The forest didn't care that he was dying.
It kept breathing anyway — slow wind through heavy branches, the distant call of something nocturnal, leaves shifting in patterns that had nothing to do with the man stumbling beneath them.
Elya knew something was wrong approximately four minutes after leaving Zaziel bleeding in the leaves.
He'd attributed the heaviness in his legs to the fight. The shallow quality of his breathing to the rib wound. The cold creeping up his sword arm to exertion.
The poison announced itself quietly.
Elya kept walking.
Behind him, Nana struggled to match his pace through the undergrowth, wedding dress torn to the knee, silk slippers already ruined. She hadn't complained. He'd give her that much.
"Your ankle," she said. "The wound is discolored."
"Keep moving."
"Discoloration around a serrated wound means—"
"I know what it means."
Silence.
Then: "So you know you're poisoned."
"Drop it."
"I'm just—"
"I said drop it, Princess."
She dropped it.
He could feel her watching him anyway. Measuring him the way she probably measured everything — quietly, from a distance, storing information she thought might be useful later. Ashveil's daughter. Trained to observe even if she'd never been trained to fight.
He didn't care what she observed.
He just needed to stay upright long enough to put more distance between them and the palace.
Three more kilometers. Maybe four.
He made it one and a half.
It wasn't dramatic.
No warning. No stumble he could correct.
His legs simply stopped working, and the ground came up fast, and the last thing he registered before darkness was the undignified reality of collapsing face-forward into dead leaves.
Puma was at his side instantly, urgent sounds rising in its throat.
Nana stood over him.
She looked at the unconscious figure at her feet. Then at the forest around her. Then back at him.
Run.
The thought was immediate and sensible and she was already calculating it — she knew roughly which direction the nearest road lay. She had no shoes for serious terrain but she had two working legs and a head start and he was currently face down in the dirt.
Her father would send search parties. She just had to survive long enough to find one.
Run. This is the only moment you'll get.
She stood there.
Elya's breathing was shallow, labored. His face, turned sideways against the leaves, looked grey in the forest light. Puma pressed against his cheek and made a sound so human it made her chest hurt.
She thought about what she'd seen in that grand hall — twelve soldiers frozen in a heartbeat. A man who walked between bullets like they were inconvenient.
She thought about the chain marks on his ankle. The old scars on his hands. The way he'd said I've been poisoned before — except he hadn't said it yet because that was later, she was getting ahead of herself—
Stop. Think.
If she ran and he died here, she would never know why he came for her specifically. Never know what debt he'd spoken of to her father. Never understand what the frost letters meant or who the Ghost actually was beneath the cold and the silence.
And Puma was still making that sound.
Nana exhaled slowly through her nose.
"I'm going to regret this," she told no one in particular.
She grabbed his arm and started pulling.
He was heavier than he looked.
She dragged him thirty meters before she found a position where she could get his arm over her shoulder and redistribute the weight. It still nearly buckled her knees. She moved anyway — slow, graceless, stopping every few minutes to breathe and check their back trail.
Puma disappeared and reappeared at intervals, scouting ahead, returning to confirm direction. She chose to take that as guidance rather than think too hard about what it meant that the creature seemed to be helping her.
The cave was luck, mostly — a limestone hollow she nearly walked past before Puma planted itself in front of the hanging moss and refused to move.
She got him inside. Got him down.
Sat back and looked at the ceiling until her arms stopped shaking.
Then she worked.
The wedding dress gave her bandaging material. Her flask gave her water. Her education — the physician who'd called her curiosity unusual for a girl of your station while answering every question anyway — gave her the rest.
Blackroot variant. She was certain within minutes. Slow paralytic, not lethal, but punishing if the body had already been pushed past its limits. Which his had been, visibly, for at least a kilometer before the collapse.
Stubborn, she thought, binding his ribs with strips of white silk. Catastrophically stubborn.
She found the older scars while working. Couldn't help it — they were everywhere, layered over each other like a history written in damage. Her hands slowed.
No physician had treated most of these. The angles were wrong, the healing uneven. Someone had closed wounds alone, in the dark, without proper materials.
Many times. Over many years.
She finished her work and didn't say anything because there was no one to say anything to.
In the deep part of the night, he said a name.
Linda.
Nana filed it away and watched the cave entrance turn slowly from black to grey.
He woke like a weapon being drawn.
Still. Then suddenly present, eyes open, finding her in the same motion.
She was sitting near the entrance, knees pulled up. She met his gaze and waited.
"You stayed." Flat. Not gratitude — just observation.
"Yes."
He sat up. Jaw tight. Said nothing about the pain that cost him.
"The ribs are bound," she said. "Ankle too. Blackroot variant — you need a few more hours before—"
"How long was I out?"
"Seven hours approximately."
He looked at her with an expression that gave away nothing. Then he looked at his bandaging. At the torn remnants of her dress.
"You should have run," he said.
"Probably."
"Why didn't you?"
"Does it matter?"
"To me? No."
She absorbed that.
"Right," she said evenly. "You're welcome, by the way."
"I didn't ask for your help."
"You were unconscious. Asking wasn't available to you."
"Then it wasn't help." He was already testing his weight on the ankle, expression closed off. "It was a decision you made for your own reasons. Don't expect acknowledgment for it."
Nana looked at him for a long moment.
"You are," she said carefully, "genuinely unpleasant."
"Yes."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know."
He stood. Unsteady for just a moment — one hand against the cave wall — then stable. He checked his Spada. Checked Puma. Checked the cave entrance.
Did not look at her.
"We move in an hour," he said. "Rest if you want it."
"And if I don't want to move in an hour?"
"Then I'll carry you."
She stared at his back.
Same as before, she realized. Completely the same. Like none of it happened.
She pulled her knees up and watched him and thought about the name he'd said in the dark — Linda — and the scars that no physician had touched, and the fact that he'd nearly killed himself walking on a poisoned leg rather than admit weakness to her for thirty seconds.
Whoever you are, Ghost, she thought.
Something made you this way.
She wasn't sure yet whether that made her feel sorry for him.
She was fairly certain he'd hate it if she did.