Chapter 6
Clara's POV
I didn't stop to think. The moment I cleared the inn's threshold, my legs carried me straight into the reed beds along the Blackwater, where there were no paths—only knee-deep mud and thorns that tore at every step. Each footfall sent a white-hot bolt of pain shooting up through the soles of my feet, but I couldn't feel it, not really. My lungs worked like a cracked bellows, each breath arriving with the copper taste of blood, and still I didn't dare stop.
No one was behind me.
Silas hadn't sent anyone. That silence frightened me more than an army at my back ever could. Was he waiting for me to walk back into his hands on my own? Or did he simply not consider me worth the trouble—a gnat too small to swat?
I didn't know how long I ran. Only when my legs had turned to lead and the last pale thread of light was swallowed by the dark did I allow myself to stop, collapsing against the charred trunk of a dead tree, gasping in great ragged pulls of air. My soaked clothes stiffened in the wind, hardening around me like a shell of ice. I pressed my fingers to my cuff and felt the tin badge sewn into the lining, its edge pressing a cold line into my wrist.
Perrin was dead.
A man I had met only once, who had spent his life and his last breath for a prince I had never known, for a belief I couldn't name—and he had died in that tavern. While I, a petty thief with no loyalty to anything but my own survival, had walked away carrying the only proof that his cause had ever existed.
"What am I even doing this for?" I whispered to the dark, and my voice shook so badly the words barely held together.
I wanted to live. That was all I had ever wanted—a warm room, a full stomach, and enough quiet to keep breathing through whatever this broken world threw at me. And Sigrid. I wanted to find Sigrid, even if the chance of that was one in ten thousand.
I thought of my father.
He had not been a hero. Before he took up arms he was a ferryman, nothing more—but he had been a soldier once, and before the Veyr Imperium's boots had ground the Valley Kingdom to dust, he had given his allegiance to the House of Arden. Prince Henry Arden. In the stories that still circulated through Lyr, that name hung like the last star before sunrise. When the Imperium had finished its slaughter, the royal blood was nearly gone—nobles surrendering, nobles fleeing—and only this one young prince had vanished without a trace. Every faction was hunting him: the Veyr Imperium, naturally, but also the supposedly neutral Skeld Compact, all of them running the scent like hounds after a hare.
If Perrin had given his life to protect that secret, what had my father's death been for? Had it been for the same thing?
Something shifted in my chest—strange and unfamiliar, like a coal catching light for the first time. I had always told myself that living meant breathing, meant eating, meant not ending up as one more body rotting at the roadside. But the badge pressed against my wrist like something burning, and the heat spread through me until my hands trembled.
Maybe surviving wasn't enough. Maybe I could live for something, the way my father had.
I had to reach House Carrow.
I forced myself upright, jaw set, legs screaming in protest. Deliver the badge. And after that—after that I would be free.
The Carrow lands had once been the Valley Kingdom's breadbasket. Now they were a camp for the displaced, and I smelled them before I saw them—the dense, fermented reek of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together, layered with waste and sickness and a particular quality of despair that had no other name. The Carrow banner flew from the walls: golden wheat sheaves wound around a broadsword. Below the gates, relief stations had been thrown up in rough rows, and there were more clerks with ledgers and priests in their vestments than there were soldiers actually ladling soup.
I merged with the line, head low, doing my best to look like any other refugee.
The line crawled. From somewhere ahead drifted the thin, ghost-like smell of porridge—bran and wilted greens boiled together into something that could charitably be called sustenance.
"Next."
When I reached the front, the soldier on duty glanced at me once, then made a show of blocking half the pot with his body, gesturing toward the empty bottom of the other half. "All gone. Come back tomorrow."
"What? There's still some left—I can see it."
"That's reserved." He shoved my shoulder, not hard, just dismissive—the way you'd push a door shut. "Move along. You're holding up the line."
The people around me watched with hollow eyes. No one spoke. No one intervened. In this world, sympathy was the least valuable currency in circulation.
I stared at that half-pot of clouded broth while hunger clawed at my stomach like something feral. I couldn't leave. If I left now, I wouldn't have the strength to make it to the donation box.
I drew a breath, lifted my chin, and pitched my voice as loud as it would go. "My father was Sir Kaelen—a knight in Lord Hugh Karrow's service! He died at the Battle of Embergate! I am his daughter!"
Silence dropped over the immediate area like a hood.
The soldier blinked. His eyes traveled over my clothing—ragged, yes, but the fabric was good wool, an old cloak of my father's I'd cut down and resewn.
"Sir Kaelen?" He frowned, searching his memory. "There was a commander by that name, wasn't there. He had a daughter?"
"He did." I held his gaze and didn't flinch. "He told me Lord Hugh had given his word: the orphaned children of his knights would not starve."
It was a lie. I'd picked the surname because it was common enough among soldiers that it might stick. It wasn't a clean thing to do—trading on a dead knight's honor for a bowl of soup—but I needed to eat more than I needed a clean conscience, and I had no intention of dying of cold against someone else's city wall.
The soldier muttered something foul under his breath, then scraped the ladle along the bottom of the pot and handed me a bowl slightly thicker than water. "Take it and get out of my sight."
I took the bowl. My hands were shaking.
Another day. I'd bought myself another day.
I turned to go, cradling the bowl carefully, already mapping the route to the donation box marked for lamp oil. Leave the badge. Walk away.
"Stop."
Two soldiers in silver plate appeared from either side, each one taking an arm before I could react. The porridge hit the ground.
"What are you doing? I told you, my father—"
"Take her." The officer leading them cut me off without looking at me. "Lord Hugh wants to see her."
My stomach dropped to somewhere below the earth.
They dragged me through the crowd, through a heavily guarded courtyard, and deposited me onto the floor of a tent that was warm to the point of excess—thick rugs underfoot, the air heavy with lavender and charcoal smoke. I was dripping: snowmelt and cold sweat both.
"Look up."
I raised my head.
The man behind the long table was perhaps fifty, his temples going to silver, his eyes sharp in the way that had nothing to do with age. The woman beside him wore a deep-blue gown and held an embroidered handkerchief pressed to her nose.
"You claim to be Sir Kaelen's daughter?" His voice gave nothing away.
"Yes, my lord." The words came out in pieces.
"Sir Kaelen had no daughter." The woman's voice was like chips of ice dropped into a glass. "He had one son. The boy died in the plague, three years ago. You're lying." She turned to the officer at the side of the tent and made a small, negligent gesture. "Cut off her hand and throw her outside the walls. We've had entirely too many spies slipping in lately."
The two soldiers stepped forward and drew their swords.
"Wait—" My voice tore itself out of my throat. "Wait, I'm not—I didn't—I'm—"
The name Perrin rose to my lips. So did the word badge, and Lantern Office, and all of it. But I swallowed it back down. I was inside Carrow territory. I didn't know, not for certain, not the way Perrin had been certain of anything. If the Carrows themselves were compromised—
"I was looking for my sister!" The words came out in a rush, and the tears that followed weren't entirely performed. "I lied. I'm not a knight's daughter. I'm nobody. I'm an orphan and I lost my sister and I heard there was work here, servant's work, and I just wanted to eat something and look for her—please, please don't kill me—"
I wept with everything I had, which, it turned out, was considerable.
