The girl ran to the door, pressed her ear to the wood, and listened: the muffled stomp of a hoof pawing at snow, the jangle of a bridle, someone barking an order in that language she didn’t understand. The animagus’s people were just outside. She would have to sneak out the back.

Quieter than a mouse, she stretched up on tiptoes, fingered the iron door hook, and slipped it into its eye, latching the door. It wouldn’t hold long if someone tried to force their way in—the door was old and splintered—but it might buy her a few seconds.

She grabbed her ragged cloak from its peg by the door and whipped it over her shoulders. Her fingers fumbled as she tied it at the neck. Mamá’s cloak hung beside the door too; the girl wasted a precious moment staring. Mamá would never wear it again.

But it would serve as a blanket. Sometimes, on the coldest nights of the year, Mamá had pulled the cloak from its peg and draped it over them on the bed. They’d spent many days’ worth of hours cuddled together beneath that cloak.

She grabbed it and bunched it up, then shoved it into the basket they used for gathering herbs.

“Cloak, fire, and food,” Mamá had told her. “Remember that, if you ever need to flee.”

The girl’s feet twitched to run, but her mamá was right; she wouldn’t last long without food. Leftover stew was spilled and soaking into the floor, half covered in detritus from their destroyed furniture. Salt pork was stored in the cellar, but smoke bubbled out of the trapdoor and flames licked the top of the ladder—she dared not go back there. Maybe the cheese wheel? A gift from the blacksmith, which they’d been saving for Deliverance Day. It was around here somewhere. . . .

She searched feverishly, heart pounding and lungs burning, as smoke continued to rise through the floor planking. No cheese anywhere to be seen. Maybe it was buried under the rubble.

Being very careful to not look at her mamá’s limp hand, the girl tried to nudge aside the fallen table with her leg. It scraped loudly against the floor but hardly moved at all.

Someone rattled the door, trying to enter.

The girl froze.

It rattled again as the girl whimpered, her feet melded to the warming floor. The rattling turned into pounding. The door strained against the latch.

Run, my sky.

She hefted the herb basket that was heavy with her mamá’s cloak and fled past the hearth and the pile of ruined, smoking furniture, toward their hut’s single tiny window. It wasn’t a real window with fancy glass, but rather a large shutter that swung upward, which they would prop open during the summer months to invite the cooling mountain breeze.

The girl unlatched the window. Behind her, pounding sounded again, along with a flurry of angry words, as she cracked the shutter open and peeked outside. Icy air hit her face.