Where Is Your Sense of Duty?
Dawn in the wilds came sideways, slow blue bleeding across the tangled horizon, so hesitant and gradual that Alina thought perhaps the world might simply choose to sleep through it, to give up on the business of day altogether. But, as always, the sun rose, indifferent to the machinations of earth and its creatures. Even before the first thread of light stitched the clouds to the treetops, the woods had quickened, pulsing with an uncanny anticipation she could sense in her blood and bones. Every tree, every ancient pine and twisted birch strained upward as if to catch the sun’s first glance, while the undergrowth bristled in a hush that was anything but silent.
The intense scent of loam and green stung Alina’s nose. It was a sharpness that cut past the soapy perfumes of her old life, biting and wild, a reminder that she no longer belonged to rooms of polished marble and air perfumed with imported orange blossoms.Her new world was moss and rot and sap, the quiet violence of things pushing up from the earth in an endless struggle mirrored in Alina herself. When she inhaled, she expected the cold to burn her lungs as it had those first weeks, but now she only tasted the faint salt of her own fear.
The woods were watching. She felt it as a prickle over her skin: the animals, the wind, the waking things that lived beyond her understanding. The birds had stopped their morning crescendo as the rebels had taken position, their silence an omen they could ill afford. Now, they were taking up their conversations again, songs of joy and loss, hunger and satisfaction, seeking and finding. A squirrel, expertly proficient in the art of keeping well-stocked caches, judging by its chubbiness, zipped across the leaf-cushioned path, a flash of gray gone in an instant, swallowed whole by the roots of a gnarled yew. Alina watched it vanish and wondered, not for the first time, if she would be as quick. Or if, when the time came, she would freeze and be seen.
She crouched lower, the cold and wet of the mossy ground seeping through the thin fabric of her leggings. The stones beneath dug into her kneecaps, sending a slow ache up her shins, but she didn’t dare move. The wind shifted, and with it the world around her. Branches bent and groaned, the canopy shivered, and from a distance came a sound like the tolling of a muted bell—three notes, measured, impossible to mistake. The signal.
They moved as one, or near enough. Alina braced herself behind the ragged rise of a boulder slicked with centuries of rain, her breath shallow and deliberate. For a moment, she shut her eyes and let her thoughts flicker through all the ways this could end. It had become a kind of ritual: imagine the worst, then do the thing anyway.
To her left, Kael blended so perfectly into the bramble that Alina had to look twice to be sure he was still there. His dark hair, longer now and matted by the morning dew, left his face a blur against the shadows. He was all sinew and stillness with his hands pressed into the earth, fingers splayed as if rooting for strength. The tension in his posture was almost beautiful, the readiness of a predator unsure whether it was about to hunt or be hunted. His eyes, when he caught her glance, were almost luminous in the gloom under the bushes: golden, unblinking, unreadable. By now, it had somehow become natural that Kael would be at her side, for all the world to see—and yet there was a gap between them that seemed unbridgeable. But now was not the time to dwell on that.
Just beyond Kael, Marcus lay in a coil that defied expectation. He was larger than the others, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, his presence always the first to fill a room. And yet, somehow, he moved with a ponderous restraint, keenly aware of his mass and how he had to move to stay hidden. Each breath was a careful negotiation with his ribs, every shift of weight considered. She’d never met someone who could shrink so thoroughly into the background, or who could explode back to size in a heartbeat. His hands, which she knew could snap a man’s wrist with casual efficiency, now hovered in front of him, palms open to the dirt as if in prayer.
Seraphina was not visible, which was exactly as intended. The night before, she’d vanished into the lower branches with a single word and a curl of her lips, promising to cover their approach. Alina searched the tree line for any hint—an arrow, a wisp of red hair, the barely-there shimmer of a blade—but found nothing. That was her way: to be neither seen nor unseen, but to hover in the mind of everyone around her as a possibility, a threat, aquestion mark. Even now, Alina wondered if Seraphina watched her, judging every twitch.
Finn and Maven, having completed their preparatory tasks, remained out of sight. If things went awry they were to decide whether to come to their aid or, if things looked really bleak, to retreat.
