Chapter 18 It’s a Shame, Really #2
A young scout barreled in, face streaked with mud and something darker. He looked about twelve, but his eyes were already old. “Captain,” he gasped. “It’s the safehouse. Hazelwood. Royal Guard—they found it. It’s—” The words broke apart. “They’re killing everyone.”
The room exploded.
Marcus went straight for the list of available men, belllowing names and orders in rapid succession.
Seraphina tore a length of parchment from the wall and scribbled a missive, folding it so tight her knuckles turned white.
Kael moved like a man struck by lightning—one hand on the map, the other on the hilt at his belt, as if he could draw both sword and plan at the same time.
“What about the fallback routes?” Kael snapped.
The scout shook his head, breathless. “They’re already blocked. Someone tipped them off.”
A heavy, ugly silence fell, the kind that thickened the air and made everyone look anywhere but at each other.
From the far end of the table, a voice cut through the din. “How’d they know where to look?” A few heads turned, eyes sharp and glittering. “Who knew the location?”
For a second, Alina hoped that maybe they would just keep talking, that her presence would be ignored the same way it always was these days.
Instead, every eye in the room tracked her with needlepoint precision.
Maven, lurking near the sideboard with a stack of parchments in his arms, stepped out of the shadows, his smile a knife wrapped in velvet. “Curious, isn’t it, how often our luck turns sour since we’ve been hosting our guest of honor.”
Every vertebra in Alina’s neck tightened. “I didn’t—” she started, but Maven rolled over her words.
“Of course not. You’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time, every single time.” He cocked his head, eyes flashing with a cold amusement. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Kael slammed a fist onto the table, making the map jump. “Enough! Get out, all of you. Seraphina, take the scout and draw up the relief plan. Marcus, gather the ready men and get them to the north tunnel.” He jerked a finger at Maven. “Shut up and get out of my sight.”
The room cleared with a speed that bordered on the miraculous. Only Kael, Alina, and the faint smell of scorched wax remained.
Kael turned to her, his shoulders stiff, expression unreadable. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Alina tried to swallow, but her throat was a fistful of sand.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said, voice cracking.
“I never would. I don’t know where that safehouse is.
I don’t even know where these caves are, for the love of the Gods!
How would I even do that? How would I get messages out and in?
How would I get in contact with anyone?” She’d gotten louder with every sentence. She was breathing heavily.
He exhaled, the anger draining from his face to leave only the fatigue of a man with the fate of far too many placed upon his shoulders. “I know,” he said quietly. “But knowing and convincing everyone else are not the same thing.”
She looked at the ground, shame flaring in her chest, hot and bitter. “What should I do?”
Kael glanced at her, then back at the chaos of the map. “Stay safe,” he said, then softer: “Don’t give them any more reasons to doubt you.”
She nodded, but even as she turned to leave, she knew it would never be enough.
From the corridor, she heard Maven’s voice, already at work, already laying the next trap: “…every time, she’s at the center of it…”
The words stuck to her like mud, and no matter how hard she scrubbed, they would never come off.
The Caves were in an uproar.
Alina trailed Kael through the tangle of corridors and side chambers, the clamor growing as they neared the staging area.
Word of the Hazelwood massacre had reached every rebel in mere minutes.
Now, squads clustered in armor and oilcloth, teeth bared as they jostled for arms and orders, some shouting, some arguing over tactics.
The air hummed with a sense of doom—or maybe it was the sharp, acrid tang of blood already being spilled somewhere just out of sight.
Kael walked at the center, every muscle honed to a line, every word clipped and precise. He didn’t so much command as impose, the way a thundercloud doesn’t ask permission to break. Alina followed just behind, part of her desperate to keep up, part of her wanting nothing more than to disappear.
She caught his sleeve at a turn in the corridor, breathless. “Let me come with you. I can help.”
Kael didn’t look back. “No.”
She dug in, planting her feet. “I’m not a liability. Not unless you let them make me one.” Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears—hard, brittle, unyielding.
