Sera's POV
Sera's bag was already packed when she got back to the room.
She stopped in the doorway and stared at it. A small canvas bag sitting on the bed, filled with things that were not hers, a heavy winter coat folded on top, a pair of boots that looked warm and expensive, a small wrapped bundle that might have been food. Her own things, the few she had, were nowhere in the room.
Crest was standing by the window with the expression he always wore when he was following orders he hadn't been consulted on.
She looked at him.
"We leave in twenty minutes," he said. "Commander's orders. I'm sorry I can't tell you more than that."
She turned around to find Dominic and walked straight into him. He was right behind her in the doorway, and she stumbled back a step. He caught her arm to steady her, then let go immediately.
"We need to move tonight," he said. "The review has been pushed up. Silas moved it to six in the morning, which means he has something planned for tonight that we can't be here for." He glanced at the bag on the bed. "Crest packed what you'll need. If there's something specific you want from the kitchen dormitory, tell him now, and he'll get it."
Sera stared at him.
She pointed at the bag. At the door. At herself. Then she shook her head hard.
"I know," he said. "I know this is not what you agreed to."
She pointed at him and made the gesture she had made in the corridor, hands flat, like a boundary, and then pointed at the door again with a question on her face. You said I wasn't property. So why does this feel exactly like what property looks like?
Something moved behind his eyes. Not quite guilt. Something more complicated.
"If you stay in this fortress tonight, Silas will have you removed by morning," he said. "Not transferred. Removed. He'll file you as a security risk and have you taken somewhere I can't find you." He paused. "I think that's been his plan since he saw what happened in the festival yard."
Sera's hands went still.
She thought about the bottle. The pale silver liquid. The way Silas had held it up to the light with the careful attention of a man who had been waiting a long time to use something.
She looked at the bag on the bed. At the heavy winter coat. At the boots that would actually keep her feet warm in the snow, which was more than her kitchen shoes had ever done.
She thought about twenty-four years in this pack. The dishes. The broken bowls. The festival stages and the laughing soldiers and the way every single person had looked straight through her like she was part of the furniture.
She walked to the bed and picked up the bag.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting in the back of a military vehicle, moving through the fortress gates into the snow.
The night was clear and very cold. Through the window, she watched the gate close behind them, and something happened in her chest that she hadn't expected, fear exactly. More like the feeling of a door closing, and not being sure whether it was closing behind you or in front of you.
Dominic sat across from her, not beside her. Crest was upfront with the driver. Between Sera and Dominic were two seats of empty space that he seemed to have left deliberately, like he understood that right now, space was the kindest thing he could offer her.
She appreciated it more than she could say. Which was, as always, entirely.
Outside, the pack's lights got smaller and smaller.
She had never left. In twenty-four years, she had never once left the pack's land. There had never been a reason. Nobody invited the kitchen staff to travel. Nobody thought to ask whether the mute girl had ever wanted to see the mountains up close instead of just through a window.
She pressed her palm against the cold glass and watched the lights disappear.
Then she turned away from the window and made herself think clearly.
She was alone in a vehicle with a man she had known for two days. A man whose curse made him dangerous, whose enemies were more powerful than her entire kitchen staff combined, and who had claimed her in front of witnesses using a legal mechanism she hadn't known existed. She was going to a place she had never seen, for a reason that had been explained to her in the briefest possible terms, with a bag of things that weren't hers.
When she laid it out plainly like that, it was terrifying.
But then she thought about the journal. Her mother's handwriting. She is the key. Her mother had known something about Sera that Sera still didn't know about herself, had known it long before Dominic arrived, had somehow left a message in a place where it would be found at exactly the right moment.
Her mother had not led her wrong in life. She had no reason to believe she was being led wrong now.
She folded her hands in her lap, sat up straight, and watched the mountains come closer.
An hour passed.
The road got narrower, and the snow got deeper, and the vehicle moved more slowly as the driver navigated carefully through passes that Sera suspected most people didn't travel at night in winter. Dominic sat quietly across from her, his eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open and staring at the seat beside her in a way that suggested he was managing the voices inside his head.
She noticed when he was struggling. His jaw would tighten. His hands would close into fists on his knees. Sometimes he would exhale slowly through his nose in the careful way of someone trying very hard not to react to something painful.
After the third time she saw it happen, she moved.
She shifted from her side of the vehicle to the seat directly beside him, left the one seat of space between them, and sat still.
His jaw loosened.
His hands opened.
He didn't look at her, but after a moment he said quietly, "Thank you."
She nodded and looked back at the window.
They rode in the particular kind of silence that was almost comfortable, almost, and would have been completely comfortable if Sera's mind hadn't been turning over everything she still didn't know.
Then the vehicle stopped.
Not slowly, the way it stopped when they reached a destination. It stopped suddenly, with the kind of jolt that meant the driver had seen something in the road.
Dominic was on alert before the vehicle finished stopping. "What is it?" he called forward.
The driver's voice came back tight and careful. "Someone in the road, sir."
Sera looked through the windshield.
A figure stood in the middle of the mountain pass. Not moving. Not stepping out of the way. Just standing in the beam of the headlights with their arms at their sides, face turned toward the vehicle.
It was an old woman.
She was small and thin and completely still, and she was dressed in nothing nearly warm enough for a mountain pass at night in the middle of winter. No coat. No hat. Just a plain grey dress and bare feet in the snow, and she should have been frozen solid, and she clearly wasn't.
Dominic stepped out of the vehicle before anyone could suggest he shouldn't.
Sera got out on the other side.
He looked back at her sharply. She gave him the look that meant she wasn't getting back in the vehicle, and after a moment, he turned back to the old woman.
"Move aside," he said. Not unkindly. But firmly.
The old woman looked past him.
She looked directly at Sera.
And she said, in a voice that was raspy and dry and nothing at all like the voice Sera remembered, "I told you it would be her. I told all of them."
Sera's feet stopped moving.
The voice was wrong. The face was older, much older, worn down to something barely recognizable. But the eyes were the same. The same unusual pale grey that Sera had spent six years trying to forget because remembering them hurt too much.
She made a sound. Not a word. Not a howl. Just a sound, small and involuntary, that escaped before she could stop it, the first sound she had made in twenty-four years that wasn't accidental.
Dominic turned to her immediately, shock open on his face.
She didn't look at him. She was staring at the old woman in the road.
Who smiled at her with her mother's smile and said, "Hello, little moon. I've been waiting a very long time to finish what I started."
Behind them, from somewhere back down the mountain pass, came the distant sound of engines.
Multiple engines.
Getting closer.
Crest leaned out of the vehicle window, his voice sharp with urgency. "Commander. We have vehicles coming up behind us. Fast." A pause. "They're Silas's."
The old woman who wore her mother's eyes looked at Sera calmly.
"I suggest," she said, "that you invite me into the vehicle before your friend's enemies arrive. I have answers to things you haven't figured out how to ask yet." She tilted her head. "Including why your voice just came back."
Sera pressed her hand against her own throat.
Her voice. That small involuntary sound.
She hadn't made a sound since she was born. The healers had said it was permanent. The pack had said she was broken.
Her hand pressed harder against her throat, and she felt something there that hadn't been there before. Something that felt, impossibly, like the very beginning of something waking up.
The engines behind them were getting louder.
Dominic looked at her. His expression asked the question he didn't have time to say out loud.
Sera looked at the woman with her mother's eyes.
And nodded.