A tiny drop of melted tallow hit the pool of hot wax at the base of the iron candlestick, making the single yellow flame sputter and hiss in the dead quiet of the royal bedchamber.
Ever since Nightingale's voice had trailed off, a sepulchral silence had swallowed the stone room whole. The air, which ten minutes earlier had crackled with the tension of a throwing knife and a midnight break-in, now felt as heavy as lead, weighed down by four centuries of a hidden tragedy.
Standing two paces from the bed, Roland Wimbledon didn't move a muscle.
Behind his grave expression, the gears of Cheng Yan's modern mind were spinning furiously, trying to strip away the religious superstition of this world and decode the distorted biological truth underneath.
Witches were not demons. They had never been servants of hell. They were the victims of a brutal, unforgiving genetic and energetic mutation.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress with her arms wrapped around her knees, Nightingale stared down at the woven patterns of the wool rug, her golden curls casting soft shadows across her pale cheeks as she explained the nightmare with a clinical coldness that barely masked her own scars.
— "As Your Highness probably knows, the vast majority of magic awakenings occur during the harsh seasonal shift right before the Months of Demons," — Nightingale said quietly. — "To the ignorant commoners and the priests, the freezing gales and the falling snow are the sign that the 'Gates of Hell' have swung open in the north, corrupting young girls with demonic breath. In truth, the extreme cold and the surge of ambient magic in winter simply force the dormant power inside a girl's body to surface."
Nightingale raised a gloved hand, looking at her own slender fingers in the dim light:
— "In our world, the eighteenth birthday is not a celebration of adulthood; it is the final dividing line between life and biological damnation," — she continued, her voice steady and hollow. — "If an ordinary girl reaches the age of eighteen without manifesting any signs of magic, her chances of ever awakening drop to practically zero. By eighteen, the human vessel has fully matured and solidified, locking the door against magic forever. However, for those of us who awaken before our eighteenth year... every single year on the exact anniversary of our awakening, we suffer a violent internal relapse. And on the day we finally turn eighteen, that cycle reaches its lethal peak: the Demonic Bite."
Listening to her description, Roland felt a cold, heavy knot tighten in the pit of his stomach.
To an engineer, what she was describing sounded less like a dark curse and more like a catastrophic electrical short-circuit tearing through the human central nervous system.
— "When the Demonic Bite begins on that final threshold, the pain is beyond anything human language can describe," — Nightingale whispered, her blue eyes darkening with haunted memories. — "Every single nerve ending, every tendon, and every muscle fiber in the body spasms at once, as if boiling iron were being pumped directly through the veins. The agony is so absolute that the mind begs to pass out, yet the surging Magic Power keeps the brain wide awake through every second of it."
Nightingale's shoulders tensed slightly beneath her dark cloak:
— "When the mortal vessel can no longer contain the peaking pressure of the Magic Power inside it, the physical breakdown begins," — she explained grimly. — "Boiling blood forces its way out through the pores of the skin like dark sweat, and the pressure inside the skull climbs so high that a girl feels as though her eyeballs are about to burst straight out of their sockets. If—by some sheer miracle of physical stamina, willpower, and guidance—a witch manages to endure the peak of that storm without her heart stopping, her trembling, feverish body will slowly piece itself back together over four or five days of total bedrest. If she fails..."
Nightingale bowed her head low, the shadow of her golden hair hiding her eyes.
— "If she fails to hold the magic back, she dies in the most grotesque, miserable way imaginable," — she finished in a whisper.
She was not repeating a story she had heard around a campfire; she had watched her own sisters die in her arms.
— "I have witnessed the collapse with my own eyes more times than I care to count, Your Highness," — Nightingale said, her voice tight. — "The moment a girl's vital energy gives out and she loses mental control over the stabilization process, her own Magic Power turns violently against her flesh. In a matter of seconds, the body is torn apart from the inside by monstrous convulsions, twisting bone and muscle until the girl is reduced to an unrecognizable mass of ruptured tissue."
Roland felt his throat go dry as she painted the horrifying clinical reality:
— "Thick, black blood mixed with fragments of internal organs—literally cooked from the inside out by the runaway energy—erupts from every orifice of the body," — Nightingale murmured. — "The air around the corpse grows so hot it begins to boil, releasing a thick, foul-smelling cloud of black miasma that hisses and steams until nothing is left on the ground but a heap of charred, deformed meat."
