Page 6 of A Legacy of Storms and Starlight

She looked ahead to a cluster of trees in the distance, willing herself totravelto them. When she landed, more howls sounded in the half-light. She had to keep going, no matter how much her wrists hurt, how much her chest ached, how much the snow had soaked through her clothes.

Zylah urged herself to keep travelling, again and again, in short bursts to the next cluster of trees ahead of her. After the fifth burst, her knees buckled beneath her, her hands trembling. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping her going; if she stopped, let it fade, she didn’t think she’d get back up again.

The wolves howled again. Further away this time. But she couldn’t stop. For the first time in her life, the knot on her spine ached; up until now, it had only ever been a small lump she chose to ignore. Why give attention to something she couldn’t change?

Zylah didn’t want to think about her list of ever-growing ailments; whether she’d still have all her toes when she finally took off her shoes. If her heart was still beating, then she’d endure it. She travelled again and again until her head pounded so loud she couldn’t think straight. The trees had begun to thin, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if it would be safer to risk the night in the forest than to chance being seen by the king’s guards with chains around her wrists and rope marks at her neck.

Don’t be ridiculous, Zy, her brother would say. She half ran, half stumbled ahead to where the trees thinned out further, the forest falling away and a strong gust of wind hitting her. Zylah staggered to a stop as a steep drop cut away from the rock just ahead, and below, patches of jewel-bright water beneath a layer of fog spread as far as she could see, until the fog was too thick and the light too poor to make out anything further.

It was a long way down. But she closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, and thought of standing on the stone beside the water.

Her feet touched down on something warm, and she opened one eye. Relief washed over her, and if the cuffs hadn’t weighed so much, she’d have thrown her arms up in the air. She knelt down and held her hands above water as bright as the sky on a clear day.It’s warm.A single tear of relief rolled down her cheek. It wasn’t fog she’d seen. It was steam.

Zylah tentatively dipped a finger into the liquid to test it. It felt like bathwater, but she didn’t succumb to the thoughts that screamed for her to submerge herself, not yet. Instead, she sniffed at the water to try and detect anything that might be contaminating it.

Besides, she could bathe for a while, but then what? Every muscle ached. She plunged her hands into the blue and watched it turn rusty as some of the blood washed away from her wrists. The pain in her back was worse. The lump was small, no bigger than a pebble, but since she’d learnt others were afraid of anything strange or different in Dalstead, Zylah had always covered it up as best she could.

She cast her gaze from the edge of the water, back to the base of the rock face she’d travelled from. Dark shadows dotted the rock.Caves. Small islands of moss-covered rock peppered the space between her and the shore, the water bright and peculiar beside it. Some of the distances between islands were too far for her to jump, and she thought of the stories from her childhood and imagined water sprites and spirits snatching her from the air and into the water. She hadn’t come all this way just to be taken by a sprite. Zylah pushed herself to her feet, her body trembling with the effort as she willed herself to travel one last time.

Her feet slipped on wet moss as she landed at the shore, the steam easing her aching muscles. Other animals could be using the caves, and she stilled, tilting her head to listen in the twilight. She heard nothing but her own thumping heart.

With quiet steps, she made her way towards a cave with a sputter of steam in the entrance, where the warm vapour billowed from a hole in the ground. The rock beneath her feet warmed her toes, and as she stepped around the geyser the heat of the cave cocooned her.

Zylah fell to her knees, her hands pressing against the warm rock, and let her sobs shake through her. She stayed like that for a moment, letting the tears fall and her cries echo in the darkness.

Then she took a deep breath and sat tall, smoothed the front of her clothes as best she could with her cuffed hands and then—her fingers brushed against something in her apron. It was whatever Kara had slipped her, back in the cell.

Zylah shoved her hands into the pocket, her fingers closing around the tiny piece of paper and she unravelled it as carefully as she could, the warmth slowly returning to her fingertips.

Her breath snagged. It was a hairpin. “Kara, you sly little thing,” Zylah whispered, a smile breaking across her face and quickly turning into a cough as she choked on the pain in her throat and her lip split open again.

She angled the pin in her fingers, bringing the cuffs together so that she could work at the first lock. She’d never picked a lock before, only read about it in the storybooks Kara was always letting her borrow. Zylah turned the pin slowly, afraid it might snap, listening carefully for any sounds inside the lock that might tell her it had caught in the right place. She wouldn’t survive long with her hands cuffed together. And anyone she saw would know her at once for what she was: a prisoner on the run.

Her fingers began to shake, and she drew in a deep breath.Concentrate. She listened to the sound of the pin scraping inside the barrel of the lock, to the way it dragged against the tumblers inside it.

Carefully, slowly, she angled her makeshift lockpick, running it along each of those pins one by one until—the cuff clicked open. She fought down the whimper threatening to escape, rubbing at her freed wrist where the bruises had turned it purple.One down, one to go.

Zylah slid the hairpin into the second cuff, listening carefully for the drag of the cylinders. She twisted it slowly; it just needed a little more and then—the pin snapped inside the lock.

“No!” she groaned, clawing at the broken metal. But it was no use. She angled her wrist, banging the cuff against the ground to try and shake the pin loose, but nothing worked.

So close. She’d been so close. Every part of her ached. Her head, her back, her legs. She knew the moment she stopped she wouldn’t be able to get back up, but she hadn’t expected the exhaustion to be so all consuming. The warmth from the cave was making her drowsy, too.

Her lip trembled, but she was too exhausted to cry. Zylah lay down in the dirt, her head resting on her uncuffed arm, and closed her eyes.

In the morning she would come up with a plan. In the morning she would figure out how to get her life back. But for now, all Zylah wanted was to sleep.

Chapter Four

Apiercing howl had Zylah bolting upright from her resting place in the dirt. It could have come from anywhere, but she uncoiled to her feet regardless. Something seemed to whisper, carried into the cave on the wind. Or maybe it was the wind itself.

Everything still ached. The lump in her back. Her head, her wrists, her throat. Her legs. Her chest. Worse than the time she had fallen through every single branch of the weeping eye tree in Kara’s parents’ garden.

An odd odour lingered in the warm air of her little cave, something she suspected might be an animal’s dwelling if she were to explore further into the darkness. But Zylah’s thoughts were occupied with survival. She’d need food and water if she was going to keep running. To where, she hadn’t figured out yet, but all she knew was that she couldn’t risk staying in one place for too long.

She couldn’ttravelagain just yet though. She felt it in the searing pain in her head, and the way her chest burned, no matter how or why the travelling had happened the way it had. She stepped tentatively out of the cave, holding the loose cuff in her still-cuffed hand, her eyes adjusting to the brightness of the water.

Pampa reeds jutted out of the rock here and there, bent over double from the weight of their seed pods. They were completely inedible, a fact she’d discovered as a child when she’d hurled up half her guts after tasting one, but that wasn’t what Zylah was considering.

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