"Keep your voice down," Aristha hissed, grabbing the sleeve of Gayatri’s mud-stained tunic as the chaotic noise of the refugee camp swelled around them. "We are supposed to be invisible, remember? Not running a charity clinic for the destitute." Gayatri jerked her arm away, her eyes flashing with stubborn defiance as she continued tying a strip of torn linen around a crying child’s bleeding knee. "Someone has to look at them, Aristha, unless you prefer we step right over dying children on our way to save our own skins. Look at her leg—it’s infected." "I am looking at the three bounty hunters twenty paces away who are currently eyeing your horse’s expensive bridle with very sharp, very interested expressions," Aristha retorted, his hand sliding instinctively toward the hilt of his stolen short sword while his bruised ribs screamed in protest. "Let them look," she muttered, standing up and dus

"If those cutthroats take your head, the child’s leg won’t matter because we’ll all be swinging from the same gallows tree," Aristha snapped, his fingers digging uncomfortably hard into her shoulder as he dragged her backward through the squalor of the refugee camp. "Stop pulling me, you absolute coward!" Gayatri hissed, stumbling over a discarded cooking pot that clattered loudly against a stone, drawing immediate, suspicious glares from a cluster of nearby displaced families huddled around a dying fire. "We can take three men. We have a sword—well, you have a sword, and I have a very sharp rock." "A very sharp rock against professional trackers who smell bounty money better than bloodhounds?" Aristha threw a panicked glance over his shoulder. The three heavily armed mercenaries had broken into a fast, purposeful jog, shoving aside canvas flaps and scattering crying infants without a second thought. "Unless your rock

"If you so much as twitch your aristocratic nose or look at the sergeant like you're about to demand his ancestral estate, I am turning around and walking right back into the freezing mountains to let the wolves eat us," Aristha whispered fiercely, his hand clamped hard around the sleeve of his own oversized, mud-stained tunic. He hunched his shoulders forward, exaggerating a miserable, pathetic slouch that made him look half his actual size, while wincing as a sharp twinge of pain shot through his still-healing ribs. Gayatri straightened her spine, adjusting the ragged woolen shawl over her head with an unconscious haughtiness that made Aristha want to scream. "I am perfectly capable of playing the part of a humble, shivering peasant, Aristha. I do not need you treating me like a recalcitrant child every time we are forced to interact with the common folk." "Common folk don't call people 'recalcitrant,' your highness," Aristha hissed under

"If you drop that wooden spear one more time, Gayatri, the local wildlife is going to die of sheer embarrassment before we even manage to find anything worth hunting," Aristha whispered sharply, crouching behind a massive fern frond. He winced as he shifted his weight, his hand instinctively pressing against his bandaged ribs where a dull, persistent ache still lingered from their escape through the frozen foothills. "We are supposed to be foraging for food, not auditioning for a tragic play about incompetent scavengers." Gayatri glared at him through the dense foliage, her face smudged with dirt and her hair pulled back into a messy knot that defied every rule of courtly etiquette she had spent her entire life learning. "If you think your improvised stick with a sharpened stone tied to the end is a masterclass in weaponry, Aristha, you are profoundly delusional. Furthermore, if you tell me to be quiet one more time in that patronizing whisper, I am going to use

"If you expect me to bow to a man whose primary tactical strategy appears to be hiding behind a very large, very smelly pile of rotting cabbages, you are severely misjudging my capacity for insubordination," Aristha muttered under his breath, his eyes darting across the muddy clearing of the rebel encampment. He shifted his weight, wincing as his cracked ribs reminded him of their recent capture. "Keep your voice down, you absolute fool, or our next tactical strategy will be digging our own graves behind those exact cabbages," Gayatri whispered fiercely, her posture rigid as she stood beside him in the center of the camp. Despite her mud-stained tunic and unwashed face, the remnant of her royal bearing flared in the tilt of her chin. "Captain Vane is deciding whether to execute us as spies or put us to work. Do not antagonize him." Captain Vane didn't look up from the rough-hewn wooden table where he was carving a notch into a crude map of t