The eastern sentry turns.
“Run.” My voice isn’t a whisper anymore. “Run.”
I grab Finn the best I can, Tiana on his other side. We run, half-carrying and half-dragging Finnian behind us.
The gravel screams under our boots. The sentry shouts something I can’t fully hear. But I catch the shape of it, the sharp consonants of an alarm call, and behind us I hear the deeper resonance of a response. Two more sentries, three, and the distant sound of metal on stone as someone draws a weapon.
Kestra passes me.
I don’t process the moment of it, just the blur of her moving ahead, her arm sweeping back in a sharp arc, and then the sound of something shattering behind us.
It’s like she’s thrown us into a snow globe.
Shouts behind us echo over the vast space.
“Where’d they go?”
“Do you see them?”
“Just disappeared.”
The tree line is ten meters.
Finnian is running beside me now and his breath is ragged. He’s leaning on me heavily, barely holding his own weight. We are so damn close.
Five meters.
An arrow cuts the air. Not close. Close enough.
Three.
The first branch catches my shoulder and I don’t slow down. I go through it, through the tree line, through the wall of shadow and root and ancient Fae dark that swallows us whole.
Behind me I hear Kestra. Tiana. Finnian holds onto me tightly.
Four sets of footsteps.
Four sets of ragged breathing.
The Dark Forest closes over us like a fist, and the castle’s shouts go distant, and then strange, and then quiet.
I run for another thirty seconds before I stop, unceremoniously dropping Finnian.
My back hits a tree. I press against it, hands braced, and drag air into my lungs like I can store it. The thorns are rioting under my skin, full defensive display, every instinct screaming threat, threat, threat. And I let them scream for a moment. Let the magic read the situation and find no immediate target and begin to settle.
The adrenaline doesn’t settle with it. My hands are still shaking. I press them harder against the bark until the tremor moves up into my arms instead, somewhere I can ignore it, and breathe through my nose until my pulse drops below usable.
It takes longer than it should.
The Dark Forest doesn’t feel like safety.
It feels like one nightmare replacing another.
Finnian slides to the Dark Forest floor, his head on his knees, as I look around us.
The trees are wrong here. Old wrong, not sinister wrong. Ancient in a way that Moros’s castle could never be, rooted so deep they’re more stone than wood, and the dark isn’t the comfortable dark of shadow magic. It’s a different kind. Something that predates courts. Something that doesn’t know to be afraid of kings.
I’m not afraid of it.
