The world narrowed to the next step, the next moment, the next obstacle clambered over or ducked beneath. Alina’s senses had gone curiously sharp, every detail magnified past endurance—the smell of pine sap so thick it coated the inside of her nose, the metallic tang of blood from every direction, the brittle snap of twigs underfoot. Her ears rang with the memory of her own scream, but above it she caught the sound of pursuit: voices echoing through the trees, the staccato bark of orders, the soldiers scrambling to establish discipline after the shockwaves.
They ran blindly, cutting through brambles and deadfall, the terrain sloping downward until suddenly the ground gave way to a muddy bank and the gleam of running water. Kael veered hard, sliding down the bank through dense underbrush in a controlledtumble and landing beside the creek. He motioned for the others to follow, then crouched low, peering back the way they’d come.
Alina’s knees finally collapsed. She crashed into the earth, her hands splayed in the cold shallows. Her vision swam, and for a moment she could only hear the hammering of her own pulse, the frantic struggle to drag air into her lungs. Kael knelt beside her, hands hovering, not quite touching but ready to catch her if she fell any farther. His eyes darted between Alina, the water, and the shadowed woods behind him, never still for a second. Above them, the bushes and brambles provided a shield, though for how long Alina could not say.
Marcus staggered up to the creek, dropped to his haunches, and plunged his arm into the water up to his bleeding shoulder, hissing as the shock hit him. His other hand pressed against his forehead, as if holding his skull together by force of will alone. Seraphina followed, slid down the embankment, and came to rest on her knees. She doubled over and retched, bringing up bile and nothing else, then spat into the rocks and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. There was no dignity left, only survival.
They huddled there, clustered in a patch of thin sunlight filtered through the shattered branches above. Kael’s head was on a swivel, scanning, calculating, never relaxing even for a second. Alina felt the emptiness in herself, like nectar drained from a glass. She’d thought that using her power would leave her triumphant, or at least changed, but all it seemed to do was carve out the space inside her, leaving her hollow and cold.
No one spoke for a long minute.
Kael squeezed her hand, and she realized he was shaking as badly as she was.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
She tried to answer, but her throat was raw, her whole body hollowed out. Instead, she leaned against him, let herself be held, and listened to the distant noise of reinforcements crashing through the forest after them. Let them come, she thought. She had already become more than she’d ever been allowed to be.
They limped through the woods until the sun climbed high enough to burn away the worst of the morning chill. The retreat was a disaster—no plan, no order, just the hard scramble for somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t crawling with the King’s men. Where the others were, they didn’t know, only able to hope they might be making their own way home. By the time they found the hollow, a low spot beneath a half-dead willow, Alina’s legs had stopped listening to her. Kael eased her down to a patch of dry ground, then checked Marcus, who was already busy tearing his shirt into strips to stanch the bleeding from his shoulder.
Seraphina moved around the perimeter, bow in hand, but her movements were uneven. She favored her right side, the other arm pressed close to her ribs. When she circled back to the hollow, she set the bow down and slumped beside Marcus, not bothering to mask the pain. Kael fished in his kit for a salve for Marcus’s wound.
The silence was thick as pitch.
Alina kept herself apart. She sat on a rock at the edge of the hollow, hands curled into her lap, staring at the trembling in her fingers as if it belonged to someone else. She could feel the eyes of the others on her—sometimes direct, sometimes glancing, butalways there. No one said anything, not at first. Only the birds kept singing their songs, oblivious to the misery on the ground below.
Kael cleaned Marcus’s wound with water from his canteen, then packed the cut with the salve. “You’ll keep the arm,” he said, voice flat.
Marcus grunted. “Might prefer losing it to another day like this one.”
Kael didn’t smile, just wrapped the bandage and tied it off. He moved to Seraphina, checked her for breaks or sprains other than her ankle. Seraphina hissed when he touched her side, but said nothing.
Only when he finished did Kael turn to Alina.
She didn’t look up. She didn’t have the strength to. She was wrecked, her muscles twitching at random, vision doubled at the edges, sweat cooling on her skin in a sour film. The words she’d needed to say—the apology, the explanation—were stuck somewhere in her chest.
Kael crouched beside her, keeping a careful distance. His gold eyes were tired, the lines at their corners deeper than before. When he spoke, it was not as a commander, or even a friend. It was as someone who had lost something important.
“We need to talk about what happened back there.”
Alina swallowed. She tried to find his gaze, but her own slid away.
Seraphina answered instead: “You could have killed us all.”
There was no accusation in her voice, just the dull shock of someone too tired to feel anything sharper. Marcus didn’t add to it, but his silence was heavy as an anchor.
Alina’s throat closed up. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I—I lost control.”
Kaelnodded. “You saved Marcus,” he said. “But we don’t know about Finn and Maven. You can’t—” He struggled for the word for a long moment. “You can’t be a weapon if you can’t aim. This time we managed to come out of it alive. But that was pure luck and there is only so much of that to go around.”
The rebuke hurt more than she’d expected. She wanted to lash out, to defend herself, but the memory of Rowan’s face—horrified, then hungry with speculation—was enough to clamp her mouth shut.
Alina said nothing. Her worry for Finn almost made her puke.
Marcus rolled his eyes skyward. “We’re all weapons if you think about it. Some just have a bigger blast radius.” Alina kept her eyes down.
Seraphina picked at the skin around her thumb. “Now that they’ve seen it, they will want you more than ever. You can’t go back, Princess. Not anymore.” Still, Alina remained silent.
The title stung. But there was no malice in it, just a kind of bleak resignation.
