For a long moment, Lili stood on the stool and simply looked.
The courtyard lay far below, broken into islands of torchlight and shadow. Beyond the walls, the town slept under its blue roofs, streets pale and empty beneath the moon. Farther still, the stone bridge stitched black water to the mainland's dark line of forest. And farther than that—northeast across the cold sea—lay her homeland.
No captain here would carry her back. No ship sailed so far north, save for the one Duke Leo had taken to seize her.
It didn't matter.
This was no longer about going home.
This was about escape.
If she could not return to her people, she would vanish into the woods and build something new—scrape a life out of soil and weather and stubborn will. Just her and her child. No banners. No dukes. No smiling cages.
She glanced back at the door.
Oak thick as a tree trunk. Iron bands dulled by age. The small viewing hatch shut tight. No footsteps beyond it. No murmured guard-talk. The men were where they always were—down the stair, bored and patient, certain she had nowhere to go.
Good.
Let the Albion brutes stand there until their beards went white. Winter would come soon. Ice would take the tower, and climbing it then would be madness. By winter, the child would be born.
It was now or never.
A grin crept onto her face before she could stop it—sharp, foolish, defiant. She pictured Leo's face when he found the room empty. The roaring disbelief. The fury. The way he would fling himself onto that oversized black horse and thunder out to hunt her like a wronged god.
She imagined him shouting her name, swearing the sky itself into service.
And if he caught her?
Would he bargain?
Or would he lock her away deeper than before?
After five months, she still didn't know.
Lili forced herself back to the present and leaned out of the narrow window again.
Vines climbed the tower below—old ones, rope-thick and braided by years of neglect. The stone itself offered seams and proud blocks, the kind a climber learned to read with skin and bone rather than eyes.
Shoes would betray her.
Bare feet would not.
She kicked off the slippers without hesitation, letting them thud softly against the wall below, and went fully barbarian in the matter of her feet.
Palms to stone.
Grit scraped her skin.
She breathed once.
Twice.
"You can do this, Lili," she whispered, voice barely sound. "For the baby's future. My child will not be a pawn in a brutish man's game."
Inside her, warmth pulsed in answer.
Not loud.
Not miraculous.
Just there—steady as a hand on the shoulder.
She moved.
Sliding onto the deep sill, she gathered her skirts high and swung her legs into the night. The opening was barely wide enough. Turning onto her stomach, she reached down with bare fingertips until they found the vine—thick, woody, alive.
She tugged.
It thrummed and held.
Good enough.
Her other hand traced the wall until it found a stone block proud of its neighbors—half a toe's width, maybe less. She set one foot there. Then the other.
Three points of contact.
Always.
She looked down.
The height punched the air out of her chest. The world tilted; the courtyard seemed to rise to meet her. Her stomach dropped, and for a heartbeat she was certain she would freeze right there, clinging to stone like a foolish insect.
It had been a long time since she'd climbed anything so sheer.
The warmth inside her flared again—quiet, patient.
You're not alone, it seemed to say.
Her pulse slowed.
Her lungs remembered their rhythm.
Lili set her jaw and climbed.
Right hand to the vine—yes, it ran all the way down, but she would not trust it with her full weight. The left hand read the stone: shallow seams, finger-width cracks, the faint shadow where mortar had failed. Her feet did the same—seeking nooks for toes, the slight lip where two stones met imperfectly.
A fraction at a time.
Hips in. Belly to stone. Test the next hold. Breathe.
Then down again.
The wind shouldered the tower and slapped at her cloak. She froze instantly, pressed flat until the gust passed, then moved on. Resting meant hugging the wall, letting the burn ease out of her fingers and forearms. Move a hand. Test a foot. Hips in. Breathe. Again.
To an untrained eye her hands were slender, even pretty.
In truth, they were mountain hands—sinew braided for work. The months in the tower had not stolen her strength. Under the plain wool, muscle quivered and held: legs roped by long miles, an abdomen kept firm by quiet drills beside the hearth, back and shoulders taught by years of hauling and climbing. She was rusty at first, yes—and her breasts had swollen with pregnancy, which did nothing for balance—but the body remembers.
