Elara’s POV

Snapping out of my daze in the tavern, I stared at Finnian’s cheerful message on the communication stone until the glowing letters blurred.

The tavern noise faded. The laughter, the clinking mugs, the crackle of the hearth—all of it dissolved into a dull hum beneath the pounding in my ears.

Ela. Long time no see.

Such simple words. Casual. Warm. The kind of message you sent to an old friend on a quiet evening when life was ordinary and whole. He had no idea. He couldn’t possibly know that the woman reading his words was sitting in a stranger’s tavern with nothing but a half-empty coin purse and a bag of clothes, running from the wreckage of her own life.

My thumbs hovered over the stone’s surface. I drafted three different replies on the stone’s surface and erased each one.

I’m fine, just busy.

Erased.

Things have been difficult.

Erased.

I left my children tonight and I can’t stop shaking.

Erased.

I pressed my forehead against the cool surface of the communication stone and closed my eyes. The young mother at the next table was humming now, rocking her smaller child against her shoulder. The sound was a knife turning slowly between my ribs.

I traced the words again. Kept it short.

"Can I come see you?"

I stared at those five words for what felt like endless moments. My finger rested on the edge of the stone, hovering over the sending rune. One press. One small motion. And I’d be committing to this—to the direction, the distance, the finality of moving farther from the capital instead of turning back.

The young mother kissed her child’s hair. He made a soft, sleepy sound against her neck.

I pressed the sending rune.

The reply came instantly. As if he’d been sitting there with the stone in his hand, waiting.

"Ela!! Of course!! When? I’ll come get you. Where are you?"

Three exclamation marks. I could hear his voice through the glowing letters—that open, uncomplicated enthusiasm that had never once made me feel like I owed him something in return. Finnian didn’t calculate. He didn’t weigh costs. He just gave.

"No need to come get me. I’ll take the public coaches. I should arrive by tomorrow evening."

"Don’t be ridiculous, those coaches are terrible. Let me drive out to meet you halfway at least—"

"Finnian. I’m fine. I’ll message you when I’m close."

A pause. Then: "Alright. But you message me at every stop. Promise me, Ela."

"I promise."

I tucked the stone back into my bag. Paid for the ale I hadn’t touched. Pulled my hood up and stepped back into the night.

The next coach was already waiting at the edge of town—a smaller, rougher vehicle than the first, with a cracked leather bench and a door that didn’t close all the way. I wedged myself inside. Two other passengers sat across from me: a man with mud-caked boots who smelled of livestock, and an older woman clutching a basket of turnips to her chest like it contained gold.

The coach lurched forward. I braced my arm against the wall and watched the dark countryside slide past through the gap where the door didn’t seal.

Fields. Hedgerows. The occasional distant flicker of a farmhouse window. The world beyond the capital was quieter than I remembered. Emptier. The kind of emptiness that pressed against your skin and made the thoughts louder.

Kaelen has found the letter by now.

The certainty settled over me like cold water. He would have gone to the nursery eventually. He always checked on Lyra before he retired, even on the nights when we didn’t speak, even during the worst of the silence between us. He’d push open the door, glance at her crib, and see the folded paper on the table beside it.

I imagined his hand reaching for it. The crease forming between his brows. The way those dark gold eyes would move across my handwriting—slow at first, then faster as the meaning hit.

Would he send the guards? Would he dispatch riders to every road leaving the capital?

Or would he stand there in the nursery with the letter in his fist and feel nothing but the confirmation of what he’d always expected—that everyone he let close enough to matter would eventually leave?

My chest cramped. I pressed my knuckles against my mouth and bit down.

The coach hit a rut. My teeth clacked together. The turnip woman muttered something. The livestock man snored.

At the next station, I transferred to an even smaller coach. This one had no door at all—just a canvas flap that snapped in the wind. The bench was a plank of unfinished wood. The other passengers were a family of four, the children sleeping across their parents’ laps in a tangle of limbs and blankets.

