She wore each slur like an extra layer beneath her clothes, hot and tight and impossible to remove.
For the first hour, Alina climbed as if she could outrun the words that haunted her. Each step gouged out another debt from her body. Her lungs burned until the taste of blood perfumed the back of her throat, and the tendons in her calves felt ready to snap. She welcomed the pain, even pushed for it; it took herfocus away from the unbearable pain inside. She kept her face averted from the dark mouth of the cave down below in case someone—anyone—was standing there, watching her go. She didn't want to give that hypothetical person the satisfaction of seeing her break, even if it was less than likely that someone could even see her from this distance.
At a switchback, she stopped and allowed herself a glance toward the east, blinking at the sharp ache in her knees and the prickle of sweat that ran cold over her ribs. The horizon was a bone-thin blade, the night’s dense black peeled away to reveal a surgical line of dawn slicing the world in two. Somewhere far behind and below her, the kingdom slumbered, full of desperation and an inherent lust for power and violence. Up here, there was nothing. No fighting, no scheming, no love, no loss. Just the relentless pressure of stone and the constant, whining buzz of the wind.
She inhaled and the wind tore the breath from her lips, leaving her even emptier. This was what the rebels had wanted all along, wasn't it? Not to kill her, but to send her out to vanish into the indifference of the world. No one needed to stain their hands with royal blood if the elements could do it for them. They got what they wanted. She could admit that now: they had won.
She pressed onward, her boots slipping and catching on the fine, glassy dust that sheathed the rocks. The air thinned until her head ached, and the slope sharpened with every step. Once she stumbled and went down hard, her hands catching her weight against the jagged edge of a boulder. Her skin split and pain lashed at her, blood welling up in quick beads—bright in the half-light, almost beautiful. She stared at her palms, at the torn, ruined skin. Well, that was what came from hanging on too tightly.
She didn't bother wrapping the bleeding. It was easier to use the sting to ground her, to focus on the raw immediacy of stinging air and dripping blood, rather than let her thoughts turn in their endless circles—Kael’s silence when she left his room, Tamsin’s face cinched tight with contempt, the look in her father’s eyes the last time she’d seen him. There was no way to appease any of them. The damage was done, and it could not be undone.
The path narrowed, winding like a scar through the stone. The wind howled up the side of the world and battered her hair into a wild halo, the ends stinging her face and sticking to the salt of her tears. With nobody to see her cry, Alina let the tears fall freely for the first time in days until they stung and froze on her face. She chewed the inside of her cheek and forced her legs to keep moving, even as her thigh muscles started to knot and spasm.
With every step, she replayed the memory of the mess hall: Maven’s voice, oily and smug, twisting his story into a perverse version of the truth, painting her in a light so horrible that the audience’s faces were warped with disgust. Traitor, he’d called her, and the others had nodded along, even the ones she thought she’d befriended. She remembered the exact moment her vision had gone red with shame, and how her will to fight snapped in two like a brittle twig, leaving her unable to defend herself anymore.
She should have known better. She’d spent her entire life being told she was a liability; too soft, too trusting, too eager to please. Her own family had said it so often that, eventually, she’d started to believe it. It was a shock, then, to discover the rebels were no better. They simply spoke a different dialect of disappointment.
And yet, even now, as the mountain battered her and the cold gnawed at every exposed inch of skin, she found herself hungering for their approval. For someone to say: ‘You didthe right thing’. Or even: ‘We miss you’. The absence of those words was its own punishment, and it burned fiercer than the wind could ever hope to.
The farther she walked, the less the world seemed to care that she existed. There were no witnesses to her exile—not the rebels, not her parents, not even the birds that sometimes flitted along the lower ridges. It was like she’d been erased, written out of every story, and she wondered if perhaps that was the most honest fate of all. She was not meant to belong, not to any of them, not to the world at large, not even to herself. The thought was cold and relentless, and it seeped into her bones along with the wind.
The trail eventually gave up all pretense of being a trail and became a negotiation with the mountain, a constant argument between her will and its towering indifference. She clambered over ledges sharp enough to shred her sleeves, ducked under overhangs crusted with frost and lichen, and squeezed through tight cuts between standing stones where her shoulders scraped both sides. Her breath came in fogged, ragged bursts, each inhale bringing with it the metallic taste of the high air. For a time, she stopped thinking entirely and let the animal urgency of survival take over.