Leo had never noticed the milk. His gaze was always elsewhere, his hands eager and thoughtless on her backside most of all. Her body remembered those touches too—the ship's narrow cabin, the way he had taken her when they first met and ever since. Now he would have to do without her. Whether she had ever climbed a tower hardly mattered.
Stone is stone.
She would climb this tower no matter what.
She froze—cheek and chest pressed to the cold wall, breath shallow in her ribs—as a guard passed below with a torch. Firelight washed up the curve of the keep and briefly limned her shape against the stone, then slid away as the man yawned and kept walking. Who would think to look up—to the inner face of the tower—for a small woman climbing by night?
When darkness folded back, she slid another handspan down the vine, found the next proud edge of ashlar, and eased her weight onto it. The tower's curve moved under her palms like a slow-turning planet.
The coastal wind worried at her cloak, but she did not falter.
In the yard below, wagon axles groaned as they took on weight. Men worked and complained—backs sore, coin too thin for this hour. Laughter—low and tired—bubbled up anyway. A drowsing sentry startled when the haft of his spear clonked against his helm; his mates jeered and told him to fetch ale before he toppled off the wall.
Lili glanced down and sneered despite herself.
The guards wore iron from crown to calf: kettle helms and nasal helms; mail and splint; pauldrons, vambraces, gauntlets; cuisses and greaves. Only the joints below the waist showed small, grudging gaps. Spearheads gleamed in lantern light; swords slept at their hips in leather sheaths; shields hung from backs or rested on forearms—blue-painted, lion-headed, matching the tabards.
The sight always stung.
In her homeland, a single necklace of bright metal was a treasure. Here, men walked around in it like moving fortresses. When Albion ships had grounded on her people's shore, skill and courage had meant little; points and edges had skittered off this metal skin. She was glad—still—that she had stepped between them before worse happened.
Warmth flowed from her belly into her limbs.
The little sun inside her did its quiet work—easing the burn from her forearms, unknotting the ache in finger and calf. Where she had expected strength to run out halfway down, it steadied instead. Focus came too, like the click of a lens finding sharp.
Gratitude lifted into her throat.
Whatever this child was—hers, yes, and his by blood but not by claim—she would keep the baby far from that man's shadow.
She climbed, and her thoughts walked north.
She pictured home as the wind salted her lips: high plateaus and broken ridges; fjords biting deep into stone; valleys where reindeer threaded the snow like quiet rivers. The land of the midnight sun—where winter skies sometimes danced even at night. Harsh and golden, quiet and alive. Albion's fat fields and easy hills could not match it.
Bells from the town below sometimes pulled her backward into memory: the soft clack of antlers at dusk, the hush of hooves in powder snow. She felt the old tug to see her herd again, to bury fingers in warm winter coats. She saw herself crawling belly-down along a ledge to free a doe wedged in panic, singing nonsense until the small body stilled, trusted, and moved.
Life had been simple then.
Her fingers numbed—then tingled back alive. The farther she went, the thicker the vines grew, heavy with late-summer blooms. She tested them and felt—oddly—that they answered. Under her grip the stems tightened like flexing muscle, rough bark biting her skin, holding her weight cleanly.
Trust rose from somewhere below thought.
She committed: both hands to living rope, feet searching stone.
The plant did not fail her.
Voices gathered at the wagons. The rhythm of loading found its beat: thud, drag, creak, mutter. A sleepy driver barked a laugh at something short and rude. In the gatehouse the captain cleared his throat—the bored sound of a man who expected dawn to be as dull as midnight.
None of them suspected anything beyond the usual.
I'm going to make it, she realized, and hope filled her like wine.
Faces rose inside that strength: her mother; her father; three brothers, two sisters; a ring of cousins; and the wider circle around the central fire—hair like straw in winter sun, eyes the glacier left behind: violet, bright, unmistakable. Her people. The place her child must see.
"Don't worry," she breathed into the stone, no louder than wind. "Father, I'm coming. Brothers, sisters—wait for me. Nothing holds me. I am Lili, and the blood of the North runs strong. I'll find my way back."
A pulse answered from the small sun—comfort, resolve, a promise made of light. She took it and let it steel her hands.
Down a hand.
Down a foot.
Hips in.
Breathe.
The tower's great belly curved on; the yard swam a handspan nearer. Somewhere a gull cried in its sleep. The sea turned a page below the bridge.
