Dawn found Alize still fighting the wind’s scorn. Though her limbs knew how to move, she found new obstacles. Bold blisters developed where her callouses had fallen away during the winter. Her muscles had grown softer in the isolation of the stone walls. The tasks that had characterized her Hrumi lifestyle now left her exhausted. The new frailty made a more fearsome foe than Hesna had ever thought to warn her of in all her to reminders exercise diligently.

Soon it won’t matter, Alize told herself, I’m going home. That thought alone brightened the world around her.

She walked towards the only place she could recover in safety. Even the Deku would not be so foolhardy to hunt her in the Hrumi children’s camp. Where the trees could no longer provide her solace or protection, the camp could swaddle her like a lullaby.

But its proximity to the citadel might yet pose a problem.

The mountain range had been a gift from the Ginmae to the Deku, and the citadel they built at its summit had provided shelter for the Deku’s clandestine rituals. They were known as assassins, soultrussers, but only for profit, not piety. And no one trusted them more than the Ginmae, even as their family unknowingly fell prey to the Deku salt for centuries.

Until the Deku grew weary of rationing the Ginmae. As a child, Alize had often heard Hesna recount the story of the final Ginmae massacre at the hand of the Deku.

Now she had heard it from the Deku perspective. They told it with an entirely different level of fervor.

The citadel portrait gallery housed an enormous picture of the Ginmae Prince Heraldin, whose had battled against a militant prophet and his followers. The Deku worshipped him as the Ginmae ancestor of bravery. Alize felt sick when she remembered Viken’s story of his soultrussing. The prince was burying his weapons, as a symbolic gesture of goodwill to the survivors. That day the Deku took possession of his soul and left the body to rot amongst the red poppies thronging the old battlefield.

All the Ginmae ancestors had such stories. Irkan, ancestor of innocence, soultrussed by a dying river. Dahar, ancestor of patience, caught unaware while bathing in the bay of the Silver City. There were hundreds, including an ancestor Alize, ancestor of courtesy. Viken liked to remind Alize about her, as if a namesake could shame Alize into compliance.

Until the Ginmae massacre, the hapless royalty had remained ignorant of the Deku crimes against them. The Deku assassins divided their time between the citadel, high in their sacred mountains, and the Silver City, where they guarded their prey until they felt like hunting.

Hrumi history did not say when the clans had settled the children’s camp in the forests of the Deku sacred mountains. Pressed as they were by the Sargons, the mountains had provided much-needed sanctuary for centuries. Even the Sargons feared the Deku soultrussing. And when the Kogalok Soul Eaters overran the Silver City and the Ginmae province, the children’s camp had only become safer. Of all the people in the world, only the Hrumi knew magic to protect their souls.

The day was bitter cold, but Alize’s nervous heat kept her warm, her palms clammy with sweat. Already her exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her weary limbs, but if she faltered now, Viken might find her, might drag her back to the citadel. And Alize would live what little life she had left with blood dripping down the fingernails of her clenched fists.

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I will have freedom or I will have nothing. Alize vowed.

The Hrumi called these mountain woods a lightning forest. When the storms sailed over the peaks, lighting rained down, leaving billowing trunks both flaming and drowning in the wet torrents. The mountain forest had always welcomed Alize, but as dawn brightened, the trees remained silent as heartbreak except for the icy branches chiming against each other. Their dead leaves hung like abandoned cocoons, their contents rendered by some unseen force, leaving only the shriveled husks. Alize struggled to shrug off the loneliness. After all, there was no hope to restore her magic.

A falcon shrieked overhead and Alize pulled into the concealment of a tree to watch it circle. It focused further away, allaying Alize’s immediate fears. But she frowned and flit her frozen fingers. Surely the Deku would not target the Hrumi children’s camp.

The falcon’s presence could mean the Deku anticipated her arrival there and intended to recapture her. For what purpose? Alize wondered in frustration. They had long since proven she was of no use to them, yet even Iedaja had never dared mention a prospect for Alize’s release in anything above a whisper.

As she walked, Alize climbed the trees often to monitor her surroundings. The entire process distracted her from anticipating her reception. There would be smiling faces, warm roasted chickpeas in thyme and oregano, the smell of horse hair and wet wool. Of course, the Hrumi would have her dagger too. Her sisters would welcome her, would wrap her into the community, so she could put all of the events of the autumn behind her.

Yet her approach under the star-littered darkness gave no hint of the Hrumi camp aheed. No lights, no music, no smells of food for her empty belly. Stale cold air greeted her instead. Like the forest, the camp should have been alive and warm, not silent and still. Only when she neared the periphery of the camp could she begin to realize her sisters’ fate.

Bodies lay strewn in every direction – not the children, but the mentors and the keepers. The children’s bodies were nowhere to be found. The blood had frozen in puddles around the corpses and Alize retreated from the collapsed tents with aching watchfulness. Now more than ever she feared the flickers of her Deku pursuers’ white robes in the forest beyond. Her mind reeled and Alize pressed forward, numb. She could not afford weakness now, when she risked confronting whatever it was that had decimated her sisters.

There was no sanctuary here.

A thousand questions dug into Alize’s mind. Had the assault left any witnesses? Who knew of what had happened? Could the Hrumi elsewhere be ignorant of these atrocities, still basking in the false comfort of a home that no longer existed? Alize turned west and felt a new responsibility on her slumped shoulders. The clans would have retreated back to the forests after the Temple Battle. There were always ways to find them.

But the Kogaloks’ warnings of her sisters repeated in Alize’s mind. Viken had only once alluded to the fate of the Hrumi after the Temple battle, and only to provoke Alize. But he too had spoken of Parousia, a government city. Normally the thought of a city festering with Sargon warriors would sicken Alize. They were the soultrussing nightmares that had haunted her childhood and stalked her in the forest realms of the Western clan. But in her travels, Alize had met Davram and Kell, two Sargons who worked with her to seek answers at the Temple. Their support had bolstered Alize in her personal darkness, and their Sargon identities had not prevented the fragile friendship that blossomed.

And even in the frigid night, the thought of Kell made Alize flush. Against her will, her memory stole back to a bright day in a healer’s tent. Having just redeemed her Hrumi identity, Alize had practically spurned it once again when she given herself to Kell’s embrace. The memory left her heart drumming and her mind recoiling in guilt.

Blood, prince, Parousia, the Soul Eater had said. Kell had claimed the Sargons only wanted peace, but Parousia was the capital of his prince’s province.

Don’t jump to conclusions, Alize reminded herself. She had been wrong enough times before. Still, she grit her teeth. Of one thing she was certain: her fate remained tied to the Hrumi. She would not be the last.