She cradles her hand against her chest, fingering the abbreviated bump at the outer edge of her left hand. There’s no pain now, not even a red raised spot to mark where the darkness’s teeth bit in. The skin is continuous, even-toned, soft. It feels just like all the skin around it.

It’s like there was never a finger there at all, and that, that, is what brings her to her knees.

She clutches her hand tight, gasping, sucking in desperate breath after desperate breath, unsure of where she goes next.

A quick inventory: she has her body (mostly) and her mind (likewise), clothing and boots, a small amount of food, a candle she can light, and a knife, still tucked into her remaining stocking, safe and sound. It’s more than she had when her father was executed. She’d been tossed out with only the clothes on her back and fine slippers on her feet.

If she finds somebody, anybody, she can do it again. Walk away, forget about the Loving Saint and Phosyne, Edouart and Simmonet, Ser Voyne and King Cardimir, and find some new place to make her home in.

Treila makes herself stand and trace the path of the river until she finds a bridge. It’s new construction. Not well-made, but more than a felled tree. It’s unguarded, and she crosses over, into the churned mud of the old encircling camp.

From this distance, Aymar is a monument. There is nobody on the battlements, and she can’t make out the blocks of stone from here, only the imposing whole. It towers on top of the bluff, impenetrable, unpenetrated. There’s no smoke rising from it, no new banners waving at the tops of the towers, and though she cannot see it from here, she assumes the gates are closed just as tightly.

It makes no sense.

She picks her way along the riverbank, her boots drying slowly in the damp autumn air. There’s no trace of the heat that had her almost senseless just days ago. It’s like she fell asleep below the earth and woke up only to find the future is now the present.

But if it has been three months, then Phosyne and Ser Voyne . . .

Treila keeps walking and does her best not to think. It doesn’t matter, after all. It didn’t matter the moment she left them in the keep and went on ahead alone.