Now there was nothing left but resignation.
Not even you.
She stared at her bag—a battered satchel that had been old when she first got it—and began to fill it. Not with the desperation of someone running for their life, but with the deliberate, precise movements of a woman who had finally accepted that there was nothing left to lose.
She packed her spare shirt, the half-empty flask of water, and a chunk of hard bread wrapped in waxed cloth. She folded her only other set of trousers, the knees already patched twice and tucked them in on top. She grabbed the small, curved knife Finn had once given her “for sentimental assassinations,” and slid it into the hidden pocket she’d sewn into the lining. Last, she reached for the amulet. She’d stopped wearing it ages ago. But now, as her fingers closed around the cold metal, she felt the tiny flare of comfort, the old promise that maybe she could hold herself together long enough to make a difference somewhere else.
She put it in her bag with the rest of her things and closed it.
She sat on the cot, bag in her lap, and forced herself to look around. The room was nearly bare, having never bothered to decorate, never thought she’d stay long enough for it to matter. The blanket was still rumpled from last night’s sleep. The candle by the bed was burned down to a nub. On the table were some old notes she had kept, paper being a rare luxury.
The pen was almost dry. She wrote anyway.
Kael,
I’m sorry I was a disappointment. I will no longer be a burden.
I wish you only the best. Truly.
—A
She folded the note, left it on the cot, and stood. She straightened the bed and folded the blanket with now-steadyhands. She shrugged on her jacket, slung the bag over her shoulder, and reached for the latch.
Before she left, she allowed herself one last look. One last brush of her fingertips over the rough stone walls, this place that had almost felt like home. The walls did not give back anything, least of all warmth, but she traced her name into the dust on the small shelf, a mark no one would probably ever see but her.
She opened the door and slipped into the hall, moving silently as a ghost. The world outside was already blue with the promise of the coming morning. She would be gone before anyone woke, before Kael could call her back, before she could change her mind.
She moved through the Caves with practiced ease, passing the mess hall, the training yard, the place where she had nearly died and the place where she had first learned what it meant to be truly alive. The air was cold, but the night was clear, and the stars looked down with an indifference that felt like mercy.
Alina did not look back. She walked out of the place, and into whatever waited for her beyond the stone, leaving behind her hopes, her dreams, her love—him.
She was done waiting for someone else to tell her who she was.
She would decide for herself, even if it meant being alone.
20
Shit
The air stung as if it meant to flay her. Alina stood at the edge of the world, or what passed for a world in the hour before dawn—a gray, pitiless expanse of rock and cold that rolled away in ridges as far as the imagination dared. There had been no ceremonial exit, no one to see her off, not even the shadows of the Caves at her back. She had chosen the earliest possible hour, and it seemed the mountains themselves had agreed to keep her secret.
She pulled her jacket tighter, but the wind slipped through the seams and gnawed at her wrists and collarbones, raising gooseflesh on skin already mottled with bruises. Every breath hurt; every step onto the half-frozen scree crackled like a dare.
The trailhead was nothing but a gouge in the rock, a suggestion of a path made by the feet of animals braver or more desperate than her. In daylight, it would have looked like a broken promise, a way upward that had never delivered anyone to safety. In the flat, blue-black wash of pre-dawn, it was simply the only direction left.Alina shouldered her bag—a sack of frayed canvas, really—and set out.
The crunch of gravel under her boots became her only companion. With every step, the sound echoed up the slope, rebounding off the granite like the bark of a lean, hungry dog. She listened for any pursuit, half hoping, half dreading that the rebels had second thoughts and were coming for her after all. But there was nothing, not even birdsong. Just the whistle of the wind brushing over the rocky slope. The sky above was a scrap of velvet, pinpricked with the last few stars and the first faint glow of the sun, too far below the rim to offer anything but the promise of more glare and more cold.
Alina did not look back.
The slope was steeper than it looked from below. The path—if it could be called that—angled sharply upward, a zigzag between boulders the size of palace beds, every turn threatening to pitch her down into the empty air behind. She dug in her heels with each step, half-dragged by gravity, half-pushed by the memory of the voices she had left in the Caves.
Traitor.
Snake.
Liability.
Not even you.