Roland swallowed hard, tasting bitter bile at the back of his tongue.
Suddenly, four hundred years of human history made sickening, undeniable sense.
Now he understood why every kingdom on this continent viewed witches as the literal spawn of hell. When an illiterate medieval peasant, a terrified tavern keeper, or a superstitious town guard watched a seventeen-year-old neighborhood girl suddenly convulse on the floor, spew boiling black blood, and dissolve into a heap of smoking, charred flesh... how could anyone expect them to calmly diagnose a "genetic metabolic overload"?
To ignorant eyes, it was a visceral, undeniable manifestation of the devil claiming his vessel.
Worse still, the Church of Hermes had seized upon that biological tragedy and turned it into the ultimate weapon of mass control. From every pulpit in the Four Kingdoms, the priests preached that this gruesome death was divine proof of demonic corruption—terrifying the commoners into handing over their own daughters while conditioning the public to believe that burning a witch at the stake before she "exploded" was an act of holy mercy!
Crushed between the ropes of the Church and the annual torture of their own blood, the average lifespan of a witch was tragically short. In fact, as the annual cycles of pain grew worse each year, many young girls chose to slit their own wrists or jump from cliffs at seventeen rather than face the agony of their eighteenth birthday.
— "The Demonic Bite at adulthood is the cruelest filter in nature," — Nightingale concluded softly, raising her head to meet Roland's eyes again. — "Before age eighteen, the Magic Power flowing through our veins is unstable and incomplete. Only if a witch survives that final, catastrophic physiological fusion does her power permanently stabilize within her adult body. Once she crosses that line, the annual torture stops forever. Not only does she live, but her magic capacity leaps forward exponentially, and sometimes her power even mutates into entirely new, higher forms. Evolution demands its price in blood, Your Highness."
When Nightingale finished her account, the bedroom sank back into a heavy, suffocating silence.
Roland walked slowly over to his writing table, resting his hip against the oak edge as his fingers drummed a quiet, troubled rhythm against the wood.
For the first time since waking up in Graycastle, Cheng Yan realized that a problem couldn't simply be solved by building a hotter furnace or mixing a better chemical ratio.
— "According to the confiscated notes Barov showed me, and what you said earlier..." — Roland spoke in a low, raspy voice, — "the Witch Cooperation Association believes that if you reach the Sacred Mountain in the north, you will find a magical paradise where witches are permanently cured of the Demonic Bite. Tell me the honest truth, Nightingale: do you actually have a shred of proof that this place exists? Because my advisor Arthur already warned me that the Sacred Mountain is nothing more than a myth."
Nightingale let out a short, poignant breath that carried a bitter smile.
— "Nobody knows for certain, Your Highness," — she admitted with disarming honesty. — "The Sacred Mountain only exists in fragmented ancient legends and the fevered deliriums of our oldest sisters. Perhaps your brilliant Count Arthur is right, and there is nothing up in those frozen peaks but ice and rock. But if we do not try... what else is left for us? To sit in the dark and wait to burst into black mist? And no matter how many ancient books your advisor has read, even he cannot prove a negative without seeing the peaks himself."
Roland closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose hard, torn in half by a brutal moral conflict.
To his grand industrial blueprint, Anna and Nana were not just two sweet girls; they were the irreplaceable twin engines of Border Town's survival. Without Anna's high-temperature fire to smelt steel and bake cement, and without Nana's miraculous healing to keep his small army alive during the winter siege, his entire five-year plan would suffer a devastating blow.
Any true feudal king—like his father Wimbledon III, or his ruthless brothers—would have immediately ordered the castle guards to lock Anna in an iron cell so his "human blowtorch" couldn't leave.
Yet the soul inside Roland's chest was not a feudal tyrant; it was a modern human being.
Knowing that Anna was less than four months away from a biological time bomb that could rip her body apart from the inside out, how could he look her in the eye and force her to stay in his workshop just for his own political convenience, denying her the chance—however small—to seek guidance from older witches who had actually survived the transition?
He couldn't do it.
Letting out a long, defeated sigh, Roland dropped his hand from his face and looked at the blonde assassin on his bed.
— "Anna's quarters are one floor down in the inner wing," — Roland said, his voice sounding suddenly heavy and tired as every word felt like pulling teeth. — "I will go wake her up, bring her here, and explain the exact situation to her myself. If, after hearing the truth about her eighteenth birthday and your Association, she chooses to pack her things and leave with you tonight... I will not stop her. You have my word as a prince that you may take her freely. As for little Nana Pine, her situation is different; she is only thirteen, she just awakened three days ago, and her parents live right here in town."
