Marco's boots crunched through the frost as he walked me to Lorraine's archery school, the morning air sharp with the tang of burnt timber and pine. Sunlight bled weakly through the haze, casting long, skeletal shadows over Sundra's scarred streets. Lorraine stood in the doorway of the school, her posture straighter than yesterday, color creeping back into her cheeks, though her eyes still carried the hollowed look of someone who'd stared too long into the dark. The empty porridge bowl beside her testified to the breakfast I'd left—oatmeal drizzled with honey, Flynn's portion scraped clean.
"Where is he?" I asked, already shouldering past her. The school's interior felt hollow, the straw dummies untouched, bows dangling like dead things on the walls. Lorraine's voice chased me, fraying at the edges.
"He waited until I fell asleep. Took his pack, his boots—I tried to stop him, but—"
Flynn's cot lay stripped, the emergency kit he'd obsessively stocked—dried venison, a whetstone, the bone-handled knife we'd bartered two hares for—gone. Only dust motes swam in the slatted light. My chest tightened. No.
"Check your house," Marco said, already turning toward the door.
We ran.
The cottage hunched at the edge of the woods, its thatch roof sagging like a weary spine. Inside, chaos. Flynn's spare tunic lay shredded on the floor, sleeves hacked off for bandages. His boots—the ones I'd resoled last winter—were missing. The bed was a carcass of discarded clothes, the quilt torn, feathers spilling like innards. Drawers hung open, their contents vomited onto the floor: rusted fishhooks, a cracked compass, Kisa's old hair ribbon.
And there, beneath the overturned chair—a single sheet of paper, edges crumpled, ink smudged by haste.
I didn't need to read it to know.
The wind moaned through the cracks in the walls, carrying the scent of pine resin and distant snow. Somewhere beyond Blackridge Pass, Flynn was running toward a future I couldn't protect him from.
Marco hovered in the doorway, uncharacteristically silent as I picked the letter up,
Iris,
I know you'll tear this place apart looking for me. Don't. I'm already gone.
I couldn't say goodbye. You'd have tied me to the damn bedpost, and we both know it. But I can't sit here waiting for the next sucker horde, the next funeral pyre. Not after Kisa. Not after watching you nearly die trying to clean up a mess we didn't start.
You always said the Wolves don't care about us. Maybe they don't. But I'm done being the one who needs saving. If I can be half the shield you are—if I can keep one person from ending up like her—then it's worth the shot. Even if it kills me.
Don't come after me. Don't try. This isn't your fight to fix anymore.
I love you. More than the stars. But if I stay, I'll rot. And so will you.
Pray I see you again somewhere the world isn't on fire.
—Flynn
Marco let out a low whistle, crumpling Flynn's letter in his fist. "Kid's got balls."
"He's eighteen," I snapped, snatching the paper back and smoothing its creases with trembling fingers. "Barely eighteen."
"And what are you?" Marco leaned against the splintered doorframe, arms crossed, but his smirk didn't reach his eyes. "His keeper?"
I whirled on him, my boot crunching a discarded fishhook underfoot. "No. I'm his sister." I yanked open a warped drawer, scavenging for my whetstone. "If he wants to march into the Wolves' jaws, fine. But I'll be there to drag him out when they bite."
Marco's gaze sharpened. "What is it with your family and this obsession with martyring yourselves?"
The whetstone slipped, gouging the table. I stared at the scar it left, pale and raw, like everything else in this godforsaken cottage. "Because he's all I have left," I whispered. The admission hung between us, fragile as a moth's wing. "And I won't bury another sibling."
For once, Marco had no retort. He just watched as I slung my quiver across my back, the leather straps biting into my collarbone. Finally, he sighed—a sound like wind through hollow bones. "If we ride now, we'll hit Blackridge Pass by sundown tomorrow. No stops. No fires."
I froze, a spare arrow clenched in my fist. "We?"
He shrugged, feigning indifference, but his knuckles whitened around the doorframe. "No use rotting in this graveyard of a town. Might as well die somewhere scenic."
I studied him—the tension in his jaw, the way his thumb worried the scar on his palm. For all his bravado, he looked… anchored. Like he'd finally found something to outrun.
Before I could speak, Lorraine's shadow filled the doorway. Morning light haloed her frazzled braids, glinting off the dagger in her hand. Its hilt was carved into twin wolves mid-howl, their wooden jaws frozen in perpetual fury.
"Take this," she said, pressing it into my palm. The blade was colder than river ice.
I recognized it instantly, the dagger Kisa had whittled in secret last winter, hiding it beneath her skirts whenever I'd entered the room. My throat tightened. "She wanted you to have it," Lorraine murmured. "For your twentieth."
The sob tore free before I could cage it. I pulled Lorraine into a hug, her rosemary-and-ash scent flooding my lungs. Her shoulders shook, silent tears soaking into my tunic. "Keep the school alive," I choked out.
She nodded against my shoulder. Then, with deliberate slowness, she unwrapped the oilcloth bundle in her arms. Marco inhaled sharply.
Lorraine's prized Sunderguard bow gleamed in the weak light, its oak limbs polished to a mirror shine, the grip worn smooth by three generations of calloused hands. She thrust it at Marco.
"You'll treat it better than your teeth," She said, managing a faint smile. "Try not to snap it like you do your pride."
"You—you're giving me this?" He cradled it like a newborn, fingertips tracing the faded runes along the riser.
"You shoot like a drunk badger," Lorraine said flatly. "But you've got grit. Don't waste it."
Marco let out a laugh, half-nervous, half-grateful. "I'll guard it with my life."
