Chapter 21 Now Let It Go
Now Let It Go
The world on the other side of the rune passage was blinding, liquid gold.
Alina stumbled from the close, dripping dark and into a day so bright it made her knees buckle.
The cave mouth released her onto a narrow ledge a hundred feet above a valley, a place that looked as if it had been painted by a hand with no knowledge of sorrow.
She blinked, expecting the mountain’s glare to hurt, but the light was different here—warm, soft, thick as honey.
The ledge was carpeted with moss so plush it muted her footsteps, and beneath her, the valley fell away in terraces of green and old stone, each shelf crowned with stands of ancient, silver-barked trees.
Their canopies caught the sun and spread it like sheets of gold and green, shading everything beneath in a perpetual haze.
She had expected wilderness, emptiness, the relief of being nowhere. Instead, she found the world thick with evidence of lives in motion.
The valley floor was a patchwork of clearings and wood-smoke, every bit of it alive.
At the center, nestled among the oldest trees, a settlement sprawled.
Small houses had been built into the roots and hollows, while walkways and ladders were strung through the air, bridges slung between branches that swayed in the soft wind.
From this distance, the village seemed both accidental and perfectly planned, as if the people here had grown up alongside the trees instead of cutting them down.
She took it in with slow, stunned breaths. The air in her lungs felt soothing, healing even. After a while, the multitude of pains seemed to lessen. The exhaustion weighing her down retreated a bit. She took a deep breath and then a second. Somehow, she felt a little lighter.
Alina stood for a long while on the ledge, unseen, drinking it all in.
The domed sky was so clear it looked brittle, ready to shatter at the touch of a careless bird.
The sun turned every leaf to a coin of gold, every dew drop to a tiny lantern.
Far below, the path she’d glimpsed was a soft thread of moss and flagstone that meandered its way down to the cluster of houses in the valley’s heart.
Along its curves, she could make out movement: children in packs, arms and legs everywhere, their laughter rising in sudden, piercing bursts.
They chased dogs and each other; some darted through the high wildflowers, while others scrambled up ladders into the lower limbs of the massive trees ringing the settlement.
There were voices calling, but no sharp commands, only the gentle rise and fall of names and nicknames, warnings meant as gestures rather than actual limits.
Nearer to the houses, men and women moved in steady, confident ways, their hands full of baskets and tools—always busy, but never frantic, as if their work was a kind of conversation with the world around them.
A little to the left of the main cluster, smoke curled from the opening in a thatched roof, and she could almost taste the bread and roasting roots.
The ache in her stomach sharpened, but it had changed: it was less about hunger and more about longing, a nostalgia for something she’d never known.
There was no sign of soldiers, no hint of the hunting parties she’d expected.
The only weapons she could see were the knives on belts and the axes stuck into tree stumps for woodwork, and even these seemed to belong more to the rhythm of daily life than to any real sense of threat.
She started down the path, careful at first. While she had dragged her broken carcass of a body through the passage on her last reserves, she felt a little better now.
Still, she was in no real shape to hike down a slope surefootedly, so she had better take care.
And yet, under her feet, the moss was so thick and yielding that every stumble became a glide, and soon she found herself walking steadily, drawn downwards by the gravitational force of the valley.
Bits of conversation began to reach her, battered and bent by the distance.
She caught the end of a joke, the high, impossible giggle of a toddler, the soothing cadence of a lullaby drifting from an open window.
She heard arguments, too, but they ended as quickly as they began, dissolved by bursts of laughter or the simple comfort of shared silence.
It was the laughter that struck her the hardest. In the palace, laughter had been a currency, a tool to be deployed or withheld by those who understood its power.
In the Caves, it had been a byproduct of desperation, always meant as a defiance.
Here, it seemed to be an accidental Gift, given freely, without calculation, and was nothing other than what it was meant to be: an expression of joy.
She tried to keep her eyes on her feet to avoid staring, but the closer she got, the harder it became.