Nightingale blinked in surprise at the sudden surrender, then rose smoothly from the edge of the mattress, bowing her head with genuine, heartfelt respect.
— "Thank you for your understanding, Your Highness," — Nightingale said softly. — "It seems my instincts were right after all—I did not misjudge your heart."
Nodding once, Roland turned toward the heavy oak door, intending to unbolt it, walk down the freezing stone stairs, and have the night sentry fetch Anna.
Before Roland's fingers even came within six inches of the iron doorknob, however, the heavy, rapid thudding of leather boots echoed loudly up the outer staircase and marched straight down the corridor toward his room!
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Three loud, energetic knocks rattled the thick oak panels of the door.
Before Roland could even ask who was there, the unlocked outer latch clicked—Roland had failed to slide the bolt all the way home when Nightingale threw the knife earlier—and the heavy oak door swung wide open!
Into the dimly lit bedchamber strode Commander William in his navy-blue doublet, walking across the threshold with the casual, booming confidence of a man entering his own living room.
And standing right beside William's elbow—wrapped in a simple wool cloak thrown hurriedly over her linen dress, her bright blue eyes wide with mild confusion—was Anna!
— "Evening, Your Highness! Looks like the midnight shift arrived right on schedule!" — William greeted him with an easy grin, though his sharp fighter's eyes immediately swept across the empty room, taking in the faint smell of ozone in the air, the silver-plated dagger still sticking out of the doorframe, and Roland's tense posture.
There was nobody sitting on the bed anymore. The exact millisecond the iron doorknob had rattled, Nightingale had dissolved straight back into the invisible monochrome veil of her Mist World, retreating silently to the dark corner beside the wardrobe.
William's sudden arrival at midnight with Anna in tow was not a lucky coincidence.
Four hours earlier, right after dinner had ended and Anna had returned to her quarters, Arthur had pulled William aside into the quiet shadow behind the main staircase, his dark eyes cold and calculating as his Intelligence 14 mind reviewed the timeline:
— "Listen closely, Will," — Arthur had whispered, glancing at his pocket watch. — "Nightingale was inside the dining hall throughout our entire science lesson this afternoon. Now that she sees we aren't torturing the girls, she is going to make her move tonight to recruit them. Once the castle lights go out, she will confront Roland in his bedroom and tell him about the Demonic Bite to convince him to let Anna go."
— "Wait, and Roland's gonna fold?!" — William had frowned.
— "Cheng Yan has a soft modern conscience when it comes to his people; if he thinks keeping Anna here will kill her on her eighteenth birthday, he'll offer to let Nightingale take her," — Arthur had explained. — "Wait until eleven-thirty tonight. The moment you hear voices or movement upstairs, go straight down to Anna's room and bring her to Roland's bedchamber yourself. Don't let Nightingale corner Anna alone in the dark—make sure the choice happens right in front of Roland."
Following Arthur's script to the letter, William had crept down to the ground-floor guest wing ten minutes ago and knocked softly on Anna's door.
True to her workaholic nature, the seventeen-year-old girl hadn't even been asleep; she had been sitting at her small wooden desk under the glow of a single candle, meticulously copying Roland's mechanical diagrams of steam pistons with a charcoal pencil.
In the brutal feudal world where Anna had grown up, when a six-foot-one muscular man holding the castle's master keys knocked on the door of a solitary teenage girl's room in the dead of night, her first instinct had been a jolt of pure, conditioned terror. For a split second, her heart had hammered like a trapped bird against her ribs, every dark warning from the slums screaming that this powerful man had come to demand something horrible in exchange for her safety.
Then William had opened his mouth.
There had been zero lust in his eyes; instead, his voice had carried that same pragmatic, exasperated, older-brother tone he used on the training field every day:
— "Time to pack up the pencils, shorty. Put a warm cloak on. The nerd boss... I mean, His Highness the Prince needs you upstairs in his quarters for an urgent midnight meeting."
William hadn't even stepped a single boot across her threshold; he had simply leaned his broad shoulder against the outer corridor wall with his arms crossed, waiting patiently for her to come out.
Remembering how William had defended witches against Barov on day two, and how respectfully he had discussed her steel furnace at dinner, Anna had felt her ancestral fear evaporate on the spot, trusting him completely as she followed his quiet footsteps up the stairs.
