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It was taking her a very long time to get her things together and leave.

Ava could feel the tension and frustration rise up in her, and she forced herself to look at the ground, to work on a blank expression.

“It draws the eye,” Gregor said, and she lifted her gaze to meet his with a jerk.

That sounded like a warning.

She glanced down at what she had made, more or less without thinking, and studied it.

It was a thin, flexible piece of wood about the length of her hand from wrist to finger tip, and she had woven it into a complicated knot with the feather in the middle.

She had been thinking of rescue, however unlikely that possibility was, as she had bent and shaped the wood.

They were far from the main road, on back paths and barely-there tracks that she was slowly coming to realize were used regularly by traders to avoid the Kassian army.

That these hidden routes were so well known told her that traders had been avoiding the Kassian military for years. It made sense. Herron, her cousin and the Queen’s Herald while he was alive, would have not stepped in to police his own soldiers if they took what they wanted from the trader caravans.

“It’s just a piece of bark,” she said, and flicked it off the tree stump she was using as a seat onto the ground behind her.

It never reached it, though.

Blackie’s feather spiralled down, and then was lifted by the light breeze, and with a twirl, it lifted up and floated away.

She turned away from watching it.

General Ru would have sent people after her, but if they hadn’t taken Evelyn and the Grimwaldian’s bait at Bartolo and gone toward the coast, they would most likely be using the main roads.

Sirna had known what he was doing when he had taken the less-traveled route.

Her only hope might lie at the border.

If General Ru’s rescue party was making better time than the caravan, they may be waiting for her there, watching the traffic going through the border post.

She already knew she needed to escape before they reached the border, but perhaps she should head there anyway, or make her escape just before they arrived. Whoever General Ru had sent, they would help her, protect her, and get her back to Fernwell.

It would be better than being on her own with no resources.

If she could find Luc . . .

She had had this thought more than once.

He had ridden north east a day before she’d been taken.

He would be close to Cervantes by now, if she had counted her days correctly.

He was much closer to her than Fernwell was.

She wondered if it really made sense to find him, given she had no real idea where he would be, or whether she just wanted to go to him, no matter the practicalities.

And then she wondered if she cared about the reason, one way or the other.

“If Melodie looked at it, I am sure she would say it wasn’t just a piece of bark.” Gregor’s words were soft, breaking through her reverie.

Ava drew in a quick breath and turned her head to look at him, but he was staring into the fire.

“I don’t think so,” she whispered back. But there was a part of her that hoped she was wrong and he was right. It would mean her magic was coming back. “Even so, Melodie’s . . . gift . . . is unusual.”

And very, very useful. Just like her own.