Steam rose in thin, foul-smelling ribbons from the butchered carcass of the mutant boar, the dark blood slowly sinking into the churned snow as the ten witches turned their backs on the crater and resumed their forced march south.
As the afternoon wore on, the mountain gale seemed to catch its second wind, howling down through the skeletal pine canopy to lash the girls' cheeks with ice crystals as sharp as broken glass.
Worse still, the burst of survival adrenaline that had carried them through the ambush ten minutes earlier was rapidly draining out of their veins. In its place settled a bone-deep muscular exhaustion, uncontrollable shivering, and the silent, suffocating dread that the heavy scent of fresh blood on the wind would draw an entire pack of scavengers straight onto their trail.
Trudging right in the center of the staggered file, sixteen-year-old Eyesight narrowed her eyes against the blinding glare, strands of her pale pink hair whipping wildly from beneath the frayed hood of her wool cloak.
Every muscle in her calves burned like hot wire, and her toes had gone numb inside her wet boots an hour ago. Even so, she forced the corners of her chapped lips upward into a stubborn, cheerful smile whenever one of the other girls glanced her way.
By nature, Eyesight was the kind of girl who couldn't stand silence or gloom; she drew her own courage from keeping the people around her from falling apart.
Even her magic was built around connection. By touching another person's skin and leaving a tiny, harmless mark of Magical Power behind, she could link her optic nerves directly to theirs, seeing the world through their eyes in real time—provided they stayed within a strict four-meter radius of her body.
At that exact moment, she was holding two separate links open at once.
Inside her head, her field of vision was split into three distinct pictures running side by side: her own eyes staring at the snow-dusted back of Soraya Zoen's cloak right in front of her; Ellen's downward-tilted view at the point of the column, scanning the uneven ice crust and thick white fog; and Library's calm, sweeping view two paces to her left, constantly measuring the slope of the ravine walls.
For an ordinary person, processing three moving perspectives at the same time would have triggered a blinding headache and violent nausea within thirty seconds; for Eyesight, after a year of practice in the dark, it was simply the best way to make sure none of her friends stepped into a hidden crevasse.
— "We're doing great, girls! Keep those feet moving!" — Eyesight called out, pitching her voice high enough to carry over the whistle of the wind. — "Did you see how fast Violetta cut that giant boar down back there? With a shield like hers watching our flank, no monster in these woods stands a chance! If we keep up this steady pace for another hour, we'll find a dry rock overhang to camp under before dark!"
Nobody answered her.
Up ahead, Ellen was too focused on her ground radar to waste breath, and behind her, Cherry and Mystery Moon were panting too hard to talk.
Refusing to let the heavy silence win, Eyesight reached out with a gloved hand and gave a gentle tap to the narrow shoulder of the girl walking directly in front of her.
Soraya Zoen was trudging through the deep boot tracks with her head bowed low and her shoulders hunched inward, looking completely disconnected from the freezing white hell around them.
— "Hey, Soraya, what are you thinking about so hard up there?" — Eyesight asked, keeping her voice warm and curious.
The quiet girl with the light-brown hair blinked slowly, taking two full seconds to pull her mind back from whatever faraway place she had been wandering in.
In the camp, Soraya's gift was viewed by Cara as the height of uselessness: she could conjure an illusory paintbrush out of thin air and paint solid, colorful coatings of whatever she saw or imagined onto flat surfaces.
— "I'm painting the air in front of my boots, Eyesight," — Soraya murmured in a distant, almost dreamy whisper that barely reached Eyesight's ears.
— "Painting the air?" — Eyesight tilted her head.
— "I'm imagining a huge stone fireplace right in the middle of the snow," — Soraya explained softly, staring straight ahead into the swirling fog. — "I'm laying down thick strokes of vermilion, burnt amber, and bright canary yellow—making the flames so hot that the oil paint itself starts to bubble and boil on the canvas. I'm trying to see if painting a fire inside my head can trick my toes into feeling warm again."