Now, standing in the center of the Prince's bedchamber, Anna blinked in surprise at the tense silence.
— "Your Highness?" — Anna asked softly, looking at Roland's pale face. — "Commander William said you needed to see me urgently. And... he told me on the stairs that there is someone else hiding in this room."
Anna's blue eyes narrowed slightly as she scanned the empty corners by the wardrobe, her right palm warming with a faint orange spark of defensive fire just in case.
From the dark corner of the room, a soft sigh echoed out of thin air.
Slowly, like ripples spreading across a pool of dark ink, the invisible boundary of the Mist World peeled back, and Nightingale's cloaked figure materialized out of nothingness three paces away from the group.
Over by the door, even though he had known she was there, watching a stunning blonde assassin literally condense out of empty space made William let out a low, appreciative whistle.
— "Man... seeing that trick live is way cooler than reading about it," — William muttered under his breath, leaning his back against the closed oak door and folding his arms across his chest like a silent bodyguard.
Stepping forward to keep the peace, Roland gently took Anna's cool hand, led her over to the small round writing table near the hearth, and introduced the two witches to each other.
Once Anna, Roland, and Nightingale were seated around the small wooden table, Nightingale looked into the younger girl's eyes with deep, sisterly pity and repeated everything she had just told the prince.
She held nothing back, explaining the truth of the eighteenth birthday, the agonizing convulsions of the Demonic Bite, the high chance of exploding into black mist, and the refuge of the Witch Cooperation Association.
— "In our sanctuary up north, far away from the hatred of the Church and the eyes of commoners, there are dozens of witches just like you, Anna," — Nightingale said earnestly, leaning across the table. — "More importantly, we have senior sisters who have already survived their eighteenth birthdays. They know the breathing methods and the mental focus required to endure the Demonic Bite. Come with me tonight. Let your sisters guide you through the awakening."
Beside her, Roland forced himself to keep his voice strictly neutral, though his hands were clenched tightly beneath the table:
— "This goes far beyond our work contract, Anna," — Roland said quietly. — "When I hired you, I did not know the danger waiting for you at eighteen. Since this is a matter of your life and death, I will respect whatever choice you make tonight. If you wish to go with Nightingale to prepare for your birthday, you are completely free to leave."
Nightingale offered a warm, encouraging smile, reaching a hand halfway across the oak wood toward the younger girl.
— "You don't have to be afraid anymore, Anna. Once you pack—"
— "I am not going."
The four words dropped onto the table like a slab of cold iron, shattering the heavy tension in the room like a stone through glass.
Roland blinked twice, stunned by the sheer, instantaneous speed of her answer—she hadn't even taken two seconds to think about it!
Across the table, Nightingale's smile froze on her lips.
— "What... what did you just say?" — Nightingale asked, thinking the girl had misunderstood.
— "I said I am not going anywhere with you," — Anna repeated, her voice not rising in volume by a single decibel, yet carrying the immovable weight of a mountain. — "I am staying right here in Border Town."
A sharp crease of frustration appeared between Nightingale's golden eyebrows, her calm demeanor cracking for the first time.
— "Anna, listen to me! I am not telling you these stories to scare you!" — Nightingale urged, leaning closer. — "I could feel the density of the Magic Power inside your chest the moment you walked through that door! Because you awakened so young, the energy in your veins is enormous, and you are dangerously close to maturity! Your eighteenth birthday arrives right after the Months of Demons end! If you stay here melting iron in a courtyard without guidance from adult witches, the Demonic Bite will tear you apart! The sooner you come to our camp, the safer you will be!"
Anna didn't even look at the older witch.
Completely ignoring Nightingale's urgent warnings, the seventeen-year-old girl turned her head and locked her crystal-clear blue eyes directly onto Roland Wimbledon.
— "Your Highness... do you remember three weeks ago, right after Master Karl brought little Nana to the castle?" — Anna asked softly. — "You asked me that afternoon if I wanted to take a break from the kilns and go sit in Master Karl's schoolhouse again, so I could study quietly alongside the normal town children."
Roland nodded slowly, remembering the brief conversation in the yard.
— "Back then, I did not give you an answer right away," — Anna continued, her voice smooth, steady, and completely free of fear even in the face of a bloody death sentence. — "Because you also told me something else that day: that whether a witch chooses to live quietly like an ordinary person or use her power openly, there is no shame in being what we are. I thought about your words for a long time, Your Highness. And I realized that I do not care about hiding in the mountains, and I do not care about pretending to be a normal girl anymore."