She did not look down again.
She did not stop.
At last, her feet found earth—cool grass giving under her toes—just as the wagons jolted and drivers called out to get moving. The inner gate groaned; chains rattled. Two guards stood at the postern inside the arch, watching the wagons' backs and the widening black mouth of the gate.
Lili crouched in shadow, cloak drawn close, heart hammering once—then steady.
She was off the tower.
Free—if only for the next few breaths.
And that was enough to keep going.
Thinking fast, Lili kept low and let the shrubs along the yard wall swallow her. Her palm closed around a pebble. She flicked it with a snap of her fingers; it rang off a helmet with a bright cling.
"Oi—" the first guard snapped, turning on the second across the arch. The other—who'd heard it too but hadn't seen it thrown—scowled back as if accused. A heartbeat of hostility hung between them. Then the second guard stooped, picked up the pebble, and tinked it off his mate's brow-plate in petty retaliation.
"You—!"
Hands rose. Shoulders squared. For a ridiculous second they looked ready to swing.
Lili slid like water into the shadow behind the rearmost wagon, caught the tailboard, and rolled into the bed. The load was light—mostly empty sacks and broken crate-lids; her own weight added nothing that the axle noticed. She wormed under the burlap, flattened herself, and went still.
The teamsters clucked their tongues. Traces tightened. Wheels lurched.
The wagon-line creaked forward.
Only then did Lili realize she'd been holding her breath too long. Breathe, girl, she told herself, and sipped air slowly through her nose. Her mind—traitorous and eager—ran every way this could go wrong: a spear prodding the sacks; a driver deciding to jump in back; a dog catching her scent; Leo himself riding out of the gate like a storm.
Truth was, she'd never fought anyone. Not really. Only stubborn reindeer that needed a song and a stern talking-to. The idea of striking a man like Leo—big as a bear and wrapped in iron—was laughable and frightening. She'd break her hand on him before he felt it.
But the guards said nothing.
No spear jabbed.
No dog barked.
The wagons rattled beneath the portcullis, under the murder-holes, through the second arch, and out into the cobbled lane. The castle fell behind them with a sound like a door closing on a bad dream.
They rolled down the short hill beyond the walls. The town thinned—first to workshops and sheds, then to paddocks and dark yards. At a crossroads the road forked: back toward the keep; off toward the port with its smells of tar and fish; and straight ahead, long and flat, toward the bridge that stitched water to mainland forest.
Lili felt the bridge before she saw it—a faint glow pinned to the dark, torchlight hovering like a necklace far ahead. A few kilometers, maybe more. Too open. Too watched.
She lay under the sacks and scarcely dared to believe it.
I did it.
She pressed a hand to her belly. The little warmth inside her had gone quiet—resting, perhaps, after its work.
"Thank you, little one," she whispered. "From here, Mamma will handle the rest."
The wagons slowed for the turn at the crossroads. Leather creaked. Axles groaned. A driver spat and cursed the hour. That was her moment.
She rolled to the sideboard, slipped over the tail, and dropped to the road with a soft thup. In two heartbeats she was in the drainage ditch, pressed flat among reeds while wheels clattered past. The lantern bobbing at the wagon's rear dwindled, then vanished.
Night exhaled.
Lili rose and listened. No shout. No alarm. No galloping horse. The castle road lay quiet behind her.
Ahead, the straight road ran pale under the moon toward the bridge, its torches small but steady in the distance. To her left, fields spread wide and dark—wheat and rye laid in long stripes of furrow, rich black earth breathing up the day's warmth. Hedges stitched the land together, thick and friendly to anyone who knew how to move through them.
The road was watched.
The fields were not.
Barefoot, light on the edges of her feet, she slipped into the hedgerow and let the road go. Thorns caught her cloak and released it. Stalks brushed her calves. Somewhere close, a field-mouse skittered and went still.
She paused, crouched, and looked again at the bridge—still distant, still guarded. Not yet, she decided. Patience now would buy her freedom later.
She gathered her cloak, tied it high at the waist so it wouldn't drag, checked the knife at her belt, and breathed the night like a promise.
Then she turned her back on the road and began moving through the fields, keeping low, keeping quiet, letting the darkness teach her the way forward.