Eyesight felt a sharp pang of sympathy in her chest, though she kept her smile bright and gave her friend's shoulder a warm squeeze.
— "Hold onto that picture, Soraya! Don't let it fade," — Eyesight encouraged her. — "When we make it down to Border Town and find out Nightingale was telling the truth, you won't just paint in your head—I bet the rich lords and ladies in that valley will pay silver coins just to hang your paintings on their walls!"
Soraya didn't say anything else, sinking quietly back into her daydream, yet the rigid tension in her narrow shoulders relaxed by a fraction of an inch—a small victory that made Eyesight's throat ache a little less.
Three paces behind Eyesight and Soraya, however, another girl was fighting a silent, suffocating battle inside her own head.
Walking with her chin tucked down into her frayed collar, Selena kept her eyes fixed on the backs of her sisters' cloaks—yet what filled her vision had nothing to do with wool fabric or blowing snow.
Selena saw the world through the raw, unfiltered colors of human emotion.
Back inside the mountain cavern, Mentor Cara had strictly forbidden Selena from opening her emotional sight inside the camp under threat of being locked in the dark without rations. According to Cara, a witch who could read the hidden feelings of her sisters only bred paranoia, gossip, and friction among women who were already living on the razor's edge of starvation.
Yet Selena possessed a heart too soft to obey an order like that.
You couldn't simply turn off empathy because a leader told you to. For the past year, Selena had kept her power secretly active in short bursts whenever the camp was stressed, convinced that spotting which sister was close to a breakdown was the only way she could offer a comforting word before someone did something desperate.
Out here on this death march through the Hidden Forest, however, the colors bleeding into the whiteout around her were enough to make her want to claw her own eyes out.
To Selena's sight, the snowfield wasn't white at all; it was smeared with clashing, turbulent halos of color that pulsed with every heartbeat of the ten women on the trail.
Up ahead around Eyesight, a ring of bright, sunny yellow was flaring stubbornly outward—the unmistakable color of forced cheerfulness fighting a losing war against the heavy, bruised dark-blue clouds of terror and exhaustion pressing in around her ribs. Right in front of her, Soraya Zoen was wrapped in a thick, dull gray fog of numbness,pricked only here and there by tiny orange sparks of homesick daydreaming.
Those were sad, heavy colors, yet they were normal for a winter march.
What made Selena's stomach twist into a cold knot was what she saw flickering at the outer edges of their line.
Shifting her gaze slightly to the left, Selena looked at seventeen-year-old Feather, who was gliding over the top of the snow crust with her arms wrapped tightly around her chest.
Normally, timid little Feather gave off a pale, harmless mist of dove-gray shyness mixed with childlike nervousness.
Right now, that gentle gray was being eaten alive from the inside.
Coiling around Feather's thin frame like a nest of venomous, pulsing maggots were thick, jagged tendrils of glowing blood-red.
Hatred, Selena realized, her breath catching in her throat as she stared at the docile teenager's back.
It was a sharp, bitter, corrosive hatred completely foreign to the sweet girl Selena knew. As the early nerve-twinges of her approaching eighteenth birthday chewed at her marrow, Feather wasn't just drowning in fear of dying anymore—she was burning up with a dark, furious resentment against her own weak body, against the unfairness of the world, and against girls like Hummingbird whose "useful" powers had earned them a safe spot in Cara's main column while Feather was thrown to the wolves.
The pressure of the imminent Awakening was twisting the poor girl's mind into knots before the Demonic Bite even started.
Shaken by that ugly crimson glow, Selena quickly tore her eyes away from Feather and looked back toward the right flank of the column, searching desperately for the steady emotional anchor of Violetta.
As the oldest, strongest combat veteran marching with them—the warrior who had just thrown her own body in front of a one-ton boar to save Mystery Moon—Violetta's aura should have been a solid, comforting fortress of deep forest green and calm steel blue, radiating protection and sisterly duty.