But pain and fatigue have their own gravity, and after another hour, her thighs trembled outright with every step. Her boots threatened to betray her on every loose stone, and her vision blurred with the effort of staying upright.
She paused, knuckles white on a jutting stone, and dared to look back the way she’d come.
The view was spectacular. The rebel stronghold was already invisible, lost behind a series of folded ridges and a curtain of low cloud that rolled up from the north. Below, the land was painted in the bruised colors of early light, purples and blues overlaid with thesickly yellow of the first sunbeam. Alina felt nothing but cold. She let her gaze linger, searching for any sign that she’d been followed. There was none.
She pressed on.
The sun, once it arrived, was more a mockery than a comfort. It shone directly into her eyes for the next half mile, forcing her to squint against the glare and navigate by instinct rather than sight. The wind never let up—if anything, it sharpened, dragging against her jacket and pulling at the hair she’d twisted back in a rough braid. By now, her cheeks were numb and her ears stung with the cold. Her hands were so raw she could barely feel the straps of her bag.
She found a short, flat section of trail and collapsed onto it, legs splayed, lungs heaving. Holding her hands above her face, she grimaced. The cuts were already crusted with blood and dust, the fingernails split and dirty, and her skin was red raw. Alina wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to simply let go. To stop fighting the mountain, the past, the constant press of expectation. Would the world even notice if she sat here and froze into a relic?
No, she decided. It would not. Nevertheless, she forced herself upright, ignored the new aches in her back and knees, and resumed the climb.
It was steeper now. The ridgeline was so close she could see the change in color where the rock turned from dark gray to a near-white dusted with snow. Alina fixed her eyes on the point where the two met and aimed for it, letting the pain in her feet and legs become a mantra, a rhythm to measure the miles.
When she reached the top, the wind caught her full in the face and nearly knocked her over. She steadied herself with both hands, leaning into the gust, and looked out.
On the far side of the ridge, the world dropped away in a dizzying plunge, an endless sweep of stone and shadow, studded here and there with gnarled trees and the thin ribbon of a river far below. The sky was enormous, pale blue smeared with wisps of ice-cloud, the sun climbing higher but not yet strong enough to melt the frost that glittered on every surface. For a moment, she just stood there, panting, her body shaking with exertion and the simple shock of having survived this far. In a corner of her mind, she noticed that she was still able to see the beauty of the world and be touched by it.
For the first time since running from the Caves in a blind rush, her thoughts slowed and her emotions settled. A strange calm set in. She looked around and saw the barrenness that lay beneath the beauty. With clinical detachment she noted that there was no food to be found here and worse, no water. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough by far. The landscape stretched on as far as the eye could see—no building, no sign of habitation. No shelter for the night.
She remembered something Marta had once told her, late at night in the palace kitchens, when Alina had confessed to being terrified of open heights. “It’s not the falling that gets you,” Marta had said, pressing a sticky-sweet bun into her hand. “It’s the moment before, when you realize you’re all the way up and there’s no way back.” There was indeed no way back now; only forward. She would have to see where it would lead her. Or where her journey would end.
Alina smiled at the memory—sour, but not without its own warmth. She reached into her bag, found the hunk of hard breadshe’d brought, and took a bite. It was nearly inedible, stale and gritty, but it sat heavy in her stomach and gave her the illusion of comfort.
She allowed herself a minute—just one—to watch the sun edge over the next ridge. To let the light, weak as it was, soak into her bones. Then she put the bread away, wiped the crumbs from her hands, and started down the far side of the mountain. The path was even less defined here, but that was the point. No one would come looking for her. Not here.
Each step felt like it might be the last one she could manage, but she kept moving. She owed herself that much, at least. To keep going, even when there was nothing at the end but more cold and more stone.
The world was empty, and so was she. It was a relief.
She walked on, the cold stone accepting no trace to mark that she had ever been here at all.
The mountain spat her out onto a plateau that was more dead than alive, little more than a scrape of yellowed grass and ice-streaked mud, flat as the belly of a butchered animal, wind howling across it in a constant, guttural roar. The sun was high now, its light pitiless and sharp-edged, but the air was colder, the kind that cuts past skin to find the thinnest blood vessel to freeze.
