not yet titled
an excerpt

I

Before she had to make due with what was at hand, she had crossed this path often, picking wildflowers and berries as if the motherly smile she received in return were sustenance enough. Now, it was only the faint traces of childish steps in her memory that guided her. Though much of the night remained, there was no time for falling. With the old moon dying, the certainty of what was behind her had to be light enough to see by. By morning, half the town would be gone, the other half left to explain. She tried to feel some pity, but deep within her welled up a cool wrath over the collaborators. Her anger burned hotter at herself and those like her, those who simply failed to notice the new administrators.

Now they paid, running like thieves in the night, each his separate way. Some went to relatives, others to hide in the countryside, and a few to seek out the disparate bands which warred upon the government in secret, or so she thought. No one had discussed their plans. On her father’s advice, they had kept their plans secret from each other in case of capture. She did not even know where her parents were going, only that they had set out in different directions, dividing her brothers and sisters among them. If they had begun their journeys like she had, they had taken a long road around to go by another route to an unknown place.

When the old king built the roads when her parents were still children, they were so grand that every journey had to follow them by popular custom. Where before, the townsfolk knew the land and what lay beyond better then they knew their own tools, as her mother had told her, now they followed maps showing roads and cities, and could find nothing without them. If they survived the times, they would have to scour the wildlands looking for each other, and she would not know where to begin. She had not cried a single tear when they left, but as she wandered deeper into the woods blinked increasingly often, clearing away the pooled tears and imagining herself less aggrieved than she felt.

She realised she had stopped and, rather than looking ahead of her, had turned her head to the almost full-waned moon above; it, too, would leave soon. Lowering her gaze to the dark woods, she was less certain than ever of what to do. She had directed battles and saved the kingdom countless times in these very woods as a girl, but the dark tangle of branches before her loomed more menacingly than any of the foes of lore she had imagined then.