"I know. I've seen you building it." She threw a look back over her shoulder. The crashing was getting closer. "She's going to catch me. Let me in."
"Who?"
"My handmaiden. I'm supposed to be doing deportment." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Walking with books on my head. I've been doing it for three years and I still knock them off every time. It's stupid."
The crashing grew louder. A woman's voice, breathless and panicked: "My lady! My lady, please — your father will have my position — the forest is not safe —"
The girl looked at me. Looked at the fort. Her eyes — golden, even then, the kind of eyes that felt like standing in direct sunlight — didn't beg. They dared.
I stepped aside.
She squeezed through the gap, pressed herself against the back wall of branches, and pulled a handful of leaves over her ruined dress. I went back to my spot at the entrance, stick-sword across my knees, whittling like nothing had happened.
The handmaiden appeared — red-faced, sweating, thorns in her sleeves, looking like she'd been dragged through the forest backwards. Her eyes landed on me. On the fort. On the boy from the border apartments who had no business being this deep in the woods.
"You — boy. Have you seen a girl come through here? Dark hair, white dress?"
I shook my head. Kept whittling.
"She came this way. I heard her."
I pointed my stick-sword toward the eastern path without looking up. "Something big went through there a bit ago. Scared the birds off. Probably deer."
The handmaiden stared at me. I stared back with the wide, blank look my mother had taught me — the one that said *I'm just a border kid who doesn't know anything about anything.*
She moved on. Her calls faded into the trees.
Behind me, a rustling. The girl crawled out of the leaves, picking a beetle off her sleeve and studying it for a moment before setting it on a branch.
"You're good at lying," she said.
"You're bad at running away. Your footprints go all the way back to the third oak."
"I wasn't trying to be sneaky. I was trying to be fast." She sat down cross-legged in my fort without asking, picked up my whittling project, and turned it over in her hands. "What's this supposed to be?"
"A sword."
She squinted at it. "It looks like a worm."
"It's not finished."
"Hmm." She put it down, not unkindly. "I'm Ada."
"I know who you are."
"Everyone does. I hate it." She said it simply. Not sad. Just true. "Who are you?"
"Hakan."
"Hakan what?"
"Just Hakan."
She looked at me — really looked, the way children do before the world teaches them to glance and judge and look away. Her eyes moved over my patched clothes, my too-long hair, my bare feet that matched hers. I waited for the moment she'd understandwhat I was — border-born, nothing-named, the kind of boy a god's daughter wasn't supposed to talk to.
"Just Hakan," she repeated. And then she smiled. Not the stiff little smile I'd seen her wear in the palace courtyard when the priests paraded her past the crowds. A real one. Crooked and gap-toothed and completely, recklessly open.
"Can you teach me to whittle?"
