Her breath went ragged. Her hips rocked into her own hand to the rhythm of the walking horse. She rode the edge, close, closer, eyes closing, the knot of light in the future-lattice pulling her toward it like gravity.
And she stopped.
She took her hand away and gripped the saddle horn, trembling, flushed to the collar in the freezing night, and finished nothing.
'A princess rules one domain still,' she told her starving body, coldly, the way she had told ministers and armies for nine years. 'And this one will not surrender to my own fingers. If the south wants it, the south can come and take it.'
She rode on, disciplined and furious and wet, and every mile south her pride bled out behind her like a trail in the snow.
Six hundred miles away the morning after, Raven stood in a skirmish line.