The instant Selena's magic eyes focused on the tall warrior in the white wolf-fur mantle, Selena nearly tripped over her own boots in the snow.
There was no comforting green around Violetta.
Instead, the silent warrior's silhouette was wrapped in a dense, suffocating, thorny cloud of dark blackish-purple—the unmistakable color of boiling paranoia, razor-edged suspicion, and cold readiness to kill!
Why is Violetta radiating an aura like that toward our own group?! Selena whimpered silently inside her collar, wrapping her arms tighter around her chest to ward off a chill that had nothing to do with the mountain wind.
Worse still, Violetta's suspicious glare wasn't directed outward at the dark pine trees where the beasts hid.
Like a hunting hound locked onto a scent, every ounce of Violetta's dark purple suspicion was aimed straight at the back of Fringe's silver-white head at the rear of the file.
Following Violetta's stare, Selena shifted her emotional sight onto Fringe—and what she saw around the former noblewoman made her blood run colder than the ice under her boots.
Around Cecilia Selda, there was no blue of fear, no red of anger, and not even the thorny purple of distrust.
Cecilia's aura was a pale, almost translucent sheet of bone-white streaked with heavy ribbons of dead lead-gray.
It was the color of absolute detachment. It was the cold, quiet certainty of a woman who had already cut every emotional tie to the people walking beside her, accepted the death of their group as a foregone conclusion, and locked her heart behind a door of pure iron.
Selena dropped her gaze back to her boots, her heart hammering against her ribs in helpless dread. She didn't know what Cara had whispered before dawn, and she didn't know what Cecilia was planning in the dark—she only knew that an invisible spiderweb of tragedy was tightening around all ten of them with every step they took.
Two paces to Selena's right, walking side by side with Eyesight, seventeen-year-old Library didn't need magic eyes to tell her that their squad was sitting on a lit powder keg.
Even with her blonde hair crusted in frost and her cheeks chapped raw by the headwind, the merchant's daughter from Eagle City carried herself with a calm, observant discipline far beyond her years.
Back in the cavern, Mentor Cara had dismissed Library as dead weight because her magic—the ability to instantly copy written text, numbers, or complex map lines from one sheet of parchment onto another by touch—couldn't stop a charging wolf or boil a pot of water.
In her obsession with raw combat power, Cara had overlooked the far more dangerous tool sitting between Library's ears: a mind trained since childhood to audit ledgers, spot pattern anomalies, and calculate survival margins without letting tears get in the way.
While Selena drowned in the group's emotions and Eyesight burned her energy trying to keep everyone smiling, Library was quietly running the numbers of their march like an accounting sheet.
Fourteen thousand two hundred steps since Violetta killed that burrowing boar, Library noted silently, her sharp blue eyes sweeping the angle of the granite boulders jutting out through the snowbanks on their left. Over the last hour, the downward grade of the ravine has flattened out by roughly five degrees, and the pine trees are thinning into bare rock. That matches the third map I copied from Scroll's ledger: we are reaching the lower granite shelf near the base of the mountain range.
Down here on the exposed rock shelf, the snowdrifts were shallower—only knee-deep instead of waist-deep—yet without the dense forest canopy to break the gale, the wind velocity had nearly doubled.
Looking up at the narrow strip of leaden sky between the peaks, Library estimated the remaining light.
Forty-five minutes until the sun drops behind the western ridge, she calculated coldly. Once the sun goes down, the temperature on this exposed shelf will plummet another fifteen degrees in twenty minutes. If we don't find a deep rock fissure or a sheltered overhang before dusk, every single girl in this line is going to lose fingers and toes to black frostbite before midnight.
Next, she audited their supplies: four small bundles of dry pine twigs that she had insisted the girls tuck inside their wool cloaks against their chests so the snow wouldn't ruin their tinder; an endless supply of ice to melt in their single dented iron pot; and ten palm-sized packets of dried, woody leather-root that wouldn't fill a sparrow's stomach, which Cherry would have to make edible using her three-bowl daily limit.
