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I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t. Let Toris see my face, my eyes, as the life went out of me. Perhaps Simon’s blood charm would work and another’s life would be taken instead of mine—?an option I couldn’t bear to think about—?but in case it didn’t, I wanted to die angry. Vengeful. I wanted to become a ghost so that I could terrorize him every single day of the rest of his life.
“No hard feelings, Princess,” he said. “You’re just not part of the plans.”
His hands were deft, and the slice he made from one side of my throat to the other was tight and clean. But I didn’t feel the knife. I didn’t feel anything.
His stroke had been absorbed by another.
The Harbinger had materialized in the air between Toris and me—?he’d cut her neck instead of mine. But her throat already bore a gash; his could do her no harm now. He dropped his knife, flinching as if he’d been stung. “Aren?”
He saw her. He knew who she was. His gaze was wild and confused, looking from her to me and then back again.
She blinked out as quickly as she’d appeared.
I wrapped my hand around the vial of blood at his neck and tugged; the cord gave way with a twang as I hurled my shoulder into his chest and knocked him backwards to the ground. Then three long strides brought me to Falada’s side, and I swept onto her back, the way Kellan had made me practice over and over again. Still clutching the Founder’s blood, I wound my hands into Falada’s long mane and dug my heels against her side.
She sprang forward without hesitation, her lithe legs pounding the damp, black earth of the Ebonwilde, carrying me away into the welcoming darkness.
10
We are not here. We are unseen. We are not here. We are unseen.
I chanted Simon’s cloaking spell long into the night, well after the blood I’d drawn to cast it had dried. When I was forced to stop and rest or risk falling, unconscious, from Falada’s back, I murmured it into the darkness while I huddled for warmth in Kellan’s cloak, listening to the mournful cries of wolves in the distance. We are not here. We are unseen. After a while I could no longer tell if I was saying the words out loud or if they were just a chorus going round and round in my head. We are not here. We are unseen. We are not here. We are unseen.
When I woke, I did not know at first how much time had passed. Inside the Ebonwilde, there was very little difference between day and night. What light there was was dim and gray, just enough to see the bloodstained slit in the fabric of Kellan’s cloak, marking the path of Toris’s knife, right before Kellan fell.
He fell.
Kellan. My best friend. My guard. My protector. The person who loved me, and—?oh, Empyrea!—?whose love I had rejected . . . he was gone.
The noise that came out of me then was an unholy cross between a wail and a groan, and I shook there on the forest’s leafy floor, clutching at his cloak knotted in my fists. I rocked back and forth on my knees, coughing and sputtering between sobs, certain that this is what it felt like to drown.
Falada nudged me tentatively with her nose, and through bleary eyes I saw what had gotten her attention: a fox was watching me from the trees. She was impossibly still, with flame-colored fur and eyes like golden discs.
I got to my feet, my breath still coming in rapid, staccato gasps. “He was good,” I told the fox. “He didn’t deserve this.”
She regarded me for another long moment, as if trying to make up her mind about me. Then she bolted back into the forest, gone as quickly as she had come.
The fox’s appearance jolted me back into reason. I was lost in a forest. If I stayed where I was, I’d die—?from hunger, or cold, or a creature with more malevolent intent than the fox. I owed it to Kellan to save Falada. I owed it to Kellan to save myself. I had to keep moving.
But which direction? I was suspended between two impossible destinations. On one side was Achleva. I knew now that Toris was headed there with a plan to pass Lisette off as me, to have her marry the prince and upset the entire monarchial line. On the other was Renalt, where Simon and my mother were—?hopefully—?still holed away, safe from the Tribunal closing in around them.
I couldn’t go announce myself in Achleva. Toris and Lisette had my brother in their possession and had convinced him I was guilty of conspiring against Renalt and Achleva both. If Conrad corroborated their claims of identity, whether through complicity or coercion, I had no way to prove otherwise. I’d face a charge of treason for even making the assertion.
I couldn’t go to Renalt, either. Simon was keeping my mother safe for now, but if I showed up on their doorstep, the Tribunal would waste no time fixing the mistake they’d made when they killed Emilie. And endangering myself meant endangering Simon, my mother . . .
I took out the bloodcloth, running my fingers over its surface. The three circles of blood remained, but one of them—?Kellan’s—?had faded to the point of being nearly invisible.
A third choice emerged: keep going. Find another way to get inside Achlev’s Wall. Stay hidden from Toris and make my plans from the shadows.
It was about more than just me now. Whether I liked it or not, the fate of my nation was wrapped up in every choice I made from here on out. A cut had been made in the center of my life. I’d left behind the before and now had to face the after.
I took a step. Then another.
I’ll always consider that decision—?to move instead of lying down to die in the Ebonwilde—?my first victory.
As I went along, the only breaks in the monotony of the forest were little sightings of the Harbinger. She’d appear and vanish in the space of a breath, always just ahead, always out of reach. Whether Falada and I were following her or she was following us, I was never certain. But as the time drifted past—?one day? Two? I couldn’t tell—?and my hunger and exhaustion began to toe the edge of delirium, the sight of her became a point of clarity upon which I could fix my attention.
Despite all, Falada never faltered. She carried me through that long darkness and across the edge of the Ebonwilde, stopping only when the trees suddenly broke and revealed the city in the distant basin below, as if she, too, was stunned at the reminder that others existed in the world.
