Chapter 14 You Were Angry
You Were Angry
The rebel camp flickered with several small fires, each one ringed with shadows that sharpened and blurred as dusk gave way to night.
The trees at the edge of the clearing watched in silence, black and unmoving, while humans did what they always did before battle: they pretended there was comfort to be found in routine.
A string of lanterns, scavenged from who-knows-where, hung between two stunted birches to cast yellow halos on the mud.
Beneath them, rebels stood in small clusters or sat on logs around campfires, oiling blades, muttering over maps, and passing dented cups between callused hands.
There was a rhythm to it: thump, scrape, murmur, the occasional burst of laughter thin and ragged as old cloth. Alina watched from the fringe, not part of the scene but not apart from it, either. Her job was to do nothing right now but stay out of the way and not make things worse.
She rolled her left shoulder in slow, careful arcs.
The burn marks had faded from an angry red to a dark auburn, a tangle of lines bursting down her arm from a knot on her shoulder.
The ache in her side still lingered, a warning shot from her own body every time she forgot herself.
Sage had warned her that scars were to be expected, and she was oddly indifferent about it.
Not so long ago, scars on her perfect skin would have been something horrible.
Now, it didn’t really matter. She pressed two fingers to the flesh below her ribs and exhaled, testing the boundaries of the pain.
The physical pain at least did have those.
Finn caught her eye as he threaded through the camp, a battered flask dangling from his hand.
He offered her a grin and a lazy salute, as if they were just two friends at a garden party and not two half-trained soldiers waiting to be thrown at a supply convoy with a better-than-average chance of dying by morning.
Alina smiled back—or at least, she tried to. The muscles didn’t quite cooperate.
Kael stood by the largest fire, accompanied by Marcus and Maven.
He wasn’t speaking; he didn’t need to. His presence was enough to anchor the others and draw their orbits closer, like the sun behind a heavy sky.
He was bundled up against the cold, as they all were, yet his mismatched and patched-up clothes did nothing to dampen his air of command.
They never did; he always seemed like a general in his best uniform.
His eyes were hard to make out in the firelight, but Alina knew them all the same: gold with flecks of amber, always watching, always calculating.
At the periphery, Tamsin moved with a predatory slowness, her long braid swinging as she traced the camp’s edge, pausing at intervals to etch strange marks into the dirt.
Every few minutes, a lamp flickered, then flared blue, a sign the wards had taken hold.
The others avoided her, but Alina found the stillness oddly soothing.
Tamsin never wasted a word, or a motion. You always knew where you stood.
A briefing was called just after sunset. The crowd drew in close, the heat from their bodies turning the air muggy and raw. Marcus rolled out a battered hide map and stabbed it with a stick.
“The convoy will cross the river at Nesbridge Pass. That’s here.” He drew a line. “We hit from the ridge. Kael’s squad goes first and disables the standards, then everyone else converges.”
Seraphina Brightwood, hair scraped back with military precision, stood at the edge of the circle as if daring anyone to contradict her.
Alina hadn’t spoken to her in some time; Seraphina wasn’t involved in her training, and they had no real point of contact anywhere else.
She flicked a gloved hand toward the map, voice honed to a scalpel’s edge: “And if the convoy brings more than three guards per wagon? Are you sure about this intel?”
A beat of silence, then Marcus shrugged with the fatalism of a man raised on lost causes. “Then,” he said, “we improvise.” He said it like it was a joke—a joke everyone had heard before, one that never got funnier.
A ripple of laughter chased the words, hollow as a cracked bell. Maven snorted, then quickly scanned the crowd to gauge where everyone was standing opinion-wise. He seemed to have an exact register in his head of every person’s views and leanings and how to best use them for his own purposes.
Seraphina’s mouth twisted, almost smiling but not quite. “You realize they’ve vastly increased their numbers everywhere. That’s not improvisation, that’s suicide.”
Marcus drummed his thick, ink-stained fingers against the map.
“It’s a bit late to worry about that now.
We’ve planned for this. We hit them fast, cut the horses loose, block their retreat.
It won’t matter how shiny their armor is if they’re in the mud with the rest of us.