Yet as tight as the weather and the food math were, Library's sharpest attention was fixed on the exact same behavioral anomaly Selena had felt at the rear of the column.
Without turning her head far enough to give herself away, Library used her peripheral vision—and the shared sight link Eyesight was still maintaining with her—to measure the spacing between Violetta and Fringe.
Four paces behind and one pace to the right, Library observed, adjusting the frozen leather strap of her satchel over her shoulder.
That wasn't how two vanguard fighters spaced themselves when guarding a column against forest ambushes. In a standard escort formation, one fighter walked near the front third while the other covered the rear ten paces back to watch for trailing predators.
Here, Violetta was ignoring the front entirely and shadowing Fringe's heels like a prison guard walking a convict to the gallows.
Whenever Fringe slowed her stride by half a step to catch her breath, Violetta shortened her stride at the exact same instant to keep Fringe directly in front of her. Whenever Fringe turned her head to check the trees, Violetta's hand twitched toward her waist and her purple eyes locked onto the back of Fringe's neck.
Violetta isn't guarding the column—she is guarding Fringe, Library deduced with icy certainty. Which means Mentor Cara doesn't trust Cecilia Selda by a single inch, and before we left the clearing this morning, Cara gave Violetta private orders to act as Cecilia's judge and executioner the second Cecilia steps out of line.
Library didn't know what had happened in the senior council tent before dawn to make Cara suspect Fringe, and frankly, she didn't care about camp politics.
What she cared about was the cold survival probability of the eight non-combatants caught in the middle.
According to Library's calculations, crossing the remaining twenty miles of monster-infested foothills to reach Border Town required both Violetta's shield and Fringe's Attraction Magic working at full capacity. If the two vanguards abandoned them, at best one or two of the eight girls might miraculously stumble into human territory alive while the rest fed the wolves.
And if Violetta and Fringe drew weapons on each other in the middle of the night—if a fight broke out between their only two protectors—then the panic and the blood scent would guarantee that all ten of them died on this mountain before tomorrow noon.
Just as the last pale gray daylight began to drown behind a wall of purple-black storm clouds, cutting the visibility down to twenty paces and turning the wind into a sheet of flying razors, Violetta's deep voice boomed from the rear flank:
— "Halt the line! We are stopping here for the night!"
Up front, Ellen and Feather stopped immediately, their shoulders slumping with sheer relief as Violetta strode past the file and pointed a gloved hand toward the base of a towering granite cliff thirty yards off the trail.
Where an ancient rockslide had brought three house-sized slabs of stone crashing down against the cliff face centuries ago, a deep, wedge-shaped half-cave had been formed—with solid rock walls on three sides and a low stone roof that blocked the worst of the howling gale.
— "Get inside out of the wind," — Violetta ordered in her crisp, no-nonsense soldier's tone as she stepped up to the mouth of the cleft. — "Ellen, run a vibration sweep across the back wall to make sure nothing is hibernating under the gravel. Feather, Mystery Moon, Soraya—get to the deepest corner and huddle under the blankets to share body heat. Cherry, Fringe—take the iron pot and the dry twigs and get a small fire going near the middle rock."
Nobody argued. Dragging their numb legs through the narrow opening between the boulders, the younger girls practically collapsed onto the dry, frost-covered gravel inside the shelter, letting out a collective groan of relief just to be out of the direct teeth of the wind.
Kneeling beside a flat stone near the center of the half-cave while unstrapping the dented iron cooking pot from her pack, Cecilia Selda kept her head bowed so the curtain of her silver-white hair hid her face.
Four hours.
For four long, grueling, nerve-wracking hours of wading through snowdrifts, she had felt Violetta's cold purple eyes boring into the back of her spine like the point of a cocked crossbow bolt.
She hadn't complained once when Violetta ordered her to help sixteen-year-old Cherry with the menial chore of boiling the evening soup.
