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“It’s how I feel.” I walked over to the bed, pulled up the cloak, and threw it over my shoulders. Looking around my room, there wasn’t anything else I wanted to take with me… with one exception. On my end table, next to my bed, sat a small, sky-blue music box. Opening it revealed an ornate mirror, and a small figurine of a woman with silver hair and a tall man with black hair.
Between them was a small girl who looked like them both. The three figures spun around as twinkling music played, a tune my mother and father had both hummed to me many, many times over the years. It had been my favorite lullaby growing up. Even now, whenever I was feeling down, or unwell, my parents would sit together and hum it for me, letting me drift peacefully into sleep.
Glancing at my reflection, I realized my eyes were turning red and starting to sting. I grabbed the music box and tucked it away inside a small, leather bag I sometimes took with me when I ventured away from the castle. In that bag were a couple of essentials—dried meat, a water canteen, a knife. I didn’t think I would need it where I was going, but I took it anyway.
“I definitely can’t get you to reconsider, can I?” Tallin asked.
“No,” I said, “Whoever they used to be, they stopped being that the day they started keeping things from me.”
“They must have a reason. They must.”
“Maybe. Whatever it is can’t be good enough to convince me to marry Cyr. Maybe if I show them how determined I am not to go through with it, they’ll reconsider. But they won’t as long as they can control me, and they can control me as long as I’m here.”
“Where will you go?”
“To see the only person who I think can help.”
“Who?”
“My big brother, Radulf.”
“You’re going to the village of the Moon Children? That’s a dangerous place, Amara.”
“I’m one of them, Tallin, and Radulf is their Alpha. I’ll be safe there. He won’t send me back to the castle, either. He’s too much of a free spirit… he’ll have my back.”
“I really must object, Princess.”
I smiled at him and rubbed the space between his antlers. “I know.” I paused. “Be good, okay?”
“Be good?”
“You know. Don’t cause any trouble while I’m gone.”
Tallin lowered his eyes. I could sense his disappointment, but I wasn’t going to let it deter me. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t either. This is my home… but what my parents are doing isn’t right.”
He paused, then gave me his big, vibrant blue eyes. “What if you’re wrong?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, heading for the bedroom door. “And it won’t be the last, either.”
“I’ll never understand how you can be so reckless.”
I shrugged. “It’s in my nature. It’s what gives me my edge, I like to think.”
“It’s going to get you killed out there. I can’t stress enough how perilous the road between the castle and the Moon Children is.”
I smiled at him. “Relax. I’m going to be the most dangerous thing out in those woods.”
Tallin hopped off the bed and rushed to the door. “Could I at least walk you to the bridge?”
“If you can keep your voice down…”
I slipped out of my bedroom and moved quietly down the hall. The palace was quiet, my parents were nowhere to be found, and there were only minimal guards roaming around up here. Getting past them wasn’t difficult, as long as you knew what their patrols and rotations were like, and I knew them down to the second.
This wasn’t my first great escape, after all.
I had fled the castle many, many times before. Every time, the Captain of the Guard would switch the rotations, the patterns, the roster. They would tighten patrols, to make my points of exit harder to reach, and thus foil my escape attempts before I could even make it out of the palace grounds.
