurried grace. Even the silence here was different; it wrapped around her like a comforting embrace, rich with the soft rustle of leaves and the distant song of a bird, rather than the hollow echo of solitude.
As they walked, the villagers greeted Kael as if a long-lost son had returned, with the comfortable familiarity of people who expected nothing and everything from each other. “Kael!” a grizzled old man called, slapping him on the shoulder hard enough to make him rock on his heels. “You still got both your eyes, I see.”
“Sadly for some,” Kael replied, and the two shared a brief, rowdy laughter, the sort that hummed with years of shared misfortune. A pair of girls in patched skirts ran up and strung a garland of pinecones over Kael’s head without asking; he stooped to allow it, grumbling but grinning nonetheless, and one of them kissed him on the cheek before darting away.
Alina trailed behind him, half-present, half watching a story unfold from the sidelines. She had grown used to Kael as a force: all edges, all momentum, always straining at invisible reins. But among these people, he seemed to expand and soften at once, a version of himself she suspected even he had forgotten how to inhabit. His stride slowed with each step, shoulders unfastening from their habitual tension, voice growing warmer with every greeting. Here, he was not the Rebellion’s leader or a strategic asset. He was simply Kael, a man whose presence sparked a small, immediate joy in the people who claimed him.
She envied them. Not for their poverty, evident enough in their threadbare sleeves and the houses patched with tar and hope, but for the way they moved around each other, lives woven so tightly that a single tug would unravel everything, or else knot it closer. It was a tapestry of belonging. Alina tried to imagine herself as a thread in that weave, but found herself wanting.
They passed the baker, who came out with flour on his nose and, without preamble, pressed a warm roll into Kael’s palm and another into Alina’s. “Eat. You’re skin and bones,” he admonished her, but with a wink. Kael tore his in two and handed half to a passing child, who grinned and stuffed it into his mouth before running off to rejoin the chaos. At the well’s lip, the old man with the wooden birds called out the news of the day—not the politics or courtly rumors of the palace, but whose goat had given birth, who’d lost a boot in the mud, who’d sung the wrong verse at prayer and been forgiven anyway. Kael listened, smiling, letting himself be drawn into the mundane rhythm of village life.