In fact, as Cecilia stacked the dry pine twigs Library handed her into a neat pyramid and waited for Cherry to strike a flint spark, her heart was beating against her ribs with a fast, sharp rhythm of pure anticipation.
Being put in charge of the cooking pot wasn't an insult; it was the exact opening she had been praying for since sunrise.
While Cherry used her small skinning knife to scrape chunks of clean white snow and shaved strips of woody, dirt-caked leather-root into the iron pot, Cecilia knelt quietly beside the crackling little fire, using her peripheral vision to map every person in the shelter.
Ten feet behind her in the deepest pocket of the rock cleft, the other seven girls—Ellen, Feather, Mystery Moon, Soraya, Selena, Eyesight, and Library—were already pressed together in a tight ball under three shared wool blankets, too exhausted and half-frozen to care about anything except warming their toes.
And six paces in front of her, sitting upright on a flat boulder right at the narrow entrance of the half-cave where nobody could step outside without crossing her boots, was Violetta.
True to her paranoid orders, the purple-haired warrior hadn't come over to warm her hands by the fire. She sat with her broad back braced against the granite wall, her heavy wolf-fur mantle pulled around her shoulders, and her dark purple eyes locked unblinkingly onto Cecilia's hands.
Watch me all you like, my loyal watchdog, Cecilia thought coldly, her left hand slipping casually inside the deep fold of her beige coat pocket to brush the small, tightly tied square of unbleached linen hidden there. You are a brilliant fighter on a battlefield, Violetta, yet you have never sat at a noble banquet table in Valencia. A soldier expects a blade in the dark; she never suspects a bowl of bitter root water served to her own sisters.
Inside that small linen packet sat the three ounces of concentrated bitter-root powder Cecilia had lifted from Herb's medicine basket four days ago.
Normally, Herb only dissolved a pinch of that greenish-brown dust the size of a fingernail clipping into a full kettle of water to treat severe stomach blockages or manic insomnia.
Cecilia had zero intention of diluting it.
She was going to dump the entire three-ounce packet straight into Violetta's single wooden bowl.
Given how much physical stamina and Magical Power Violetta had already burned earlier that afternoon blocking and slaughtering that one-ton mutant boar by herself, her body's natural resistance was already at rock bottom. Once she swallowed that dose on an empty stomach, the concentrated herb would tear through her intestines with paralyzing cramps inside half an hour, followed immediately by a heavy, nerve-numbing chemical stupor that would knock her dead to the world until tomorrow morning.
It wouldn't kill Violetta—as long as the girls pulled her closer to the fire after she passed out—yet it would take the strongest piece on the board completely out of play for the next six hours.
And the moment Violetta's eyes closed and the exhausted teenagers in the back fell asleep, Cecilia Selda was walking out of this cave alone.
She wasn't going to run back up the mountain to Cara, and she certainly wasn't going to slow herself down dragging eight helpless, starving children through a monster-infested wilderness.
Her goal was singular, ruthless, and crystal clear: her own survival.
Ever since that night four days ago when Commander William had smashed through their cavern, shattered the Church's stone, and exposed Cara as a raving lunatic with a branding iron, every illusion Cecilia held about the Witch Cooperation Association had died. Nightingale had been right all along. Cara was marching fifty women to a frozen grave in the north, whereas true survival—warm rooms, real food, and a ruler who valued witches—sat waiting down in Prince Roland's Border Town.
To make sure she had enough strength to cross the remaining foothills alone tonight, Cecilia hadn't spent a single drop of her Attraction Magic during the entire day's march—even standing back during the boar ambush so her internal tank stayed at 100%.
Unlike Mystery Moon's wild, uncontrolled magnetism, Cecilia's power was a precision vector weapon. She didn't pull things blindly toward her own chest; by locking onto a target with her left hand and pointing her right hand in a chosen direction, she could hurl a four-hundred-pound wolf sideways into a cliff face or sweep deep snowdrifts out of her path without breaking stride.
