After a while, she drifted away from the woodcutters, following the music. The crowd had shifted, opening a space near the fire where the elders now held court. Dorin Flamekeeper, a man with a face as deeply wrinkled as an autumn apple, sat with a circle of young ones at his feet. He held a stick in one hand, drawing patterns in the dirt as he spoke.
“Long ago, when the world was young and the trees were the only ones who knew the names of the wind, there lived a woman who could speak to them. Not with words, but with her heart. She listened, and in return the trees taught her their secrets: how to sleep through a thousand winters, how to wake again when the sun returned, how to bend without breaking.” His voice was soft, but carried, and the crowd around him grew silent as the story spun out.
Alina listened, transfixed. The story wound its way through loss and longing, through years of darkness and moments of sudden, impossible light. The ending was not a happy one, nor a sad one. It was simply true: the woman became a tree herself, and each spring the valley filled with blossoms that bore her laughter in their scent.
Dorin tapped the stick against the ground and looked up. “Sometimes the world turns you into something you never meant to be,” he said, not unkindly. “But there is always a season for blooming, if you wait long enough.”
Someone passed Dorin a cup, and the circle of children scattered, their attention span spent. Alina lingered at the edge of the fire, the words echoing in her mind.
She wandered away, following the line of the fire’s light until it faded into the soft dark of the grass. Near the edge of the commons she found a boy sitting alone, tuning a wooden flute. His fingers moved with quick certainty, adjusting the holes and the bindings with gentle care. When he saw her, he nodded and put the flute to his lips, sending out a melody as light as air and as sad as dusk. The notes curled around each other, rising and falling in a pattern that felt both ancient and new.
The music burrowed deep, bringing forth a memory as vivid as that first gasp of icy air after a sweltering summer: the vibrant festival of lights, lanterns strung above streets, and Kael’s reassuring hand on hers as they admired the glowing scene. How they had laughed together, how they had gravitated toward each other again and again, how there had been something in his gaze—pride, perhaps, or a wistfulness—that spurred her to keep trying, just to witness that look again.
She recalled the way his hair had shimmered under the lanterns’ glow, how the scar on his chin caught the light. The way his voice, usually sharp and commanding, had turned gentle in those private moments, when he believed no one else was listening but her. How he had sought her nearness, had reveled in her touch, had enveloped her hand in his. She had tried, relentlessly, to erase these memories. To bury them beneath her resentment, beneath the cold conviction that she had left him behind as he had her. But here, beneath a sky dense with stars and surrounded by the murmur of cheerful voices, the memory throbbed in her heart until it was impossible to dismiss.
She wanted to see him. She wanted to be near him, to show him what she had learned, what she had become. More than that, she wanted to belong somewhere—with him, maybe, or at leastwith the people who made him the man she had come to love. She started to doubt her interpretation of the scene with Elara and, deep down, she regretted not talking it out with him; not hearing his side of the story. Could she really have been so wrong about his feelings toward her? Could he really have stopped caring for her so abruptly? It was hard to imagine. She should have had more trust in him, at least given him the benefit of the doubt. Had she considered enough the strain he had been under?
The truth was this: they both had acted without enough consideration for the other, they both had taken their exhaustion out on the other. They both were victims of war and as much as he had hurt her, she had done the same to him.
She wrapped her arms around herself, letting the music and the firelight wash over her. The ache in her chest did not go away, but it dulled, becoming something better—a sign that she was alive, that there was something, or someone, worth returning to. Forgiveness settled in her and it closed the hole in her heart.
When the last logs had burned down to glowing embers and the crowd thinned, Alina stood and dusted the grass from her robe. She looked back at the fire, the circle of warmth and belonging she had never dared imagine for herself.
Tomorrow would bring the final trial and then she would leave this sanctuary. She wasn’t done with the world yet, and she sure as hell wasn’t done with Kael Stormborne.
