Kaelyn POV
The woman's name was Mira, and she moved through the palace like she owned it.
I followed her down corridors I'd walked a thousand times but had never really seen. Every shadow could hide a guard. Every sound could be a footstep coming to stop us. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure someone would hear it.
"We have maybe two hours before they realize you're gone," Mira whispered as we descended a servants' staircase. The stone was rough under my feet. Everything here was rough. Nothing like the polished marble of the royal halls. "After that, the gates lock down."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Someone your mother paid a lot of gold to keep around just in case." Mira didn't look back. "Turns out today was the case."
My mother. The woman who wouldn't look at me in the throne room. The woman who'd let my father say all those things without defending me once.
She'd still tried to save me.
I didn't know how to feel about that.
We reached the servants' quarters, and Mira pushed me into a small room that smelled like soap and sweat. Laundry was piled in corners. Drying clothes hung from lines strung across the space.
"Change," Mira said, tossing me a rough brown dress. The kind servants wore. The kind nobody looked at twice.
I started to unlace my silk gown, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip the strings.
"Faster," Mira said.
I ripped the dress over my head. Let it fall to the ground like it was nothing. Like it wasn't the same dress I'd worn to breakfast this morning when I was still a princess. When my life was still real.
The servant's dress was scratchy and too big. It hung on me like I was drowning in it.
"Your hair," Mira said, holding up a pair of kitchen shears.
I looked at my reflection in a cracked piece of mirror on the wall. My long dark hair. The hair my mother had spent an hour brushing this morning. The hair that marked me as royal. The hair that made me recognizable.
"Do it," I said.
The first cut was the hardest. The scissors were dull, and the blade caught in my hair, pulling. It hurt. Everything was hurting now.
Mira took over, cutting with purpose, and my hair fell to the floor in dark strands that looked like death. Each cut was a piece of my old life falling away. With every snip, I was becoming someone else.
Someone nobody would know.
When she finished, I barely recognized myself. My face looked sharper without the long hair. Older. Like someone who'd already lived a hard life instead of someone who'd spent nineteen years in a palace getting ready for a wedding that would never happen.
"Better," Mira said. "Now you look like a servant. Now you look invisible."
Invisible. That was the whole point. I needed to be invisible long enough to get out of this palace. After that, I didn't know what came next. There was no after that in my mind yet.
Mira led me back into the corridors, but this time we went deeper into the palace. Toward the kitchens. Toward noise and steam and places where people actually lived instead of performed.
"Grab a knife," Mira said, pushing me into the kitchen.
The head cook was sleeping in the corner. It was late enough that even the kitchens were mostly empty. I grabbed the nearest blade from the rack. It was large and dull, meant for cutting bread. Not a weapon. But it would be something.
It would be better than nothing.
We kept moving. Through the back passages. Through doors I'd never seen before. And then, finally, we were outside.
The night air hit me like a slap. Cold and real and nothing like the controlled air inside the palace. I'd lived my entire life inside stone walls, and now those walls were behind me.
Mira pulled me across the courtyard. Toward the main gate.
Two guards stood there. My stomach dropped.
"Stop," I whispered.
"Keep walking," Mira said. "Don't look up. Don't run. Just walk like you're supposed to be here."
My legs felt like water, but I forced them to move. One step. Then another. We were getting closer to the guards. Closer to being caught. Closer to death because apparently that's what happened to princesses who didn't cooperate with their fathers' plans.
The guards looked bored. They looked tired. They looked like they'd rather be anywhere else.
We passed right by them.
I held my breath. Expected a hand on my shoulder. A shout. A sword drawn.
Nothing happened.
We walked through the gate, and I realized Mira was right. Nobody sees what they don't expect to see. I wasn't a princess anymore. I was a servant girl. A nobody. And nobody cared about nobodies.
The forest started about a mile from the palace gates. Mira and I ran until my lungs felt like they were burning. Until my legs were screaming. Until the palace was just a shape in the darkness behind us.
Finally, we stopped.
"I can't take you any further," Mira said. She handed me a small leather pouch. "There's gold in here. Enough to disappear. Enough to start over somewhere they'll never find you."
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Away from here. Away from your father. He'll want to kill anyone who helped you escape." She looked at me seriously. "He'll want to kill you most of all. He can't have you alive. You know too much now."
"About what?"
"About the truth," Mira said. "About why the Sunblade was really taken. About why your father is willing to sacrifice his own daughter to keep that truth hidden."
She turned to leave.
"Wait," I called out. "Why did my mother send you? Why would she do that if she just let him blame me?"
Mira paused. In the moonlight, I could see something sad in her expression.
"Because even mothers who don't know how to fight back know how to save their children," she said. "She just did it the only way she knew how. By letting him think he'd already won."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the darkness like she'd never been real.
I stood alone in the forest with nothing but a servant's dress, a dull knife, a pouch of gold, and short hair that made me look like a boy trying to be a girl.
I was free.
I was also completely terrified.
The forest was darker than I expected. Bigger. The trees seemed to go on forever in every direction. I'd never been outside the palace walls for more than an hour. I'd never slept outside. I'd never been alone like this.
I started walking because staying still felt worse.
Hours passed. My feet hurt. My throat was dry. I wasn't even sure which direction I was going anymore. Just away. Away from the palace. Away from my father. Away from the life that had tried to destroy me.
Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled.
Or maybe it was just the wind. When you're alone and terrified, every sound becomes a threat.
I found a stream around dawn. Drank water that probably wasn't clean. Collapsed under a tree and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
This was my new life. This was what I'd chosen. Not the palace. Not the convent. Not exile in a silent kingdom where my name couldn't be spoken.
But the forest was dangerous in ways I didn't understand. I had no skills. No training. No idea how to survive more than a few days on my own.
On the third day, hungry and dirty and barely holding on, I smelled smoke.
Campfire smoke.
My first instinct was to hide. To run. To stay away from people because people had tried to kill me.
But my stomach was growling so loudly I could barely think. I hadn't eaten anything real in three days. And I was starting to wonder if dying from starvation was better than whatever came next.
I followed the smell of smoke toward light.
Toward people.
And that's when I heard the voices.
Men's voices. Rough and low and talking about money and jobs and something about retrieving a weapon.
I could have turned back. I should have turned back.
But I was tired of being afraid. I was tired of running.
So I walked toward the fire anyway.
And that's when everything changed.