Traveling light and alone at night with a full tank of magic, she could reach the valley road before sunrise.
— "Fringe... the water is boiling," — Cherry's weak, shivering voice cut softly through Cecilia's thoughts.
Kneeling on the other side of the small fire, the sixteen-year-old street girl rubbed her red, frost-chapped hands together over the steam rising from the pot.
— "Go ahead and ladle out the first three bowls for Feather, Moon, and Ellen," — Cherry murmured, trying to offer a brave little smile. — "I'll use my magic on theirs so it tastes like hot rye bread fresh out of the oven. At least it'll trick their stomachs into feeling full so they can sleep."
Reaching down, Cecilia picked up the cracked wooden ladle—and then offered Cherry a gentle, sisterly smile that looked as warm as Wendy's.
— "Give me the bowls, Cherry, I'll serve everyone," — Cecilia said softly. — "And save all three of your flavor spells for the youngest girls in the back. You, me, Soraya, and Violetta can drink the root broth plain tonight. We're the older sisters on this march—making sure the little ones get the warm bread is the least we can do."
Across the fire, Cherry stared up at the silver-haired noblewoman with wide, shining eyes full of pure, uncritical respect—completely blind to the cold calculation hiding behind that generous offer.
If Cherry used her flavor magic on Violetta's bowl, the spell would mask the taste, sure, yet touching the bowl would also bring Cherry two feet away while Cecilia was pouring the soup. By insisting that the "older sisters" drink the broth plain, Cecilia guaranteed that Violetta would expect the soup to taste like bitter, disgusting mud anyway—and kept Cherry sitting back by the wall with the younger girls!
As Cherry hurried to the back of the cave with the first three bowls to cast her bread-flavor spell for Feather and the others, Cecilia turned her back squarely toward the cave entrance for three seconds.
Letting the wide, fur-trimmed wing of her winter cloak flare out to block Violetta's line of sight completely, she dipped the ladle to fill afourth wooden bowl with steaming, muddy brown root water.
In the same fluid motion, her left hand slipped out of her pocket, pinched open the corner of the small linen cloth, and dumped the entire mound of greenish-brown powder straight into the boiling liquid.
A quick swirl of the ladle tip dissolved the fine dust instantly. Against the murky brown sediment of the boiled leather-root and the pungent, earthy stench of pine bark already filling the small cave, the herbal poison vanished without leaving a single trace of color or smell.
Tucking the empty scrap of cloth back into her sleeve, Cecilia stood up smoothly, forced her heartbeat to stay slow and even, and walked across the gravel toward the mouth of the cleft, holding the steaming wooden bowl out in both hands.
Sitting against the granite boulder by the entrance, Violetta didn't reach for the bowl right away.
Instead, the purple-haired warrior raised her head, locking her hard, suspicious dark eyes directly onto Cecilia's face as if trying to read the thoughts behind her skull.
For three seconds, the silence between the two vanguard fighters was thick enough to slice with a dagger.
Cecilia didn't blink, she didn't look away, and her hands didn't tremble by a hair's breadth; she simply looked down at the warrior with a tired, faintly strained smile.
— "Cherry did what she could with the dry roots, though she only had enough magic to change the taste for the three weakest girls in the back," — Cecilia said in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. — "Drink it while it's hot, Violetta. You burned through a huge amount of magic killing that boar for us today. If you don't put something warm in your stomach now, the night freeze will sap your strength before your first watch is even half over."
Violetta's eyes narrowed slightly.
She still remembered Cara's warning—yet she had just watched Cecilia ladle that water straight out of the exact same pot the younger girls were already gulping down in the back corner, and the logic of Cecilia's words was undeniable. After the boar fight, Violetta's stomach was cramping so hard from hunger that her hands were starting to shake in the cold.
Reaching up with one gloved hand, Violetta took the wooden bowl, gave a single, brief nod of silent thanks, and raised the rim to her lips—drinking the thick, scalding, bitter broth down in four long, hungry gulps until the bowl was completely empty.