The villagers watched her progress, some openly, some with sidelong glances and half-hidden smiles.
The children were the boldest. Three of them stopped in the middle of a footrace to point at her, conferring in stage-whispers before one of them—a boy with a thatch of white-blond hair and a missing front tooth—shouted, “Hello! Who are you?” The others shushed him, but Alina could see their faces, eager and unafraid.
She felt the heat rising in her cheeks and looked away, pretending sudden fascination with a patch of wild strawberries fattening in the shade.
The fruits looked like rubies, and their scent made her mouth water.
She wondered if she was allowed to pick one.
In the palace, foraging was strictly forbidden; only the gardening staff could touch what grew in the royal grounds.
The memory of Marta flashed in her mind—she would have winked, plucked three berries, and popped them into Alina’s mouth one by one, daring the kitchen staff to scold her.
The thought made Alina ache with a homesickness she’d thought herself too wise to feel.
She passed a wooden arch braided with morning glories, and the path widened into a sort of commons.
In the center, a circle of stones marked a fire pit, its ashes still faintly smoking from a recent meal.
Beyond that, glass jars crowded a plank table—some filled with jams or pickled roots, others with wildflowers or clusters of tiny, glowing insects.
Around the table, a group of elders sat in the sun, their hands moving over knitting needles, whittling knives, or cards.
They noticed her approach and made no effort to rise or intercept her but nodded and smiled kindly, following her with warm expressions on their faces, as if she were an old friend passing by.
The path went on on the far side of the commons and Alina followed it. Her body, while not healed by any means, was not on the brink of collapse either. How very strange.
She could feel the eyes of the village on her, not hostile, but heavy, as though each person was weighing her and finding her wanting.
She had spent her life being measured—by tutors, by the rebels, most of all by her parents—but this was different.
There was no ambition here, no sense that her presence could be twisted into advantage.
It was as if she had walked into a story being told by someone else, and everyone was waiting to discover what role she would play.
At a small bridge over a network of rivulets, she paused.
A group of children sat with their bare feet dangling over the edge, arguing about something in urgent whispers.
They looked at her as she approached, then at each other.
After a moment, a girl who might have been nine or twelve—it was impossible to tell, she was built like a stork and wore confidence like a cloak—stood and offered a shy half-wave.
Alina waved back, equally shy and moved on.
The path led her to the heart of the settlement, where the houses clustered closest and the air was thick with the smells of bread, smoke, and wet earth.
Here, the villagers’ curiosity was less disguised: men and women paused in their work to watch her, children peeked from behind laundry lines, and the elders at the central fountain seemed to lean in as one organism, their interest palpable.
She passed two women kneeling by a stone basin.
One was dark-skinned with a braid as thick as Alina’s wrist, the other pale and speckled with freckles.
They were coaxing something impossible from a pile of damp sticks: blue flame, transparent and flickering, that burned cold and left no scorch marks on the stone.
One woman noticed Alina and winked, making a gesture with her hand that Alina recognized as both greeting and warning.
In her father's realm, the open wielding of the Gift was punishable by death or—if one was lucky—lifelong exile. Here, it was performed in broad daylight, in the center of the village, treated as an ordinary part of life. Images of another village where the Gift was used openly flooded her mind and with it, the memory of Kael—his eyes, his face, his hands. The way he had looked at her, the way his presence made her body react, the way his scent drew her in like a magnet. A pang of longing slashed through her, so intense that she couldn’t breathe for a moment.
A little further on, a man was splitting planks with a hatchet.
He looked up, met her gaze, and raised the blade in salute.
Then, with a murmured word, he sent the wood floating through the air in a neat, controlled spiral, stacking itself with gentle clicks against the trunk of a nearby tree.
Alina’s lips parted in involuntary wonder at the effortlessness of it, and she glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed, but the man had already returned to his work. No one else seemed impressed.