Anna placed both of her small, calloused hands flat on the table:
— "I am who I am," — she stated simply. — "All I want is to stay in this castle, learn the laws of nature, and work beside Your Royal Highness. Nothing more, and nothing less."
Sitting two feet away, looking straight into the bottomless blue of Anna's eyes, Roland felt his breath catch in his chest.
With all the analytical arrogance of a grown man from the twenty-first century, Cheng Yan had assumed that he understood Anna's quiet, obedient personality completely. Only now, staring at her across the candlelit wood, did he realize he hadn't understood the half of her strength.
Looking into her eyes right now, there was none of the panicked denial of a frightened child, no blind ignorance of the danger, and no shallow, fairy-tale infatuation keeping her in the room.
Instead, there was an abyssal, unshakeable calm—the terrifying resolve of a girl who had already looked into the worst horrors of the world on the gallows, accepted them, and decided that she would never run away from anything ever again. It was the exact same fathomless look she had given him and Arthur on the execution platform before he shouted "Stop!".
Turning her gaze back toward the stunned blonde assassin across the table, Anna spoke each word like an iron vow carved into stone:
— "The Demonic Bite will not kill me, Miss Nightingale," — Anna declared quietly. — "Because I am going to understand how my power works, and I am going to defeat it."
For ten full seconds, Nightingale stared silently at the seventeen-year-old girl sitting in front of her.
Finally, seeing that nothing short of knocking Anna unconscious and tying her up in a sack would move her an inch from that chair, the older witch's tense shoulders slumped forward in defeat, and she let out a long, slow breath through her nose.
— "Very well, Anna," — Nightingale said softly, a trace of reluctant respect entering her eyes. — "I understand your choice."
Hearing those words, Roland felt a massive wave of relief wash through his chest—only for the tension to return a second later as he looked at the assassin.
— "Since Anna has made her decision clear," — Roland said, testing the waters, — "does that mean you will pack up and leave Border Town in peace now?"
— "Leave? I am not going anywhere, Your Highness," — Nightingale replied coolly, standing up from her chair and pulling the heavy dark hood back up over her golden curls. — "I will be staying right here inside your castle. With the northern rivers already freezing over and the first snow days away, our main caravan in the mountains won't be able to move much until the four Months of Demons are over anyway."
Roland frowned, feeling distinctly uncomfortable at the thought of having an invisible ghost living in his bedroom all winter.
— "If Anna refuses to go with you, why stay here for four months?" — Roland asked, crossing his arms. — "Do you really plan on lurking invisible in my hallways from the bathroom to the dining table until spring?"
— "I am staying because I do not think you stubborn, idealistic children who haven't crossed the threshold of eighteen truly grasp the physical hell that is coming for her," — Nightingale's voice dropped back into a cold, razor-sharp chill that contrasted sharply with her earlier warmth. — "I have lain on the stone floor at the edge of death, tearing my own fingernails off against the rocks from the pain, and I have watched half my friends burst into blood before my eyes. When that cursed day arrives for Anna at the end of winter, I will be waiting in the shadows of this castle to help her hold her mind together."
Nightingale gave a light, macabre shrug of her shoulders as she walked toward the oak door where William was standing:
— "And if your 'science' fails, Your Highness, and she is not strong enough to survive the bite..." — Nightingale added without looking back, — "I have a great deal of experience handling what is left of a witch's remains. I will arrange a fast, quiet burial for her in the night so you don't have to scrub her blood off your courtyard flagstones."
Without waiting for Roland to reply to that chilling parting shot, Nightingale stopped right beside the doorframe.
Leaning against the wall two feet away, William didn't make a single hostile move to block her; instead, the Commander of the First Army watched the blonde assassin with open, unabashed fascination and a slight smirk of professional respect.
Reaching up with her gloved right hand, Nightingale wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the silver-plated dagger buried two inches deep in the solid oak doorframe and pulled it free with a single, effortless tug that didn't even make her wrist flex.
Sliding the blade smoothly into the sheath beneath her cloak, she turned toward Roland, sank onto one knee in a swift, courtly bow, and looked up from beneath the shadow of her hood:
— "I will take my leave for the night, Your Highness. Try to get some sleep," — Nightingale whispered.
