Heat clings to Maya’s throat. She runs — dress tinted with patches of black and grey from heat — as walls echo the voices of command and demand.

  “Check that street!”

  “I think they went that way!

  “Gods fucking damnit, you fools! You are all idiots!”

  Behind her, armour crashes and steel clanks. No looking back.

  She counts turns, counts breaths, refusing to be crushed again.

  Nikolai’s boots thunder beside her. His voice is steel.

  “Left. Narrow.”

  She follows. Not questioning anything.

  For now.

  The side street narrows, almost into an alley.

  A spear whistles past, splintering a doorframe and stinging her cheek. Blood burns. She speeds up.

  “Two more,” Nikolai says, calm.

  “Fine. Lead me out, then I’ll steer.”

  They burst into another narrow lane. Unmaintained wood presses close. Damp. Splintered. A hanging sign groans in its sway of the wind.

  Soldiers funnel into the street parallel to them.

  Maya veers right and meets a low fence sagging under age and poor maintenance.

  She vaults over it into straw. Nikolai catches her elbow, then kicks a broken wheel aside.

  “A stable,” she breathes.

  Inside, dust drifts from a hole in the roof. A black stallion stands, nostrils steaming fear back at them.

  Nikolai braces the door — barred.

  Good.

  Maya fights the tangled bridle. Knots bite her palm.

  The horse jostles — she murmurs.

  “Easy.”

  But no change. A buck from the stallion almost knocking her off her feet.

  A burly hand raises past her ear, and hovers by the horse’s face.

  Nikolai’s.

  “Easy, easy..”

  His voice low, and gentle. Yet commanding attention.

  The horse slowly settles, and its nostrils flare a few more times as its breaths slow down in rhythm.

  Buckles click as she saddles him, blood welling on her thumb.

  “Before they surround us,” Nikolai whispers, testing rear exits.

  She slips the bit — the stallion resists, then yields.

  “Good, good..” she breathes.

  Bootsteps thunder.

  “Detain survivors,” voices snap in the distance.

  Maya leads the horse out as Nikolai stood by the stable gate, not moving towards her yet.

  The horse’s nostrils flare once more, sensing the tension in the distance.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” he says.

  She did not have to worry or question. She knows his intentions without a word needing to be said, or any sentences detailing what he plans to do.

  Her hands grip the reins as she turns the horse towards a direction down the road.

  “Road past the granary. Then east,” she says to Nikolai.

  He nods.

  The stallion bolts. Smoke and ash whips her face.

  She did not look back at him, she did not have to.

  Because just after a few gallops past a few crossings later — bursting through a junction that connected to the road that Maya is on — Nikolai rides up next to her mounted on a brown horse.

  Maya looks over at him and gave a small smile.

  They hug the granary corner into a clearing. Reflections in puddles fracture and vanish.

  Pursuers close — armour, and shouts. Maya leans low, lets the horse choose his pace.

  He surges.

  Laundry snaps blind her; she tears it away without losing speed.

  The road widens into cold air.

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  Ahead her — brush. Freedom.

  Next to her — hoofbeats and steel.

  Behind — distant yells, and a broken village.

  She resists the urge to glance back, fingers steady on leather.

  “Run, just run,” she whispers.

  They dive into the bend. Echoes fade.

  Her ribs tense in protest. Cramps from her over-exertion in both physical and spiritual energy starting to knock on the door of her limits.

  Forward — always forward. She refuses to be taken.

  Slate presses close as Maya urges her stallion along the muddy track cleaving through overgrown fields.

  The quietness and stillness of nature slowly returned. Now they can afford to slow down and conserve some energy.

  Cold seeps under her boots as mud splatters her skirt. One hand grips taut reins, the other clutches the battered map at her sash — its western margin ink-bled with crosses and marks in a trail — marking rumours of closed roads and other possible points of interest.

  They come to a halt as a muddy trail leads into tall trees and overgrown shrubbery. One step later and the stalliom sinks into its fetlock, then deeper. The smell was stagnant and sour.

  Behind her, Nikolai’s horse follows.

  He never nags. He simply waits.

  Maya resists the urge to glance west. Knowing that that was the only direction that Amia could have been able to head to in their escape.

  “We can’t risk that road,” she murmurs. Patting the side of her horse, calming it from the small scare.

  The stallion snaps its head south instead. Leather creaks.

  Like being able to read her mind, Nikolai’s voice came out flat alongside her.

  “We can’t head where Amia went. We’ll just have to hope that we find them.”

  She meets his calm gaze. Her tired eyes giving away her inclination of worry that she so desperately tried to hide.

