Chapter 9 What The Forest Took

• The guards marched Aria deep into the trees, past the point where moonlight reached the ground in anything but broken silver pieces scattered across the leaf litter, their torches guttering low, their voices going quiet and uneasy the deeper they went, none of them relishing the task they'd been given even as they carried it out. It was there, in the space of a single distracted breath while one guard argued with another in a harsh whisper about who should strike the first blow, neither of them wanting the weight of it on his own hands that Aria ran.
• She ran the way something wild runs, without thought, without a plan beyond the next tree and then the next, branches whipping across her face and arms, roots catching at her feet, until her lungs burned raw and she finally collapsed, shaking, in a hollow beneath an old fallen log, pressing herself as small and as still as she could make her body go, certain each footstep she heard afterward, real or imagined, belonged to the men sent to finish what they'd started, certain that every rustle of leaf and snap of branch meant the end had finally caught up to her.
• It hadn't, not that night. The guards, furious and terrified of what the King would do if he learned they had lost her in the dark, crashed through the underbrush calling her name in low, urgent voices for nearly an hour before giving it up as a lost cause, and returned to the pack house instead and reported, flatly, faces carefully blank, that the sentence had been carried out. No one thought to question them, too raw with grief and shame to want the details. No one wanted to.