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I’d shouted, circling the hut in vain, looking for a way in that wasn’t there.

Nothing. I couldn’t see a way to get her out.She couldn’t be in there. The roof was engulfed. It would all come down soon.

I could not be losing her.

I kept shouting her name. There was nothing else.

Then I heard the howls. Howls? I blinked against the slanting rain in my eyes, then heard another. They were coming from the crawl space.

I followed them to the back of the structure, where the fire had not yet consumed everything and the foundation was at its highest, the groundsloping away. Someone got me a maul. Then I’d taken it to the side of that foundation again and again and again, until my arms and shoulders burned with the effort, until I’d gotten through, until I was on my knees in the mud prying away stones, until I was reaching in, finding her and pulling her out.

She stumbled over the stones and into my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her, my face in her smoky hair. I pulled her away from the blaze and sank to the ground with her. She was coughing, and I ran my hands over her back.

“You’re out,” I kept saying. “You’re out.”

Slowly, the fresh air worked its way inside her, and the coughing lessened. She could get a decent breath, and her coughs no longer wracked her so forcefully. Her head came up, eyes blinking, and she met my gaze. Her face looked dazed, like she was struggling to believe she’d made it out. She’d be okay.

I put my hands on either side of her soot-streaked face and nodded.

Her shoulders sagged and she let out a sputter of air, sinking until her forehead was pressed into my shoulder. I ran my hands up and down her back.

“You’re hurt,” I said, having seen the skin of her arm. “Tell me what hurts.”

She didn’t tell me, but she leaned away, and both of us tracked her body. The burns on her leg and arms, a hand she cradled to her chest.

“I’ll take you to Yeshi.”

I stood and bent to pick her up, lifting her gently to her feet. But when I tried to scoop her into my arms, she squeezed my shoulder, stalling me. A glance at her face showed she wasn’t focused on me anymore. She waslooking at the people gathered around us, and there was something new in her eyes.

She looked like she was preparing to do something.

“No,” she said, one word spinning circles in my head.

“No?”

Her gaze was sharp. The soot that streaked her cheeks took on a fierce look, and she squared her shoulders.

“Fen, you’re hurt.”

But she turned away from me. When she spoke, it was to those gathered around us, Toke’s and Runehall’s alike. Baer was shouldering his way through the crowd, one of Runehall’s elders trailing him, and there was horror in his eyes. He looked at Fen, burned and streaked with soot and rain, and his mouth fell open.

“Axl did this,” she said, her voice small and jagged, and I went cold. “He—he…” she struggled for the words, struggled to be heard with so raw a throat, “wanted me to—”

But then she broke off in a fit of coughing.

“Let’s get you to Yeshi first,” I said, coming beside her, my hand encircling her ribs. “We’ll find Axl.”

And kill him.

But she shook her head. There was that look again, wild and angry.

“He tried to give me b-back to R-R-Runehall,” she said, louder now, “but I won’t let R-Runehall have me.”

A murmur went through the crowd. I had wanted to scoop her up and carry her from this burning hut and these gathered people, but I saw what she was doing. She was standing up for herself. She was coming head-to-head with the people who had tried to dictate her path, and she was telling them no.

She was speaking out.

“I will not be—be yours to command,” she said quietly. She found Baer and Runehall’s elder when she said, “Stop your meeting. Forget your arguments. I am my own, and…and I will—will have myself.”