I wandered east, endlessly east. At first I considered travelling back west. I’d escaped—surely I could find Sorcha and Shayat. But I travelled east instead, alone, with no company but my thoughts. And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made to travel west and seek them out. They probably thought me dead. I would probably be captured and hung to death if I tried to re-enter the Empire, even with a smuggler’s assistance. And if I made it, somehow, back to Rabatha in one piece, to find them and demand quarter would put them in grave danger. They would be faced with harboring a fugitive—a traitor—and the law would be as merciless on them as it would be on me when I was inevitably found out.

I escaped, and I travelled east out of cowardice and pragmatism. I left them behind for their good and my own. It was a terrible, awful thing. It left me hollow and shattered.

After three days of travel, just as my supplies began to run out, I found a river and followed it farther east. I survived mostly on edible water grasses and fish. I felt guilty about the fish until I managed to snare and eat a rabbit. I wept when I killed it and skinned it and wept again when I ate it. It was a struggle to keep the meat down; the wrongness of it was overwhelming. Still, I needed the protein badly. After that first rabbit, I became carnivorous and killed and ate whatever animals I could.

When I was deep enough in the grasslands that it was unlikely a Qin foray would stumble on me, I took to camping for a week or two in a good spot before moving on. I knew almost nothing about the gold elves besides their language, but I knew they were nomads, and I was on a riverbank. It seemed a certainty that one clan or another would stumble across me. I don’t know how long I was out there, hopping from one makeshift lean-to to another, feasting on rabbits and burrowing rats and grass snakes like a rabid wolf. I lost count of the days. I know it must have been three or four months because the seasons turned from fall to winter. The days cooled and shortened, and the grass went from gold to a dead brown. It was strange out there, but it wasn’t bad living. Unlike the maudlin days and nights in the Qin barracks, I had no time to dwell. There was too much to do—living off the land is a hard thing, a consuming thing. There is no idleness, and so I rarely thought of Sorcha or Nuri or Shayat or Dirva or my parents. I thought of my next meal and the parts of my shelter that needed fixing and how much fresh water I had stored.