Chapter 9 #2
Ada. Daughter of Gün Ata, God of Light and Love. Heir to the Palace of Light. The most protected girl in two realms, currently standing in my secret forest with mud on her silk and a look like she'd never been freer.
I should have melted back into the trees. Border rats survived by staying invisible — we learned that young. She was everything the Light Court valued and I wasn't: golden, watched over, worth something. My forest wasn't hers to stumble into.
I didn't move.
She caught her breath, tipped her head back to find the column of light falling through the canopy gap, and — apparently not caring that a strange boy was watching her with a raised stick — spread her arms and turned a slow, ridiculous, perfect circle in the beam of light, as though she was claiming the clearing.
She was being chased. I could hear the distant, increasingly frantic voice of a woman calling a name I didn't catch, the sound of someone trying to follow the same path through the undergrowth with considerably less enthusiasm.
The girl saw me. Saw my fort. Saw the gap between the branches where a small body could squeeze through and disappear.
"Move," she said.
Not please. Not excuse me. Not any of the polished little phrases a girl in a silk dress was supposed to use. Just *move*, with the force of someone who expected everything around her to do as she said.
"No. This is my fort."
"I know. I've seen you building it." She threw a look back over her shoulder. The crashing was getting closer. "She's going to catch me. Let me in."
"Who?"
"My handmaiden. I'm supposed to be doing deportment." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Walking with books on my head. I've been doing it for three years and I still knock them off every time. It's stupid."
The crashing grew louder. A woman's voice, breathless and panicked: "My lady! My lady, please — your father will have my position — the forest is not safe —"
The girl looked at me. Looked at the fort. Her eyes — golden, even then, the kind of eyes that felt like standing in direct sunlight — didn't beg. They dared.
I stepped aside.
She squeezed through the gap, pressed herself against the back wall of branches, and pulled a handful of leaves over her ruined dress. I went back to my spot at the entrance, stick-sword across my knees, whittling like nothing had happened.
The handmaiden appeared — red-faced, sweating, thorns in her sleeves, looking like she'd been dragged through the forest backwards. Her eyes landed on me. On the fort. On the boy from the border apartments who had no business being this deep in the woods.
"You — boy. Have you seen a girl come through here? Dark hair, white dress?"
I shook my head. Kept whittling.
"She came this way. I heard her."
I pointed my stick-sword toward the eastern path without looking up. "Something big went through there a bit ago. Scared the birds off. Probably deer."
The handmaiden stared at me. I stared back with the wide, blank look my mother had taught me — the one that said *I'm just a border kid who doesn't know anything about anything.*
She moved on. Her calls faded into the trees.
Behind me, a rustling. The girl crawled out of the leaves, picking a beetle off her sleeve and studying it for a moment before setting it on a branch.
"You're good at lying," she said.
"You're bad at running away. Your footprints go all the way back to the third oak."
"I wasn't trying to be sneaky. I was trying to be fast." She sat down cross-legged in my fort without asking, picked up my whittling project, and turned it over in her hands. "What's this supposed to be?"
"A sword."
She squinted at it. "It looks like a worm."
"It's not finished."
"Hmm." She put it down, not unkindly. "I'm Ada."
"I know who you are."
"Everyone does. I hate it." She said it simply. Not sad. Just true. "Who are you?"
"Hakan."
"Hakan what?"
"Just Hakan."
She looked at me — really looked, the way children do before the world teaches them to glance and judge and look away.
Her eyes moved over my patched clothes, my too-long hair, my bare feet that matched hers.
I waited for the moment she'd understand what I was — border-born, nothing-named, the kind of boy a god's daughter wasn't supposed to talk to.
"Just Hakan," she repeated. And then she smiled. Not the stiff little smile I'd seen her wear in the palace courtyard when the priests paraded her past the crowds. A real one. Crooked and gap-toothed and completely, recklessly open.
"Can you teach me to whittle?"
"You'll cut yourself."
"So?" She held out her hand for the knife. "I don't care."
She did cut herself. Twice. Bled on the white silk and didn't even flinch.
By the time the handmaiden found her — an hour later, hysterical, threatening to resign — Ada had produced something she swore up and down was a fox but which looked even less like a fox than my sword had looked like a sword.
She held it up proudly. "Look."
"That's not a fox."
"It is. That's its tail. And that's its face."
"That's a lump."
"It's a fox and I'm keeping it." She clutched it to her ruined dress like it was made of gold. "I'm coming back tomorrow."
Not asking. Telling.
"You can't just —"
"Tomorrow," she said, already being dragged toward the tree line by the handmaiden. "Same time. And don't finish your sword without me."
She came back the next day. And the next. And the next.
For three summers, the fort in the Boundary Quarter forest was ours.
Sarp found us in the second year — wandered in looking for a place to eat stolen pastries in peace and never left.
The three of us built that fort into something real, adding walls, a roof of woven branches, a lookout post where you could see the Academy spires if you climbed high enough.
Ada brought food from the palace kitchens — ridiculous things, honey cakes wrapped in golden cloth, fruits I'd never tasted, more than the three of us could eat in a week.
Sarp brought jokes and an endless supply of stolen sweets.
I brought the forest — every path, every hiding place, every secret the woods had shown me in my years of solitary exploration.
We were children. Just children. Ada didn't care that I owned two shirts.
Sarp didn't care that my mother flinched at her own reflection.
And I didn't dream of shadows yet, didn't feel the cold thing sleeping under my ribs.
I was just a boy in a forest with a girl who climbed trees in silk dresses and a friend who made everything lighter, and the world was small enough to fit inside a fort made of sticks.
That was the version of me Ada had fallen in love with. The boy in the forest. The one who'd stepped aside and let her in.
The memory settled over me like a hand on the back of my neck — Milan's gesture, brief and firm and steadying.
Three weeks of her hands and her mouth and her light, of stolen hours in the music room and whispered conversations in servants' corridors. Three weeks of learning how to be something other than a weapon.
Today I was taking her to meet my mother. Properly.
Not because I deserved it. Not because I'd earned it. But because a girl in a ruined silk dress had once sat in my fort and smiled at me like I was enough, and some stubborn, reckless part of me still believed her.
I finished my cold tea. Straightened my coat. Checked my gloves — still in place, still hiding the darkness underneath.
And went to find her.