Chapter Four: The Forest Floor

The forest swallowed the wind differently than open ground did.

Out on the path it had come straight and purposeful, cutting through clothing and finding skin. In here it moved between the trees in broken currents, unpredictable, hitting her from the left and then from nowhere and then from below somehow, cold rising up through the ground into the soles of her boots like the earth itself was pulling warmth out of her.

She kept walking.

There was no trail. She had known there wouldn't be, the Ashen Forest wasn't the kind of place that accommodated visitors, so she moved by instinct and the faint logic of keeping the wind at her back, which at least meant she was moving in a consistent direction even if she couldn't have named it.

Northeast, Bren had said. Nine miles to a road.

She didn't know how long she had been walking. Long enough that the packhouse lights, which she had been able to see faintly through the trees for the first stretch, were gone now. Long enough that the cold had moved past the uncomfortable stage into something quieter and more serious, not sharp anymore, just heavy, settling into her muscles and making everything slightly slower than it should be.

She stopped walking when her left boot caught a root and she went down hard on one knee.

She stayed there for a moment, breathing.

The ground was wet. Snow had started somewhere in the last twenty minutes; not heavy, just present, a thin and steady sifting through the branches overhead that was already working its way through her sweater at the shoulders. She pressed her palm flat against the forest floor to push herself up and felt the cold of it move straight through her hand.

She got up.

Kept walking.

She was not going to think about Caleb. She had made that decision somewhere around the second mile, when her mind had kept drifting back to the platform, to his voice; even, professional, delivering her like a line item in a budget report and she had recognized that particular spiral for what it was and closed the door on it. There was no version of revisiting that moment that helped her find a road.

There was a version of hypothermia that started with confusion and then became something you didn't wake up from, and that was the thing worth thinking about.

She needed to keep moving.

She needed to stay upright.

She needed

She stopped.

Something was wrong with her body. Not the cold, separate from the cold, underneath it, a feeling she had been half-aware of for weeks and had been too distracted to sit down and properly face. She pressed her hand against her stomach through the fabric of her sweater.

She stood very still in the dark and the snow and did the counting she had been avoiding.

The days. The weeks. The particular way she had felt in the mornings for the past month, which she had attributed to stress, to poor sleep, to the general toll of living the way she lived. She counted again. More carefully.

Her hand stayed flat against her stomach.

The number came back the same both times.

The cold was still there, the snow was still falling, the trees were still dark and indifferent around her, all of that stayed exactly as it was, but everything inside her rearranged itself around this single, enormous, impossible fact, and for a long moment she couldn't move because there was no version of the next thought that felt manageable.

She was pregnant.

She was alone in a forbidden forest in a storm with no coat and nine miles between her and a road, and she was pregnant.

She made herself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way she had taught herself years ago when the weight of her situation tried to take her under. She made herself breathe until the first wave of panic receded enough to think past it.

You cannot fall apart here, she told herself. Not here.

She started walking again.

But her legs were not cooperating the way they had been. The knee she had landed on throbbed steadily. The cold had progressed past heavy into something that was making her movements imprecise, her feet lifting slightly less than they needed to, catching on things. She stumbled twice in the space of fifty yards and caught herself both times on the nearest tree trunk, bark rough and wet under her palms.

The third time she stumbled, she didn't catch herself.

She went down properly on both knees, one hand, the canvas bag swinging hard off her shoulder and landing in the snow beside her. She pushed herself up immediately. Got one foot under her. Her arms buckled.

She sat in the snow.

She pressed both hands to her stomach and sat in the snow and looked up through the gap in the branches overhead where the sky was moving, heavy and gray, clouds thick enough that no light came through them, and she understood with a clarity that was almost calm that she had run out of options in a very immediate and practical sense.

She couldn't feel her feet.

She could barely feel her hands.

The cold had stopped feeling like cold and started feeling like drowsiness, which she knew was wrong, which she knew was the part you weren't supposed to let happen, but knowing it and being able to do something about it were two entirely different things.

She looked down at her hands. They were shaking, she could see it, though she couldn't feel it.

They will never know your names, she thought, and the thought was so large and so unbearable that she felt something in her chest crack open around it.

She pressed her hands harder against her stomach.

She closed her eyes.

The snow kept falling.

A sound reached her, not wind. Not branches. Something deliberate, something with weight behind it, a single footstep in snow that was close enough that she felt it more than heard it.

She opened her eyes.

And looked up.