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Mum would have had this done in half the time.

Wren rolled her neck and stared glumly at the shoddy fabric in her hands that was supposed to be a blanket.

Half the time and ten times as good.

Her heart constricted in her chest, making her feel altogether unable to breathe. She needed to leave now before she broke down and cried in front of everyone.

Clutching her knitting in her arms, Wren nodded at the old crone. “I will continue this back in my tent.” She barely got it out, not waiting for a response before she fled. Of course, the moment she got back to her tent she unceremoniously dumped the knitting in a pile on top of her blankets, then collapsed to the floor to try to pull herself together.

Tears stung her eyes at the mere thought of her mother; she dug her fingers into the plain fur rug to ground herself. Her good, strong mother who could knit anyone under the table with her eyes closed. She was always knitting. When Wren had once asked why, she’d responded by saying it helped take her mind off troubling things. Wren had never known what these “troubling things” were, though she imagined they were to do with the scars that wrapped around her mum’s neck, and her difficult, mysterious past prior to landing on the Dragon Isles.

She blinked up at the pile of blankets and her abandoned project. Knitting wasn’t helping her keep her mind off things. It was making it worse. She had to do something else.

She had to hunt.

Nobody had brought game in from the woods since before Wren and Leif secured the trade with Gunn. The grain he’d given them wouldn’t last forever, and people couldn’t live on bread alone. They needed meat to keep their energy up.

This is a bad idea.

Wren lurched off the floor and rushed to her bow and quiver which rested on a plain wooden trunk at the end of the bed. She snatched them up and snuck out the back of her tent. Her shoulders hunched up by her ears when someone yelled, but it wasn’t for her. She released the breath she was holding when she managed to make it to the tree line. Wren cast one last glance on the camp and then crept deeper into the trees.

Freedom. At last.

Nobody was around to stop her. Bram was in a meeting with Vienne, and Ever was busy attending to things in the kitchen. Josenu was in the Verlantian palace, and Leif was wherever Wren’s aunt had ordered him to be.

Not that he would stop me,Wren mused as she padded through the glum light permeating the forest.Or would he? Perhaps he would ask me not to go for my own good. If Vienna and Bram realize I’ve flouted their orders, then there’s no chance they’ll ever let me out of the camp grounds again.

A branch crunched beneath her right foot.

She didn’t care.

Wren couldn’t find it in herselftocare. A dragon was never meant to be imprisoned, regardless of whether that prison was a rebellion campsite, the icy-cold depths of the Verlantian dungeons, or the sun-strewn paradise of Arrik’s bedroom.

Stop thinking about his bedroom.

She scowled at herself.

There were more important things to think about, like what the people of the rebellion needed to eat. If Wren returned from her hunt with prey in hand, then she reasoned more than a few hungry mouths would sing her praises. Perhaps if public opinion changed about her presence, she’d be allowed outside the camp again. And Wren needed all the support she could get, surrounded as she was by the folks who were still half-convinced she was in cahoots with her Verlantian brute of a husband.

For a while Wren wandered, a silent presence gliding through the forest without a single target in mind. But the moment she began spying the telltale signs of a deer moving through the undergrowth, all of her finely tuned senses came back to her as easily as breathing. She’d never enjoyed hunting like some did. Taking a life didn’t bring her joy, but she understood the necessity of meat.

It was over an hour later when Wren finally caught sight of the creature. A stag.

Her breath stuck in her throat.

He was beautiful. A tall, well-muscled stag in the prime of its life. Wren had been told game was sparse in the forest, so the beast was clearly a clever one to stay out of sight of its would-be hunters. It was a travesty that he wouldn’t see another day.

A pang of sadness hit Wren as she came to terms with the fact thatshewas its hunter today. But it was the stag or the people of the rebellion. The creature would feed many mouths.

Creeping as closely as she dared, Wren pulled out her bow and nocked an arrow. The wind, coming from the west, rustled the leaves above her. Wren readjusted her aim to account for the wind. The stag moved from a patch of grass to nibble on a cluster of daisies a few paces away.

Wren took a single step forward, the deer in her sights. She inhaled and pulled back on the drawstring.

I’m sorry, my friend.

Snap.

Her brows furrowed and she slipped into stillness just as the stag did the same. She swallowed hard as something under her foot had given way beneath her weight, and that was when she realized what she’d just done.