9. Adelina
Adelina
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Hedda says. “May I take the boots, Princess?”
I nod.
She eases the boots off, then the wet socks, and wraps my feet in a warmed cloth from beside the fire. The heat hurts at first, pins and needles biting into my toes, but then relief follows so quickly that I have to grip the arms of the chair.
Tarrant sets a cup beside the bowl. “Tea. No sleeping herbs. Freya warned us you might fear them.”
That nearly breaks me too.
I pick up the cup with both hands, but they shake so badly the tea ripples against the sides.
Hedda watches my hands. “How badly are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt.”
Her face says she does not believe me.
I lower my gaze to the tea. “There are no open wounds.”
“That is not what I asked.”
My breath catches, and for one foolish moment, I nearly tell her. The whip. The counting. The silver marks. The way my back feels flayed open even though no skin broke. But the words lodge somewhere too deep.
“Freya gave me herbs,” I say instead.
Hedda looks at her husband. He looks away first, jaw hard.
“She told you,” I whisper.
The woman’s hands still. “She told us enough.”
Heat rises behind my eyes. “How much is enough?”
“Enough to know the king has no right to call himself your protector.” Her voice remains low, but there is steel beneath it. “Enough to know Freya has been carrying more than any one woman should. Enough to know that when the day came, we would open this door.”
Tarrant’s expression darkens. “Your father would have hanged men for less than what has been done under Varek’s roof.”
My father. Spoken of not as a portrait, not as a dead king in a lesson, but as a man someone remembered.
“You knew him?” I ask.
“A little.” He pokes at the fire, though it does not need tending. “Served under one of his border captains when I was young. Your father was hard, as all northern kings must be, but he was not cruel for sport. He knew the difference between discipline and fear.”
“And my mother?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Hedda’s face softens. “She came through the lower villages after a fever season once. Brought medicine and food. Held babies with runny noses and kissed every one of them while court ladies whispered about contagion behind her back.” Her smile wavers. “Freya said you have her eyes.”
The cup shakes harder in my hands. I set it down before I spill it. “I don’t remember enough of her.”
“No child should have had to remember a mother from pieces,” she says.
The room blurs around the firelight. Through the narrow slit in the shutter, the dark has thinned to gray. It won’t be long before gray turns white, and white means I can’t fly, and not flying means I stay here while the entire kingdom wakes to look for me.
Tarrant speaks again, gruffer now. “The kingdom has not been right since Varek took the throne.”
Hedda glances toward him, but she does not correct him.
He continues anyway. “People are tired, Princess. More tired than Varek knows.”
“He knows,” Hedda says quietly. “He just thinks tired people are easier to rule.”
The words settle heavily in the small room.
I stare at the fire. All my life, my brother’s cruelty felt private because it happened behind doors, in chambers where no one looked unless they were forced to.
But this, the kingdom, the towns, the villages hidden under snow and duty, all of it has been bending beneath him too.
I was not the only one living in a cage.
Mine simply had silk curtains and a garden.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper.
“How could you?” Mistress Hedda asks. “They kept you from everything that might have taught you the truth.”
I look down at my hands. “I should have known.”
“No,” she says, sharper now. “Don’t take blame that belongs to the ones who locked the doors.”
Her words strike so close to Freya’s that my chest aches.
Tarrant crouches beside a small chest near the wall and pulls out a folded bundle.
“You can rest here until the sun lowers if the storm holds off. After that, you move. The second shelter is too far to reach safely in full daylight or in the middle of a storm, and the patrols will widen once they know which direction to look.”
“I can’t stay that long.”
“You can’t leave now,” he says. “Not with dawn breaking and the winds promising a blizzard.”
Hedda nods. “If you take the sky in daylight, they’ll see you. Silver wings are beautiful, Princess, but beauty is not always a gift.”
No, it isn’t. I know that better than most.
She rises and crosses to a shelf, pulling down a small tin and a packet of cloth. “Freya sent balm ahead months ago. Said if you ever came through here, your back would likely need tending.”
Months ago.
The plan was not a desperate thing thrown together by fear. It was a net woven patiently beneath my life, strand by strand, while I thought no one but Freya knew I was falling.
Hedda turns back to me. “I won’t touch you unless you allow it.”
The permission undoes me more than the offer. I nod once.
She moves behind me carefully, and I loosen the cloak with clumsy fingers, then the outer tunic enough for her to reach the worst of my back without exposing more than necessary. The air touches my skin, and I flinch before I can stop myself.
Neither of them comments. Tarrant turns his back and busies himself with the fire. Hedda’s breath catches when she sees the pale marks. I close my eyes.
“They’re not wounds,” I blurt. “They don’t break the skin. It only feels like they do. They will fade eventually.”
Her fingers tremble when she dips them into the balm. “The king did this?” The question is quiet enough that I almost pretend I don’t hear it.
But I’m too tired to lie for him. “Yes.”