While the grown ass man gaped like a child seeing a wolf for the first time, I slipped the coin pouch straight from his belt. He lunged, too slow, as I dumped half my sovereigns into his sack, mixing them with whatever coin he had "What the hells, Liren—!"
"You'll need rest. No training for at least the month," I said, tossing my remaining coins to Lorraine and ignoring Marco. "Here, For the school repairs. For the children."
She tried to shove them back. "I won't spend your—"
"Then burn it." My voice broke. "Burn it all, if it keeps you safe."
Her resolve crumbled. She pocketed the gold and nodded.
Marco eyed the coin pouch still in my hand, then arched a brow. "What makes you think I won't run with your money?" His hand already moving towards his sack in my hand only for me to pull it away.
I didn't even look up from where I was shoving jerky and flint into my satchel. "Because I'm not giving it back."
He stared at me, dumbfounded. "You—you can't just—"
"I can," I cut in, cinching the satchel shut with a sharp tug. "And I did."
A strangled noise escaped him, somewhere between a scoff and a howl. "Unbelievable," he muttered, but there was no real heat behind it. Just that half-annoyed, half-awed way he looked at me whenever I did something reckless and called it logic.
I slung the satchel over my shoulder and brushed past him. He raised a hand in mock surrender.
"Alright, alright," he said, already backing toward the door. "I'll go grab my own things before you rob me blind."
"Smart," I said without looking back.
"Meet me at the stables in an hour, we need to buy some gear," he called over his shoulder. "And if you take my horse, Liren, I swear—"
But the door had already swung shut behind him, his voice muffling behind it.
— — —
The market stalls lining Sundra's eastern gate were a patchwork of desperation and barter, hawking everything from moth-eaten furs to tins of rancid fat. Marco kicked a clump of frozen mud off his boot, eyeing a vendor's cart piled with coiled rope. "Think they'll give it free because of my charm?"
"Charm?" I muttered, testing the tensile strength of a braided hemp line. It bit into my palms, rough but reliable. "Your charm starts fights, Korvin."
He smirked, tossing a sovereign to the vendor and hoisting a bundle of rope over his shoulder. "Says the woman buying two bedrolls. Planning a romantic detour?"
I ignored him, bartering a week's worth of dried venison and hardtack into my pack. Flynn had always chewed through rations twice as fast as me. Taking extra for Flynn might come bight me in the ass though, I'm quickly realizing the weight is going to be too much. The vendor, a gaunt man, eyed my coin pouch greedily. "Got a salve for frostbite," he rasped, holding up a cracked jar of waxy paste. "Works on burns too."
"We'll take three," Marco cut in, slapping coins on the table before I could haggle.
"Three?"
"You, me, and the idiot," he said, stuffing the jars into his satchel. "Bet your brother's already lost a toe to the cold."
The truth of it gnawed at me. I added an extra pair of wool-lined gloves to the pile—thick ones, the kind Flynn used to mock until his fingers turned blue.
The stall's tattered awning flapped like a moth-eaten flag in the wind, my boots sank into the mud as I stared at the bundles of willow charcoal stacked in crooked pyramids, the same kind I'd bought there every winter since I was fourteen. The vendor, a woman with hands gnarled like tree roots and eyes sunk deep into her skull, nodded at me without speaking. She knew. Three coppers. Always three coppers.
I had picked up a stick, the charcoal crumbling slightly under my glove. It smelled like burnt applewood and pine resin, sharp and earthy, just like the night I'd sketched Tor by the bonfire outside Sundra's walls. His face had been half-lit by the flames, the scar on his jaw, a gift from one of his own mischiefs, gleaming like a silver thread.
"You made it look like a worm," he'd grunted, squinting at the drawing in my lap. "My scar's straight. Clean. Not some squiggly shit." He had grabbed the charcoal from my hand, his calloused fingers brushing mine, and gouged a harsh line across the paper. "There. Now it's real."
I'd laughed, but my chest had ached. Tor never let anyone see him care about anything, least of all his own face.
Marco had been leaning against a tree nearby, sharpening his knife. "I'll give you two silvers for that one," he'd said, nodding at the sketch. "Frame it. Hang it above my bed. Remind me why I'm prettier than him."
Tor had thrown a pinecone at his head. Marco caught it, grinning, and tossed me a coin.
Now, my thumb rubbed the charcoal's rough edge. The memory still so vivid in my mind. I hadn't realized I'd been staring until I felt Marco's presence behind me, He didn't speak. Didn't nudge. Just waited, boots scuffing the mud, his breath a steady rhythm beneath the market's din.
I glanced back and he began pretending to inspect a rusted hunting trap at the next stall, but his gaze flashed towards me. For once, he hadn't joked. Hadn't pushed. He knew this stall, these sticks, the way my sketches had littered the floor of our cottage after Tor died. How he'd find me cross-legged in the dirt, charcoal in hand, redrawing my brother over and over again until the paper tore.
"Two silvers," he'd said once, tossing coins into my lap as I shaded the curve of my brother's headstone. "For the one with Tor and me." That had been the third time that week I'd seen him at Tor's grave, and he'd seen me there, sketching.
I'd crumpled the page and thrown it at him. He'd uncrumpled it, smoothed it out, and tucked it into his coat.
I hadn't bought these in ages. To buy them meant no food for the day and with Flynn, I just couldn't do it. His education was more important. I inhaled deeply, letting the scent fill me for one last time because there was nop way I could sketch in the military, and moved forward. Now I had the money but no time.
At the next stall, Marco whistled at a set of iron climbing hooks. "Think Pretty Boy's scaled a cliff yet?"
"He can't climb a ladder without falling," I said, but tossed the hooks into our haul anyway. I turned, ready to argue over rations again, but froze mid-step.