  “Master, please think,” Nikolai says calmly before pausing. “Two things lay west of Vialre — the forest, and the harbour. If she’s avoiding the harbor — and she should — then she either takes the coast south or cuts inland where the forest thins.” He pauses again. “Either way. Not west, not back.”

  Maya’s fingers rubs at the edge of the leather rein that she was holding onto. A particular stitch garnering the attention of her nail.

  “Beyond that, of course, is the sea. So she will most likely have to follow the coast south.”

  The sound of their horses' hooves and the insects ring in the background as Maya stares at Nikolai. For a few moments, no one said anything.

  “Okay,” she responds.

  Maya looks away and returns her focus to the front of her horse.

  The path bends past collapsed walls and weed-choked fence posts.

  Maya studies the map’s smudged marks — mills, hamlets, rumours of where three rebel checkpoints potentially are, and a selection of points marked with crosses going downwards.

  Maya lets out a sigh.

  A hollow weight presses her ribs, but she breathes through it.

  A shout carries on the wind.

  Patrol.

  Nikolai’s head turns behind him before looking over at Maya.

  She nods.

  The two heels their horses into the ditch next to them. A wide and low tree canopy providing cover.

  Maya soon follows. Cold water swirls at her calves.

  They huddle under a cluster of branches and leaves.

  “Quiet,” she whispers.

  Bootbeats and horse hooves rasp the grass in the distance. Voices slice through the hedgerow near them.

  Her magic flickers, blue warmth itching to surge.

  She buries it.

  Not here.

  When voices fade, Nikolai’s fingers flick once — clear.

  The stallion climbs out, mud sucking free.

  Back on the path, Maya steers through a faint cart track.

  “Map?” Nikolai prompts.

  She angles it.

  He points at a black hatch symbol.

  “Barricades here, and here.”

  She points to a third.

  “There’s rumours of a field fort by the north of us. And west leads to the forest and then the sea. So we go south — follow a few posts at the river’s edge until we reach the plains.”

  “Going by the river will be slow.”

  “Slow is alive,” she snaps, then softens. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize for survival.”

  She tucks the map away. A cut on her cheek stings — memories straying to Amia getting hit by the cultist leader’s Magick.

  Not now.

  They veer slightly to the south-west where bracken hides a small marking that someone’s carved into a tree trunk. A spiral on a line — rebel sigil, or mischief?

  She notes it.

  A scarecrow leans crookedly beyond. Blackbirds peck at its straw hat.

  “That scarecrow’s not doing a good job,” Nikolai says flatly.

  Maya shrugs.

  Under stunted willows, torn ribbons flutter.

  Maya draws her cloak tighter as she scans the wreck blocking their path — a wagon chained to a fallen post, with a cloaked figure hunched over the rider’s seat.

  She looks over at Nikolai before mouthing out a single word.

  “Trap.”

  They dismount.

  Nikolai ghosts to the side of the wagon and creeps alongside it — silence.

  He charges to the cloaked figure and instantly pulls his blade onto where their neck would have been.

  The wagon’s driver is only a long-cloak on a broomstick.

  “Cute,” Maya mutters.

  They remount, and Maya glances west again.

  But her horse’s direction remained where it was.

  The village noise is gone. Even the faintest shouting stopped a long time ago. Maya’s thighs and lower back burned from the fatigue of the constant rise and fall of the saddle.

  Sounds from the river were light, and the rocks that the ground had now become had started to become a massive hindrance to their original speed.

  Dragonflies needling the cooler air twirled around in random patterns by the river’s edge, and solid tall trees lined the other side.

  A half-buried milestone emerges. Nikolai reads her mind.

  “This is the last one before the plains, no?”

  “If we reach the plains, we will reach refugees.”

  “Refugees carry rumours — and news.”

  She forces steady breath. The stallion stumbles, recovers. Maya quiets him.

  An inland gull screams.

  “Artemis will keep her alive,” Maya says softly.

  Her fingers tighten.

  “I know,” Nikolai replies. “They will both keep each other alive.”

  They crest a hummock where the path splits.

  Left — southeast toward a road.

  Straight — south, into a much wider road. The highway to the plains.

  Maya studies the sky, and the bruises of trees on the horizon.

  “South,” she decides.

  Nikolai nods and the horses lunge forwards into clearer wind.

  Maya leans forward, whispering to herself into the stallion’s mane.

  “Don’t flare. Don’t beg. Trust. Find them.”

  Ahead, pale green land curves upwards, and beyond it, the highway widens into nothing.

  She presses her knees, every hoofbeat carving distance.

  Like Amia and Artemis, Maya did not look back.