Ella POV
Anger was more useful than fear.
She had figured that out about twenty minutes into the forest, when fear had started making her legs slow and her breathing stupid, and she had switched to anger like changing a shoe and found it fit much better. Anger kept her moving. Anger had a direction. Fear just sat in your chest and made everything heavier.
She was furious, therefore. Magnificently, deliberately furious.
At her father. At the elders with their neatly prepared papers. At the guards who wouldn't meet her eyes. At Seraphine, who had led them all down and then looked away, and at herself a little bit for still feeling the shape of that like a bruise when she pressed it.
In the forest, currently, for being so aggressively alive.
Everything here grew. Thick and green and relentless, crowding the path on both sides, roots breaking through the soil underfoot, vines hanging from branches in long curtains she had to push through. She kept her hands pulled into her sleeves as far as they would go and tried not to brush anything. The dark veins had settled some since the oak was not gone, never gone, but slower. A walking pace instead of a sprint.
She was choosing to take that as good news.
She made a list. It helped.
She had always made lists when things went sideways, not on paper, in her head, things laid out in order so she could see them clearly, instead of feeling them all at once in a pile.
Current situation: one exiled elf princess, nineteen years old, no shelter, no food beyond what she could forage if she dared touch anything, no weapons, no map, no allies, three copper coins that wouldn't buy her passage out of the borderlands, and a canteen that was already less than half full.
Plus the curse. Obviously. The curse that had killed a five-hundred-year-old oak tree from four feet away while she was just standing there.
Plus forty-eight hours. Maybe less. She wasn't sure of the timeline exactly; she'd heard the guards arguing about it through the door, two of them debating whether it was forty-eight or thirty-six, and she had pressed herself against the stone and listened and tried to breathe normally.
Forty-eight hours was the generous version.
She was working with the generous version because the alternative was to lie down on a forest path, and that was not happening.
The list continued: no one in the border forest was going to help her. The Wizard Guild patrolled the northern edge, and they hated cursed things on principle. The Elf Tribe's hunting range covered the south. Everything in between was swamp and old magic and things with teeth, which she knew because her tutors had covered the border territories extensively in the context of do not ever go there.
So. Fine. That was the situation. It was a terrible situation. She was aware.
She walked faster.
She found the tree about an hour in.
It was enormous. Old-growth oak, the kind that had branches starting twenty feet up with the girth of a small room, the kind of tree that had weathered so much it had practically become part of the landscape. She stopped at its base, craned her neck, and thought: if I can get up there, I can see over the canopy. Scout the terrain. Find water, a structure, or anything that is not just more forest.
She also thought: I have never actually climbed a tree in my life.
She had climbed a great many things. Palace walls, gate scaffolding, and the library roof once on a bet with Seraphine. But trees specifically, no. She'd always grown things, tended them, coaxed them into blooming at the wrong season for fun. She had not climbed them.
How different could it be?
She caught the lowest branch, hauled herself up, and immediately got bark in her face. She spit it out. Climbed higher. The branches were close enough together to make a rough ladder if she was careful, and she was careful, keeping her sleeves down, breathing through her nose, not looking at the ground.
Ten feet. Fifteen. Better. She could see gaps in the canopy from here.
Twenty feet. The branch she was standing on creaked, and she went still, and then it held, and she kept going.
Twenty-five feet, and the forest opened up slightly to her left, and she could see the lay of the land, a ridge line to the east, which meant higher ground, which meant drier ground. Possibly a stream on the other side. Possibly sheltered in the rock formations, she could just make out through the trees.
Possibly. She would take it, possibly.
She shifted her weight to get a better angle, and the dark veins moved.
Not a surge. Not like the oak. Something worse, a slow, rolling wave that started at her wrist and moved up her forearm like a tide coming in, and behind it came the dizziness.
It hit so fast she grabbed the branch with both hands and pressed herself flat against the trunk. The forest tilted. Her vision went grey at the edges and then brightened weirdly, too bright, colors wrong, and she thought very clearly: this is the curse accelerating.
Not a spike. An acceleration. A shift in pace. Like something that had been walking breaking into a run.
She tightened her grip. Both hands, fingers locked around the branch, every bit of strength she had focused on one simple task: do not fall, do not fall, do not fall.
The dizziness peaked.
Her hands went numb.
She hadn't planned for that. She had planned for pain, for surges, for the veins and the cold and the way the bark was probably dying where her palms touched it. She had not planned for her hands to simply stop. Like the message between her brain and her fingers got lost somewhere in the dark veins between them.
Her fingers opened.
She had time for one very clear thought as her body left the branch.
There is something below me.
Not ground. Worse than ground. She registered it in the split second before the fall took over a glow, orange and flickering, visible through the branches beneath her. The smell of wood smoke. The shape of a small camp.
A fire.
She hit it.