Dawn arrived muted and silver, the trees painted with a dew so thick that the path to the woods glistened, as if the entire worldhad been dipped in molten glass. Alina dressed with deliberate slowness, aware that every movement now had the weight of ritual. She ate nothing for breakfast, wanting to hold onto the feeling of last night’s warmth and belonging as long as possible. Eating would replace it too soon with the acid of nerves.
Nola waited for her just beyond the last house, leaning on a staff carved with symbols Alina did not recognize. She wore a cloak of deep green and no shoes, her feet sunken into the moss and dirt. When Alina joined her, Nola smiled, welcoming and without reservation, and gestured with her chin toward the trees. Alina followed, and they walked together in silence, boots and bare feet both leaving trails in the beaded grass.
The trial’s location was a hollowed-out bowl at the heart of the woods, a place that looked as if it had once been a lake or a crater but was now ringed with ancient oaks. The roots tangled so tightly at the rim that nothing else could grow between them, giving the clearing a sense of privacy, almost secrecy. At the very center, the ground was smooth and bare, a single patch of earth swept clean of leaf and branch.
Nola stopped at the edge of the bowl. “You remember what I told you?” she asked.
Alina nodded. “That I must listen. That I must not force it.”
“Good.” Nola considered her for a moment, then pointed to the center of the clearing. “Go there and stand still. Do not close your eyes until I say.”
Alina walked to the circle’s center. The ground was cold beneath her feet, colder even through her shoes than the grass had been. She felt for a moment as though she might be standing on an altar, or a stage, or a chessboard where every move would be recorded and judged. The sensation was not entirely new, but inthe past she had always been able to meet it with anger or pride or something loud and bright. Now, stripped of those old costumes, she had only herself.
Nola’s voice came to her, sharp and clear as a bell. “You are here to learn who you really are. Not the self you present to others, not the self you fear you might be, not the self that you wish you were, but the self that remains when everything else is gone.”
Alina felt her breath catch. She nodded once, quick and birdlike.
“Close your eyes.”
She did.
At first, nothing changed. She could still hear the birds in the trees, the slight rustle of wind, the subtle movements of Nola somewhere behind her, insects buzzing past her. She could even hear the faint ringing in her ears that came whenever she tried to use the Gift and failed. She waited, letting the sounds wash over her.
Then, slowly, the world began to recede. The sounds of the forest faded, replaced by the steady drum of her own heartbeat. The air grew thicker, pressing against her skin until it was almost a blanket. It was hard to decide whether it felt comforting or oppressive. Some kind of magic cloaked her, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just ancient. She tried to focus on the Gift, to call it up the way she had before, but nothing happened. It was as if the well had run dry overnight, leaving her empty and a little afraid.
She waited. She remembered what Nola had said: don’t force it.
Time warped. Seconds stretched and shrank. Alina lost track of how long she stood there, her eyes closed, breathing in the cold air and the smell of moss and old wood. She began to drift, her mind wandering through memories she hadn’t meant to revisit.
She saw herself as a young child, following her mother through the palace solarium at dusk, the crystal panes awash with the watered silvers and golds of the late sun. She remembered the closeness of her mother’s figure—always ahead, always in motion, always elusive. As a girl she would run, convinced she could close the gap simply by trying hard enough, by willing herself faster and lighter, but each time she reached for her mother’s hand it slipped away, leaving only the faintest warmth in the air as proof she had ever been there. Sometimes she would look down and discover that her own hands were trembling, not from exertion or fear but from the shameful certainty that she was fundamentally untouchable, fundamentally not enough.
She saw herself again at the Caves, years later but unchanged in all the ways that truly mattered—standing on the training ground with Tamsin’s sharp gaze on her, disappointment clear. She remembered Elara’s voice echoing in her ears, hands trembling as she failed, again and again, to control the spark of her Gift. She remembered the sting of frustration, the silent litany repeating in her mind: don’t make a mistake. Don’t let them see you falter. Don’t show how much you care. She never let herself cry in front of the others, but she could remember, with glass-like clarity, the way the loneliness and futility pooled inside her, a cold that started at her fingertips and spread all the way to the roots of her teeth.
