Chapter 21: Cries on the wind

Evelyn pov

The dust from the village market still clung to the hem of my skirt, dry and itching against my ankles, but I couldn’t bring myself to slow down. The heavy wicker basket in my hand cut into my palm, loaded with coarse grain, three bruised apples, and the cheap tallow candles I’d spent our last copper coins on.

Every step back toward the cottage felt like dragging an anchor through mud.

We can’t survive another month like this, I thought, my heart thumping a hollow, jagged rhythm against my ribs. My skin prickled with the cold realization that the ledger at the baker's stall was marked in dark red ink beside my father’s name. He’d smiled at me today—a weary, desperate curve of his lips—and whispered that things would turn around. But hope was a luxury we had burned for firewood two winters ago.

I swallowed around the lump in my throat, trying to blink away the sting in my eyes. I hated the pit of resentment gnawing at my chest. I loved my father, but his silence, his refusal to tell me why we lived like ghosts on the edge of the borderlands, was slowly suffocating me. We were hiding. I felt it in the way he checked the door latch three times before dawn, in the way he flinched whenever the wind rattled the shutters too hard.

A sudden gust swept down from the pine forest, biting through my thin shawl and sending a cascade of dead leaves skittering across the dirt path.

Then I froze.

It wasn't just the wind.

Beneath the rustle of dry branches came a sound that made the hair on my arms stand up—a sharp, desperate cry.

“Please! Someone—”

The voice was muffled, snapped short as if a heavy hand had been slapped over a mouth. It had come from the wood line, where the sunlight died into dense, suffocating shadow.

My blood ran cold. The rational part of me—the girl who knew how fragile life was, who knew the quiet safety of minding her own business—screamed at me to keep walking. Get home, Evelyn. Lock the door. Mind the pot on the hearth.

Another cry broke through, higher this time, thin with absolute terror. A child.

The wicker basket tumbled from my fingers, spilling apples onto the dirt. I didn't care. I couldn't breathe, my chest tightening so hard it felt like my ribs would crack. Grief, sharp and sudden, pierced through my fear—I remembered the sound of my mother's voice when the fever took her, the helpless, suffocating panic of watching someone slip away while standing right beside them. I couldn't just turn my back. I couldn't carry another ghost.

I broke into a run.

My shoes slapped against the hard-packed earth, then crunched onto the bed of fallen pine needles as I plunged into the treeline. The temperature plummeted instantly. Shadows swallowed the path, the tall, ancient trees standing like silent, indifferent sentinels.

“Where are you?” I gasped out, my breath pluming in the chill air. My lungs burned. Branch tips clawed at my sleeves, scraping my cheeks, but I pushed deeper into the gloom. “Answer me!”

The forest seemed to hold its breath. For a terrifying second, there was only the sound of my own ragged panting and the heavy thud of blood roaring in my ears.

Snap.

To my left, near the jagged grey rocks of the old quarry.

I veered toward the sound, sliding down a damp incline of moss and loose shale. I rounded a thick trunk, my hands skidding against the rough bark to steady myself, and the breath was knocked cleanly out of me.

In the small clearing below, a young boy was crumpled against the base of a boulder, his face pale with mud and tears, his knees pulled tightly to his chest. But he wasn't alone.

Standing over him was a man shrouded in a dark, travel-stained cloak. In the gloom, I couldn't make out his face, but the tension in his broad shoulders was unmistakable. He held a long blade, its steel catching the faint, dying light filtering through the canopy.

“Get away from him!” The scream ripped from my throat before I could stop it.

The man turned instantly.

I expected a monster. I expected a ruthless bandit with cold, empty eyes.

Instead, as the cowl slipped back slightly, I was hit by a pair of striking, storm-grey eyes that held a raw, agonizing mixture of shock and fury. He wasn't striking down the boy; he was standing between the child and something else—something concealed in the brush behind them. Blood dripped steadily from the man's forearm, soaking into his dark tunic, but his stance was unwavering.

For a heartbeat, our eyes locked. The air grew thick, static with a tension so heavy I felt physically weighed down by it. A strange, suffocating warmth flared suddenly behind my collarbone, a sharp tug at the very core of my chest that made me stumble back a step.

What is this?

He looked at me not with bloodlust, but with a sudden, devastating realization that turned his grey eyes wide.

“You shouldn't be here,” he rasped, his voice low, gravelly, and laced with a terror that didn't belong to a man holding a sword. “Run, girl. Now.”

Before I could process his warning, a low, guttural growl echoed from the dark thicket right behind me, vibrating through the ground beneath my boots. The shadows at my back began to stretch, twisting into a shape that wasn't human.

I spun around, my back slamming against the cold rock, only to find the path back to the village entirely cut off.