The fire cracks sharply. Tarrant swears under his breath, a rough northern curse I’ve only ever heard guards use when they thought no one important was near. Hedda says nothing. Then her touch, warm with balm and careful fury, settles near the first silver stripe.
I stiffen.
“Breathe,” she says.
It is not Freya’s voice. But it is close enough that I obey.
The balm is different from Freya’s, older perhaps, stronger in scent, pine resin and bitterroot and something floral beneath it.
It stings at first, then sinks deep, soothing the raw magic still crawling beneath my skin.
I don’t relax. I can’t. But after a few minutes, I can breathe without feeling as though my back will split open with every inhale.
Hedda works in silence until she finishes, then helps me straighten my tunic and settle the cloak again. “There,” she says. “It won’t fix it, but it will give you a few hours and some relief.”
“Thank you.”
“You need food and sleep more than thanks.”
I obey because arguing would take strength I do not have.
She places a bowl in my hands. The stew is thick and salty, full of roots and tiny bits of meat, and the first warm mouthful nearly makes me cry again.
I eat slowly at first, then faster despite myself, hunger waking all at once now that my body believes it may survive long enough to need more.
Tarrant watches the window while I eat. Hedda sits nearby with her hands folded in her lap.
“What happens to Freya?” I ask.
Neither of them answers quickly enough.
I set the spoon down. “Tell me, please.”
Tarrant exhales. “Varek will question her.”
My stomach turns. “He’ll hurt her.”
“Likely.” The bluntness is kinder than a lie.
I know this. Varek will be furious when he discovers I’m gone. He will take it out on her. I knew this when I went into the tunnel.
“He’ll hurt her because of me.”
“He’ll hurt her because he is cruel. That is not the same thing,” Tarrant replies and looks through the slit in the shutters again.
“She stayed for me.” A tear slips free. I dash it away.
“She stayed because she wanted to buy you time.” Hedda leans forward, her voice firm enough to cut through the fear in me. “Don’t waste what she gave you.”
I hate it because it’s true. I look toward the window, toward the gray dawn pressing faintly around the edges of the boards blocking the view.
Hedda reaches for the bowl and pushes it gently back toward me. “Eat the rest. Then sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“You flew through the night. You’ll sleep. We’ll keep watch. A storm is blowing in so that should give us some extra time.”
I finish the stew because she watches until I do.
Then she leads me to a small cot behind a hanging wool curtain near the back of the room.
It’s narrow and plain, covered with two thick blankets and a pillow that smells faintly of cedar.
I lower myself onto it slowly, every part of me protesting now that it knows rest is near.
Hedda covers me with the second blanket.
I catch her sleeve before she can leave. The movement surprises both of us. “Why are you helping me?” I ask.
Her eyes soften in the dim light. “Because Freya asked.”
“That can’t be the only reason.”
“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”
I wait.
She looks toward the front of the house, where her husband moves quietly from window to window. “Our daughter served in the lower kitchens after your brother’s coronation. She saw something she shouldn’t have and spoke of it to the wrong person.”
Cold settles in my gut. “What happened?”
“She was accused of stealing from the queen’s household.” Hedda’s voice remains steady, which somehow makes it worse. “No one believed it, but belief does not matter much when the crown wants silence. She was sent to the northern work camps. She survived two winters.”
Two. Only two.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Hedda looks back at me. “So are we.”
The words are not cruel, but they carry years in them. Grief. Anger. A country forced to swallow both.
“Sleep, Princess,” she says. “If you reach the sea, perhaps one of us will have finally escaped him.”
She leaves before I can answer.
I lie in the dim space behind the curtain, listening to the low murmur of their voices, the wind moving over the roof, the soft crackle of the fire.
My back still burns, but the balm has changed the pain into something duller, something I can breathe around.
The throb in my feet has eased, though it still aches.
My wings are folded away, exhausted and hidden.
But stillness gives fear room to speak.
I see Kaedryn’s face when my brother called me his future wife. I see the way the shadows gathered and the flames shrank when anger slipped through him. I hear his voice telling them I should know what I was signing, low and controlled enough to make the whole chamber obey.
He was angry for me.
Maybe.
He also watched everything. He saw my fear, saw the tremor in my hand, saw too much, and then I ran from him too.
If he finds me, will he think I betrayed him? Will he drag me back because the treaty matters more than the girl forced to sign it? Will he be kinder than Varek and still take me to another cage?
My chest tightens. And beneath the fear, low and quiet, that same thread tugs again, the one I felt over the clouds, pulling faintly back the way I came. Exhaustion, I tell myself. Only exhaustion, and a body too tired to know what it wants.
I turn my face into the pillow and close my eyes. Somewhere behind me the hunt is waking, and here I am closing my eyes in a stranger’s bed. But my body has stopped asking permission. The last thing I think before sleep finally pulls me under is not of the sea.
It’s Freya’s voice, saying, “Go in peace, Adelina Leora.”
I don’t know if peace waits for me anywhere.
But while the sun continues to rise beyond the shuttered windows of a watch house hidden beneath black pines, I sleep.