Alina’s heartbeat hammered in her ears, but her hands, trained by weeks of drills, were steady on the hilt of her blade. The sword was borrowed, dulled at the point, but it felt heavier than any scepter she’d ever held. The rebels had told her she’d learn to love its weight, that it would become an extension of her will, but she wasn’t sure it belonged to her at all. Her mother would have laughed to see her now, knees caked in mud, hair pulled back with a strip of torn linen, the elegant curve of her neck hidden by a patchwork cloak. Not a princess—she was barely even a girl.
A branch snapped to her right, closer than the others, and Alina tensed, ready to leap or lunge or die. But it was only Finn, his eyes bright with adrenaline, mouth curled into its usual reckless grin. He slid into place beside Marcus, barely disturbing the undergrowth, and nodded at Alina with a showman’s flourish. She bit back a smile and let herself breathe again.
Above and ahead, the forest opened toward the cart track—a muddy vein running through the wilds. The sun was up now, painting the leaves with a thin edge of gold.
Somewhere, just past the next bend, a convoy would be coming, its wagons loaded with grain and barrels of dried beans, supply carts, and at least a squad of guards. They had planned well, everyone knew what was coming, but the knowledge of it hadn’t stopped the anxious scraping in Alina’s chest. She flexed her hands, once, then again, feeling for the familiar pulse of energy in herveins. It was there, dormant, and she resented it for hiding. In a few minutes, she would need it more than she’d ever needed anything.
She peered through the frost-furred fern, heart knocking against her sternum. “Do you see them?” she mouthed, barely audible. Kael shook his head, eyes forward. He did not look at her; his jaw was set, shoulders drawn tight as if bracing for a storm. In the cold, the ghost of his breath curled and vanished.
A few feet down the slope, Marcus adjusted his position, tightening his grip on the end of a length of chain, worked into the mud hours before. His moves had been practiced and precise. The chain was placed across the track, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, covered with dirt and leaves. Now, all he had to do was pull hard and the chain would snap up and block the path. Simple but effective.
The waiting was almost unbearable.
A memory drifted up: Elara’s voice, flat and absolute, from last week’s training. “Don’t blink. Not once. People die in the blink,” she’d said, as she forced Alina to stare, unblinking, across a candle’s flame for so long her eyes had flooded with tears. “What did you learn?” Elara had asked, and Alina, furious and humiliated, had spat, “That it’s stupid.” Elara had shrugged. “So is dying.”
Now, in the chilly gloom, Alina fought the urge to blink.
A branch shifted above. She glanced up and caught, just for a heartbeat, the shape of Seraphina among the higher limbs. A string of silent hand signals passed between them: one, two, three wagons. Double guards. And, flick—Seraphina would take the first shot.
A rustle—wheels crunching over frozen leaves. Voices; male, bored, cutting through the morning chill.
“I swear my fingers are gonna snap off,” one guard grumbled. “Should've stayed in bed.”
“Better cold fingers than what I'm dealing with,” his companion replied. “Drank the whole waterskin before we left. Now my bladder's about to explode.”
“Always the same with you, isn't it? We could be marching to our deaths, and you'd still be complaining about needing to piss.”
“When I die it'll be with an empty bladder, thank you very much.”
Alina’s ears caught every word, filtered the meaning, sorted the voices into a catalog of threat. It was easy, almost automatic, the way palace life had trained her to listen before all else. One of the guards had a limp, judging by the uneven cadence of his steps. Another laughed through a broken tooth, his words whistling slightly on certain sounds. The cart horses seemed to sense the tension in the air, snorting nervously as they pressed forward, their hooves heavy against the frozen ground.
She tried not to think of the soldiers as people.
She failed.
Kael shifted, ever so slightly, and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was nothing, barely even a featherlight pressure, the ghost of reassurance but it anchored her all the same, pulling her out of her own head and back into the here and now. She let herself breathe.
The lead wagon rolled into view. It was bigger than she’d expected, the wheels nearly as tall as a grown man. The driver was bundled up in a greasy coat, red scarf drawn up over his mouth, and the guardson either side wore the blue-and-gold livery of the Royal Signal Corps. Alina’s heart skipped—there were so many of them. Six on either side! She recognized the cut of the uniform, the precise way the cuffs were stitched. These men had once stood watch in her father’s court.