” He looked to Kael for backup, but Kael offered nothing—just that slow, considered nod that somehow made it feel as if the plan was inevitable, as if it had already happened and the only question was which of them would still be breathing to recall it.
The plan was then repeated, precise, economical, practiced: who would be on the attack team, who would be on the team to carry the loot.
Finn was assigned to sweep the riverbank for traps, which he accepted with a theatrical bow.
“If I don’t come back, my debts die with me,” he quipped.
A few of the rebels grinned, but Maven only rolled his eyes.
Kael stood silent through it all. When he eventually spoke, it was only to clarify: “No prisoners. We don’t have the hands to guard them. We’re ghosts. In and out.”
He said it with a finality that made Alina’s breath scrape in her throat.
She wondered if he could see how his words made her skin crawl, or if it was just another necessary cruelty.
She wondered, too, what would happen if one of their own was captured.
Would there be a rescue attempt? Would they be left?
Maven’s gaze swept across the crowd, lingering on Alina a heartbeat longer than it had to. “And the princess? Where do we put her?” His voice was light, but the question was a stone dropped in still water.
Silence, again. Alina felt every eye flick toward her, then away, as if looking too long might risk contamination. Kael’s jaw tensed. “She stays with me. As discussed and decided before.”
A stir of discomfort rippled, but was quickly buried beneath the next round of orders.
Seraphina’s posture remained solid, unshakeable as she took in the decision. “If she slows you down—”
“She won’t,” Kael said.
But Alina didn’t trust the promise. She watched the faces—Seraphina’s tight but unreadable, Marcus’s resigned, Tamsin’s impassive, Finn’s bright and brittle—and she knew that even if she survived the night, she’d never quite belong to the tribe of those who had bled for the cause.
She was still a guest here, fragile and replaceable, and that’s all she ever would be—and everyone knew it.
The briefing limped to an end. Marcus rolled up the map and tucked it away and the circle loosened.
He looked up at Alina and offered a quick smile, small but genuine.
She was thankful for the kindness. The others drifted to their pre-battle rituals: Maven huddled with the youngest conscripts, leading them in a muttered prayer; Tamsin stared into the woods; Finn fished a battered deck of cards from his pocket and tried to spark a game, but the others mostly ignored him, too wound up to pretend at normalcy.
Kael moved to the outer ring, scanning the tree line with a predator’s patience. Alina felt the urge to follow, to ask him what role she was meant to play, but her feet rooted her to the spot. What had happened between them?
Above the camp, the stars brightened, unblinking and remote. She hugged her arms tight, feeling the chill settle in the gaps between her bones. Finn wandered over with a pair of thick gloves, offering them to Alina.
“Not exactly palace couture, but it beats frostbite,” he said. “You holding up?”
She slipped the gloves on, surprised at how soft they felt. “I’ll survive,” she said, then added, “Thanks.”
He nodded, then leaned in. “Word to the wise: don’t lose them or you will be the quartermaster’s personal slave for a week.”
Alina almost laughed. “Noted.”
Finn’s smile was a balm to her nerves. “We all get jittery before a job,” he said, voice lowered. “You want company, you know where to find me.”
He drifted off before she could think of a response.
Alina watched him go, then drifted toward the less crowded edge of camp, where the woods started up again, thick with the damp smell of moss and old rot.
She craved the quiet, the illusion that she could think straight if only the world would stop pressing in.
She wasn’t alone for long.
Kael found her, as he always did. She heard his footsteps before she saw him: deliberate, measured, a rhythm designed not to startle.
“Trying to escape?” he asked, tone gentler than she expected.
She didn’t turn. “I’m not much use right now. Figured I’d get out of the way.”
He came up beside her, close enough for their shoulders to almost brush. “You could be resting.”
She snorted. “As if anyone could ever rest before a raid. Or are you telling me that you do?”
A brief pause. “No, I don’t.”
In the gloom, Kael’s face was half shadow, half golden where the embers backlit his jaw. Alina looked at him, and the hurt from the infirmary came back raw.
He hadn't visited her in the infirmary, hadn't checked on her, not even left a note. In the days that had followed he had always been busy, always somewhere off. She'd pretended not to care, but now, standing here, she wanted to smack him in the face.
“I heard you asked for me,” he said, after a while.