The appearance of Lostwood directly in her path and the sudden loss of her mount were both unexpected annoyances, yes, but no matter how well one planned something, there were always surprises. Overcoming them was typically the difference between success and failure. She breathed out a scoffing breath, realizing that the thoughts streaming through her head were not her own, but words beaten into her skull by her masters at the guild. Will I ever have an independent thought again? she wondered wryly. Still, she was grateful, for if they hadn’t accepted her into their fold when she was but a child all those years ago, she wouldn’t be here today. She wouldn’t be capable of doing what she needed to do. She would still be a helpless orphan with one parent buried in the ground and the other imprisoned for life.

“Not life,” she said, a smile curling her lips. Her plan to infiltrate Comman Dur and find her father had always been unrealistic, so she couldn’t help but to feel the hand of fate in Cainan’s escape. How could she not? Despite the hardships that had been bestowed upon her from a tender, young age, the truth was that she’d always felt as though there was a path laid before her feet, a path she had little choice but to follow.

She felt even colder now, like it was the dead of winter and not springtime. Rays of sunlight occasionally infiltrated the forest canopy, but they failed to deliver on their promise of warmth. With every step forward, the wrongness she’d felt earlier seemed to grow, swarming about her and needling inside her, making her want to move faster in order to quit this place with the utmost haste.

“Dammit,” she muttered, trying to drag her stump leg free of where it had become tangled in some vines. When she’d first been told she would lose the lower portion of her leg on what was already the worst day of her short life, she’d bawled for days. She still remembered that feeling of helplessness, of weakness.

She’d made it her personal mission every day since to never feel that way again, regardless of whether she had all her limbs.

Now, however, this rutting forest seemed to have different ideas, snaking around her wooden leg in a complicated twist of knots. Cursing under her breath, she fought to loose them, but with every knot she untethered it seemed as though another ten had taken its place. She gasped, struggling to breathe, anxiety springing up inside her chest as nightmarish memories were released from the iron boxes in which she’d locked them.