Handing the empty bowl back to Cecilia, the warrior wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and turned her gaze back toward the snowy darkness outside.
Checkmate, Cecilia thought, taking the empty bowl and walking calmly back to sit beside the dying embers of the small fire.
All she had to do now was let the clock run out.
Inside the dark, freezing shelter, the minutes crawled by like hours. Outside the granite boulders, the night wind howled relentlessly down the valley; inside, one by one, the exhausted breathing of the seven young girls huddled under the blankets slowed into the deep, rhythmic cadence of sleep. Even seventeen-year-old Library, whose sharp merchant eyes usually missed nothing, finally leaned her blonde head back against the stone wall and succumbed to sheer physical fatigue.
Cecilia didn't close her eyes once. Pulling her knees up to her chest, she watched the shadow at the mouth of the cave through her eyelashes.
Twenty minutes passed.
Twenty-five minutes.
At the thirty-minute mark, Violetta's iron-straight spine suddenly twitched.
Sitting by the entrance boulder, the veteran warrior's broad shoulders hunched violently forward. A low, strangled groan tore from between her clenched teeth, and the weapon resting across her knees slipped off her lap, hitting the gravel floor with a dull thud as she clamped both hands hard over her stomach.
Herb's undiluted purgative and nerve-numbing soporific had hit her bloodstream all at once.
Gasping for breath as a wave of paralyzing abdominal cramps doubled her over, Violetta tried to push herself up against the rock wall—only for her knees to buckle underneath her like wet straw. Cold, clammy sweat broke out across her pale forehead, plastering strands of dark purple hair to her cheeks.
Blinking hard against the heavy, suffocating fog rapidly shutting down her central nervous system, Violetta forced her blurry eyes toward the dying orange glow of the campfire.
Through her fading tunnel vision, the last thing she saw before the chemical stupor dragged her down into the dark was Cecilia Selda rising smoothly to her feet without making a sound.
The strongest combat witch in the squad had been neutralized without a single spell being cast.
Knowing her window was tight before the fire died out completely, Cecilia moved like a ghost. Slinging her leather travel pack over one shoulder and fastening her thick winter cloak tight at the throat, she walked straight across the gravel, stepped right over Violetta's limp, groaning form at the mouth of the cleft without sparing a single glance for the sleeping girls behind her, and plunged out into the nocturnal blizzard.
She was free.
Turning south down the steep, rocky incline of the mountain shelf, Cecilia didn't hold back her magic anymore.
Extending her left hand toward the heavy drifts blocking her boots and flicking her right hand toward the ravine edge, she fired short, rhythmic pulses of directional Attraction Magic—sweeping hundreds of pounds of loose snow out of her path and using the pull against the boulders ahead to launch herself down the slope at twice the speed of a normal runner.
Within four minutes of hard running, she cleared the lower tree line and scrambled up onto the crest of a jagged, wind-scoured granite ridge that overlooked the final descent toward the valley floor.
Panting hard as the freezing gale whipped her silver-white hair across her face, Cecilia felt a fierce, intoxicating rush of triumph surge through her veins. She had outsmarted Cara, she had slipped past Violetta's leash, and by tomorrow afternoon, she would be sitting inside Prince Roland's warm castle!
Her taste of freedom lasted less than five seconds.
Right as Cecilia planted her boot on the top of the craggy ridge to leap down the other side, the howling winter world around her suddenly went crazy.
Without a single warning sound, the deafening roar of the sixty-mile-per-hour blizzard was snuffed out into absolute, sepulchral silence.
A colossal, invisible, and utterly suffocating physical pressure slammed down from the dark sky overhead, pinning the entire mountain ridge beneath the weight of an unseen mountain.
Right in front of Cecilia's wide, horrified eyes, the thousands of white snowflakes whipping through the air simply stopped falling—frozen completely motionless in midair around her face.