The wardens don't bind my hands. That's not mercy—it's math. I'm bleeding through my sleeve, barefoot, and twenty pounds lighter than the smaller of the two. I am not a flight risk. I am luggage.
"Keep up," the larger one says, already six paces ahead, armored shoulders cutting through the mist like he's personally offended by it. The Wolfblade crest on his pauldron catches dull light with every step.
I've been staring at that crest for the last mile, letting it blur in and out, because the alternative is thinking about where this road ends. Somewhere bad. Somewhere with teeth.
My shoulder throbs in rhythm with my heartbeat, which feels like a design flaw on nature's part. I press my good hand against it and keep walking. The forest thins into scrubland—no horse, no cart, no acknowledgment that the girl they're marching has a hole in her that's been open since yesterday.
"She's slowing again," the younger warden mutters. He hasn't perfected the art of treating a person like cargo—there's a flicker in his jaw when he glances back. Not concern. Inconvenience. Like I'm a wheel that keeps sticking.
"I have a hole in my shoulder," I say. "It's affecting my pace. Terribly sorry for the disruption to your schedule."
Neither responds. I catalogue the silence under Expected and keep moving. The sky has gone the color of a week-old bruise, grey pressing low against the tree line, and the air carries the particular cold that means rain and means business.
"Water," I say after the second hour. The larger warden unclips a skin from his belt without looking, tosses it backward. It lands in the mud two feet short. I pick it up, drink, and add his name to the file I'm keeping titled People Who Will Regret This If I Survive.
"How much farther?" I ask. The younger one's mouth opens. The older one kills it with a flat look, and the silence that follows has a locked-door quality. My destination is classified. Nothing makes a forced march more enjoyable than mystery.
"You know where you're taking me," I say. "I know where you're taking me. The suspense isn't doing what you think it's doing."
"The suspense," the older one says without turning, "isn't for your benefit." First full sentence he's given me. I'd feel honored, but my feet are numb and there's a sharp stone embedded in the path every third step like the road itself is trying to make a point.
But the younger warden—Callum, I learn when the older one barks at him to stay in formation—is the crack in the armor. He keeps drifting back, jaw working, eyes cutting to the tree line and then to me like he's doing calculations he doesn't want to show his work on.
"You really killed her?" he says finally, low enough that the older warden might not catch it. "The she-wolf. Alone?"
My shoulder gives a vicious throb, answering on my behalf. "She was trying to eat a ten-year-old. I had a knife and poor judgment. It wasn't heroic. It was geometry."
Something recalculates behind his eyes. He looks at my shoulder, at the blood dried in dark lines between my fingers, and his mouth does something complicated. "She was Wolfblade," he says.
"So I've gathered." My throat tightens. "Nobody's told me who specifically, or why it means I deserve—" I gesture at the road, the armor, the general concept of everything happening to me. "This."
"The prince's—" Callum starts, and the older warden's voice lands on his name like a door slamming shut. Callum straightens, moves forward, doesn't look at me again.
But I heard the shape of it. The prince's. His friend, his lover, his mate, his kin—it doesn't matter which word fills the gap. What matters is the weight Callum put on it, the way his voice dropped through the floor.
She was precious. She was claimed. And I killed her with a berry knife while a child screamed behind me.
The road narrows and the trees close overhead until the sky's a pale seam between branches. My shoulder has graduated from throbbing to a thin, high scream I can feel in my back teeth, and my jaw aches from clenching against the cold.
I am going to die at the end of this road. The thought arrives as arithmetic—clean, inevitable. The Wolfblades do not forgive—the prince’s title is enough of an argument. Isolde knew exactly what she was sending me toward when she opened that door.
But I also don’t feel as terrified as I should have been. Maybe it’s blood loss. Maybe it’s indifference I have practiced for twenty two years of my life in Veyr household.
Which also doesn’t mean I’m ready to die—just that I’m resourceful and patient.
"Why aren't my hands bound?" I ask, casual, like it only just occurred to me. The older warden glances back for the first time in an hour.
"You're not a threat," he says. Something almost adjacent to amusement in his voice. Almost.
"Right," I say. "Just checking." And I let it sit there, let him hear resignation in it, let him think the fight has gone out of me. My pulse is doing something else entirely.
Around the third hour, Callum drifts east—something in the undergrowth snagging his attention. The older one's focus locks forward, fixed on the road ahead like discipline itself.
Three feet of unguarded space opens between his armored back and the nearest tree line. My body starts making its case: blood loss, bare feet, one working arm, no food, no shelter, no plan.
I overrule it the way I overruled it in the clearing—not with courage but with the simple understanding that the alternative is worse. I move through the gap before the decision finishes forming.
Off the road, through the ditch, into the trees. Branches whip my face and I don't feel them. Behind me, shouting—cracking through the air like something snapping clean.
The rain arrives like a dropped wall. Cold water hits my wound and my vision whites out for a full second, and I go down on one knee, hands catching root.
The voice in my head says get up in a tone that belongs to someone who has never been afraid. I hate her. She's right. I push upright and keep moving.
The forest goes featureless—grey tangle of wet branches, churned mud, no bearing, no landmark. The shouting dissolves into the roar of rain until I can't tell the difference.
I run until running becomes stumbling, stumble until it becomes something closer to crawling. Then I see it—a low roofline through the curtain of water, dark timber half-swallowed by years of growth.
The latch gives under the last strength in my good hand. Cold dusty air hits my face. A single room: table on split legs, collapsed chair, hearth of cold ash. Against the far wall, a narrow bed with a mattress thin enough to read through.
I lower myself onto it. Press my palm over the wound that's been trying to kill me all day. The rain hammers the roof in an unbroken roar, and it erases everything—the road, the wardens, the Veyr name, every mile between me and the girl who woke up this morning in a house that was never hers.
My eyes close before I give them permission. Last thought, arriving with the grim clarity that only lives at the very bottom of something: if I don't wake up, at least I chose the bed I died in.
________________