They keep their distance.
Smart men.
We ride through the night, following roads that become paths that become little more than game trails. The capital falls away behind us, all its pretty lights and prettier lies, and the forest rises up to swallow us whole.
Annora rides in silence, hands white-knuckled on the reins, shoulders hunched against the cold. Every time a branch snaps or an owl calls or the wind whispers through the pines, she flinches.
I watch her.
Can't help it.
She's too small for this. Too breakable. The kind of fragile that makes something in my chest tighten and my hands itch to cover her, hide her,keep—
No.
I drag my focus back to the road. The curse is still simmering from the arena fight, a low burn in my veins that wants a second taste. It always does. Violence begets violence, and I've learned the hard way that the only way to fight it is rigid control.
Control and distance.
But she's right there, barely ten feet away, and I can hear every breath she takes.
"Drink." I toss her a waterskin without looking.
She catches it clumsily, fumbles with the strap, and takes a careful sip. Her throat works, and I force myself to look away from the collar gleaming dully at her neck.
I need to remove that. Soon.
When I can trust my hands.
"Eat." I pass her dried rations wrapped in waxed cloth.
She takes them with a mumbled "thank you" that's barely audible, nibbles at the edge of hardtack like a mouse testing for poison.
"Stay close to the group."
That one's not necessary—she's surrounded by armed men, there's nowhere for her to go even if she tried—but I say it anyway because the alternative is silence, and silence leaves too much room for thinking.
She nods without looking at me.
And I catch something in her profile. Not just fear. Something sharper.
She'sthinking.
Calculating.
Trying to figure out if she's safer with me than she would have been with the Inquisitor, or alone, or dead.
Good. Fear makes prey. Thinking makes survivors.
I don't know why that pleases me, but it does.
We reachBlackwood just before dawn.
The fortress rises out of the mist like a scar on the landscape—all dark stone and iron portcullis and walls built thick enough to withstand siege from things far worse than armies. It's not beautiful. It's not meant to be.
This is a border hold, the last line between the kingdom's soft lands and the things that live in the deep forest.
My men relax as we pass through the outer gates, shoulders dropping, hands leaving sword hilts. This is home. This issafe.