Before Roland could even open his mouth to ask where in the castle she planned on sleeping, the air around her cloaked figure rippled.
Like a drop of black ink dissolving into clear water, the edges of her cloak and boots simply melted into the dim shadows of the bedroom until—within the span of a single blink—the spot beside the door was completely empty.
— "Man... she is seriously something else," — William murmured, pulling the heavy oak door open a crack to peer out into the empty, torch-lit corridor just to be sure.
By the writing table, Roland sank heavily back onto his wooden chair, letting out a long breath as he stared at the empty spot on the rug, half amazed and half terrified.
What is the actual physical mechanism behind Nightingale's magic?, Cheng Yan's engineer brain wondered frantically, trying to make sense of what he had just seen. Is she folding three-dimensional space into a parallel pocket plane? How does she completely block sound waves and body heat while still breathing the oxygen in the room?
More than her magic, what shocked Roland was her combat discipline.
From the effortless accuracy of that knife throw to her silent footwork and her cold, tactical awareness, she moved like a modern special-forces operative. Were all the members of this mysterious Witch Cooperation Association trained as lethal assassins, or had Nightingale belonged to some secret noble intelligence unit before she awakened her power? Unfortunately, the useless memories of the original Prince Roland contained nothing but wine lists and tavern gossip, offering zero answers.
Shaking his head and snapping his fingers once to clear the analytical fog from his brain, Roland turned his attention back to the quiet girl still sitting across from him at the small table.
Anna hadn't said a word since Nightingale vanished; she was sitting with her back straight, staring down with intense concentration at her own small, calloused hands resting in her lap.
Looking at her slender shoulders under the candle flame, Roland felt a sudden wave of deep gratitude—mixed with an older-brother impulse to comfort a seventeen-year-old teenager who had just been told she might explode in four months.
Standing up from his chair, Roland walked around the small table, softened his voice, and reached out his right hand to gently pat the top of Anna's orange-red hair.
— "It is past midnight, Anna, and tomorrow we still have the first test assembly of the steam cylinder waiting for us," — Roland said gently, resting his palm lightly on her head. — "Don't worry about what she said. Go back to your room with William and get some rest. We still have four months, and I promise you we will solve this problem together in due time."
The reaction he got froze Roland in his tracks.
Anna did not lean into the comforting touch, nor did she smile.
Instead, with a sudden, sharp movement, the young girl raised her right hand, caught Roland's wrist firmly, and pushed his hand clean off the top of her head.
There was no anger or hatred in her grip, yet the gesture carried an unmistakable, fierce rejection of being patted on the head like a helpless child.
Before Roland could even blink, Anna stood up abruptly from the wooden chair, smoothed down the front of her linen skirt with both hands, and—without looking up at his face or offering a single word of goodnight—turned on her heel and marched straight out the open bedroom door.
Standing by the doorway, William raised both eyebrows in surprise as the quiet girl brushed past him into the hall, shooting Roland a questioning "What did you do?" look before stepping out and pulling the heavy oak door shut with a quiet click.
Thud.
Out in the freezing stone corridor, once she had rounded the corner down the stairs and William had politely hung back twenty paces to give her privacy, the darkness of the hallway swallowed Anna whole.
Far away from Roland's rational gray eyes and Nightingale's pitying stare, the colossal, unbreakable iron facade that the seventeen-year-old girl had held up inside that bedroom suddenly cracked down the middle.
Halfway down the shadowy corridor, Anna's knees gave out by an inch.
Stopping in the dark between two wall torches, she leaned her back delicately against the rough, freezing stone slabs of the castle wall, sliding down slightly as the crushing weight of the emotions she had locked inside her chest hit her all at once.
Her small fingers clutched the wool cloak over her racing heart, and before she could stop them, large, hot tears welled up in her clear blue eyes, spilling over her eyelashes and rolling silently down her soot-stained cheeks.
She didn't want him to pat her on the head like a stray puppy that needed pity!
She hadn't just defied a senior witch and sworn to conquer the most agonizing, terrifying death known to womankind just so Prince Roland would treat her like a fragile little child who needed to be tucked into bed and protected! She wanted to stand beside him at the furnace and the drafting table as an equal—as a strong, indispensable woman whose fire could hold up his entire sky!
Lifting her trembling chin in the dark, Anna pressed both forearms tightly across her face to muffle the quiet sobs shaking her shoulders, whispering a single, tear-choked word that only the ancient stones of the corridor could hear:
— "Fool..."