I sat at the edge and held my bag against my stomach. The canvas flap let in gusts of cold air that cut through my cloak. Without Moonlight, without the wolf blood that had once kept me warm in the dead of winter, I had nothing to fight it with. Just mortal skin and mortal cold and the slow, grinding awareness of how fragile this body had become.

Valerius is awake now.

The thought hit without warning. My son was an early riser. He’d be padding down the corridor in his socks, hair sticking up at odd angles, looking for me. He’d check the kitchen first. Then the library. Then the nursery, where Lyra would still be sleeping.

"Mommy?"

I could hear his voice so clearly it made my stomach lurch. That particular pitch of confusion—not alarm yet, just puzzlement. Just a boy looking for his mother in all the usual places and not finding her.

"Daddy, where’s Mommy?"

I bent forward. My arms wrapped around my middle. The coach rattled on. The sleeping children shifted. The canvas snapped.

I messaged Finnian at every stop, as promised. Short messages. Transferred. Moving. Almost there. He replied to each one within seconds. Good. Stay warm. Eat something if you can.

I couldn’t eat. The thought of food made my throat close.

I endured an agonizing stretch of time as the journey dragged on, the public coaches growing worse and more crowded as I moved farther from the capital. The roads narrowed. The stations shrank. At sunset, the landscape had shifted entirely—rolling green hills giving way to the wilder, rockier terrain of the border region. Sparse trees bent by wind. Grey stone walls lining the roads. Air that tasted of rain and iron and open sky.

When the last coach finally stopped, I stepped down onto packed dirt and looked around.

The station was barely a station at all. A single wooden bench. A rusted iron signpost with letters too faded to read. No building. No shelter. Just the bench and the sign and the vast, grey-green emptiness of the borderlands stretching in every direction.

I pulled out the communication stone and pressed Finnian’s sigil.

He answered before the first chime finished.

"Ela." His voice—warm, solid, immediate. "Where are you?"

"The last stop on the route. There’s a bench and a sign. Nothing else."

"I know exactly where that is. Stay there. Don’t move. I promise I’ll be there in a matter of moments."

"Finnian, you don’t have to—"

"Don’t move, Ela."

The connection cut. I sat down on the bench and pulled my cloak tighter. The wind picked up, carrying the scent of wet grass and something sharper underneath—pine, maybe, or juniper. The sun was sinking behind the hills, painting the clouds in shades of copper and ash.

I waited. The wind blew. The light faded. And for the first time in days, the frantic, clawing urgency in my chest began to ease—not because the pain was less, but because I was too exhausted to sustain it.

True to his word, I soon heard the rattle of wheels.

An old cargo wagon crested the hill right on time, pulled by a sturdy brown horse. The driver was broad-shouldered, tall even sitting down. His hair caught the last of the fading light—still gold, though paler than I remembered, as if the sun had leached some of the color over the years. His face was more weathered now. Lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before. But the eyes themselves hadn’t changed. That steady, warm gaze that never asked for anything and offered everything.

Finnian pulled the horse to a stop. He was off the wagon before the wheels finished turning.

Three strides. That was all it took. Three long, decisive strides, and then his arms were around me and my feet were off the ground.

"Ela." His voice cracked on the single word. He held me like I might break. Like I might vanish. The warmth of his embrace soaked through my cloak, giving me the first true sense of safety I had felt in days. The cold hollow space behind my ribs, where everything had been numb for so long, finally began to thaw.

I didn’t cry. I had nothing left. But my fingers gripped the back of his coat, and I held on.

He set me down gently. His hands stayed on my shoulders. Those kind eyes swept over my face, cataloguing every shadow, every sharp edge, every sign of damage. He didn’t ask. Not yet. He just picked up my pathetic little bag with one hand and steered me toward the wagon with the other.

"Mom’s already got dinner on the table," he said, pulling the wagon door open. "And Dad’s been pacing the front room since I told him you were coming. You’d think royalty was visiting."

"Sorry it’s just me."

He looked at me. Something fierce moved behind the gentleness. "Don’t do that."

He climbed up and took the reins. The wagon creaked forward.

"Sorry, it doesn’t look like much," he said as we pulled away from the little station, "but it’s practical."

"It’s perfect."