He stopped, turned, met her eyes. For an instant, she saw the exhaustion lurking behind the gold: a man splintered in a hundred directions, trying to hold the pieces together by sheer force of will.
“I know you didn’t betray anyone,” he said, low and urgent.
“But if you’re seen out there, today, it will ruin you. And maybe us.”
“I don’t care about being ruined,” she spat. “I care about not being useless.”
He shook his head. “You are not—” He stopped, the words choking off. “We need you alive. I need you alive. Stay here.” He was gone before she could say another word, swept away by the current of men following him into the fray.
Alina stood alone in the corridor, fists balled so tight her nails bit crescent moons into her palms. The world funneled past her: squads running, shouts for orders, the clatter and thump of a war machine ramping up for slaughter.
She wanted to scream, to rip open the walls, to show everyone what she was really made of.
Instead, she watched the flow until the first wave of surviving refugees stumbling in from outside.
Children, women, the old and the broken—all of them smeared with mud, faces streaked with tears or worse.
Some clutched at each other like drowning sailors, others just wandered, hollowed out and aimless.
One boy, no older than eight, limped on a bandaged leg, his entire face so swollen that only one blue eye peeked out.
Behind him, a woman collapsed, her hands shaking so violently she couldn’t hold onto the little bundle pressed to her chest.
Alina moved without thinking, crossing to the woman to ease her down against the wall. The bundle mewled—a newborn, impossibly tiny, fists clenched against the sound of the world. The woman looked up, saw Alina, and flinched away.
“It’s all right,” Alina said, voice softer than she’d meant. “You’re safe here.”
The woman’s mouth twisted. “No one’s safe. Not after what happened.”
Alina wanted to ask, but the horror in the woman’s eyes said more than any words could. She stood up, watching as the sad small band of wounded trickled deeper into the Caves, and realized that the war was already here. There was no hiding from it.
She looked for Finn, for anyone she knew, but the faces were blurred by blood and panic. She ran, following the line of refugees back to the tunnel mouth, past the guards and into the open.
As always, the wind slapped her skin, cold and wild. She pelted up the slope toward the ridge, boots skidding on loose rock, her breath a frozen ghost. At the top, she found chaos.
Royal Guard uniforms flashed through the trees, blue and gold in a rolling wave.
Rebel fighters met them in a ragged line, yelling, swinging axes, firing crossbows into the press.
The clash was all sound and blur—arrows hissing, men screaming, the crunch of metal into bone.
In the gully below, a cluster of refugees had bottlenecked, unable to move forward or back.
Guards in bright armor picked them off like cattle.
Alina’s hands curled into fists. She called the Gift, felt it stir and flare, the familiar surge that left her lightheaded but alive. She sucked in air, let the world slow around her, and raised her hands.
The first time she had tried to build a shield, it had nearly burned her alive.
This time, she focused only on the space she wanted to protect—the gully, the terrified faces, the narrow band of earth between two boulders.
She imagined a wall, tall and thick and impenetrable.
She forced it into existence, drawing the power up from her gut and out through every nerve in her arms.
It shimmered into being, a band of energy that warped the air, and the next volley of arrows bent and dropped, clattering harmlessly to the ground.
With all her might, Alina willed the shield to select friend from foe.
She needed it to let in those who needed protection and hold off the enemy and their weapons.
The effort cost her dearly. It was more than a price this time—it was a stripping, a searing, a demand that reached into the core of her and started to burn.
As she forced the wall of air and raw will to stay, Alina felt her body shrink to a single point, the trembling node in her chest where the Gift twisted.
Her hands, raised and rigid, refused to lower.
Her arms locked and quivered. The world around her shrank to two realities: the pressure mounting in her skull and the impossible clarity of watching dozens of lives depend on her for their chance at survival.
She watched as the rebel front, bolstered by the sudden protection, surged forward.
The first rank of the king’s soldiers battered at the shield with arrows, then with spears, then with curses as the volleyed shafts simply warped and fell at their feet.
Every time a new projectile struck the shimmering air, it reverberated through her, like a piano key struck somewhere very far away but echoing in her bones all the same.