I stayed outside Grandmother’s tent as the stars and moonlight started to get taken over by the goddess’s unnatural darkness. The others shuffled around inside as they prepared to sleep during the morning, like we had during the Heartsong festival. Not that the exhaustion from staying awake for the past night and day would have let us stay awake much longer even if the cold didn’t sap the strength of the most energetic people.

I yawned and took a moment to wonder at the dark dawn happening before my eyes. Seeing the goddess’s power had always been an odd comfort; no matter how she had tried to control me the goddess’s feats were a reminder that no one, especially not a healer, could control everything. That, inevitably, someday I would be beyond her grasp.

Then I pulled out the small pouch Fellen had given me though I didn’t open it right away. First, Rawley with the special pouch and poison making, and now this. How was I supposed to respond? With Rawley it had been simple because we both knew there was no way for me to refuse—not with what she was offering me and the justification that the training could help me once I reaching the Seedling Palace. But from what I could tell, what Fellen had given me was simply a gift. Nothing more and nothing less. An unintentional trap all of its own.

I could accept it and let her dig her roots a little deeper into me days before we parted ways for good. A debt that would hang over me in the years that followed with no way to answer it as I had nothing to give her in return. A tie that might us bind closer and encourage her on her foolish mission to become a Realmwalker. I might have become resigned to that idea before, but there was no way I wanted to encourage her to march towards her death.

Or I could refuse it. Use whatever was inside as the lever to break her from me. Knowingly or not, she had offered up the opportunity by not letting me open the pouch earlier when I wouldn’t have had time to plan. I knew what would hurt her—she had said it often enough. All it would take would be doing something drastic enough that she would have to respond to it rather then focusing on my sudden change in attitude. Of course, twisting the past couldn’t hurt as well.

If I was convincing enough Fellen wouldn’t have an reason to take on another of the goddess’s trials. She might hate and curse me, but she would be safe with the tribe where she could find other rivals, other..friends. It would hurt, cutting her from me, but that could be a price I was willing to pay if it meant I didn’t have to hear about some girl killed in one of the goddess’s trials from a rumor after years of fear and worry down the line.

I couldn’t let her throw her life away chasing after me, not when there was something I could do. Not when I wasn’t worth chasing.

It would be better.

It had to be better.

The only question was: could I be convincing enough?

I looked inside and my throat tightened while my eyes started to burn, though no tears fell. A hair cord tightly woven out of wool was carefully coiled inside the bag. Each end of the cord had felted shaded pod crawler leaves that hung in graduated sections of varying sizes and colors. In the moonlight they looked white and gray, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those were the actual colors. I didn’t doubt that it was meant to replace the beads I had thrown away soon after our first fight.

And it was wonderfully, terribly perfect.

I stared at it for a long moment before pulling my braid over my shoulder and replacing the cord that held it together with Fellen’s gift. Her cord looked so fragile there; like a strong breeze might pull some of the leaves free. I could picture her working on it for hours, doing her best to make each leaf identical in shape, but making some small error here or there and not having the time or material to fix every mistake. Her mother would have fussed and been difficult about giving her more wool to work with.

For another brief moment, I let myself picture walking through a dark hallway at the Seedling Palace wearing it, bolstered by a distant friend’s quiet support. Then the daydream transformed into the horror of clutching the cord while Fellen’s body burned in a pyre.

We had barely made it out before—I would have been dead without my mark. I couldn’t let her take those inane odds again, much less three more times.

Grandmother’s tent entrance rustled and I turned to look as Old Lily stepped through. She glanced up at the changing sky before smiling patiently at me. “Inspiring, isn’t it?”

I nodded, doing my best to pretend that something like panic and resolve weren’t spiraling sickly in my gut. Still, her eyes narrowed and my stomach lurched before she spoke, “That’s a beautiful cord. A parting gift?”

I forced a small smile and lightly touched the cord. “Yes. From a friend.”

Old Lily softened as she nodded. “I see. I put your bedroll closest to the entrance on the right. Will you come sleep soon, child?”

I echoed her. “Soon.”

It was her turn to nod before she disappeared back into the tent. I took in the sight of the cord hanging from my hair a few minutes longer as I waited for Old Lily to fall asleep. Then I walked away from the tent until I thought I wouldn’t wake her or Grandmother with a scraping sound. I pulled my eating knife free along with my small sharpening stone and set to work making the knife’s edge as sharp as I could. Once that was finished all that was left to do was to carefully untie Fellen’s gift from my hair and replace it with my plain leather cord before cutting one of the knuckle sized leaves from the cord. It parted easily. I tucked the felted leaf into the poisoner’s pouch Rawley had given me and then coiled the cord back into the pouch it had been gifted in. Once that was secured away in another pouch on my belt I returned to the tent.

I was thankful when the exhaustion pulled me under the fog of sleep rather than lay awake gritty eyed and guilty over something I had yet to do.

- -

I couldn’t spring my plan right away though sometimes impulse tempted it. I needed a time when we would be alone without Rawley or Grandmother or anyone else to interrupt us. Time for me to hammer home what I wanted her to think. Unfortunately, the Dark Night celebrations had a tendency to be all or nothing, everyone together or everyone separated, and it wasn’t acceptable in the downtime in between to scamper off to meet with friends. You were supposed to be focused on the goddess.

So the second day’s hour of contemplation mostly passed in a blur of prepping and revising what I was going to say and how I was going to say it before that time blurred into the whisper women recounting why the second day was a day of fasting as well as more myths. They had gathered everyone together in a group and had loosely encircled us so that they could speak from all sides. For once, I could hardly pay attention though I did notice Fellen’s disappointment when she glanced at my hair and saw that her cord wasn’t there.

The Grandmothers’ history lessons and myths took us until the evening when the stars and moon started to appear again. That’s when we were finally sent out to collect fallen branches and wood from bushes as a symbolic nod to the past when the goddess first allowed our ancestors to use the resources from her land. It would all be gathered together for a large bonfire, the only we would waste resources on during the cold season, and more wood would be added the next evening, but it wouldn’t be lit until the last day.

But while everyone was sent out to collect fuel for the fire, you didn’t have to keep separate from everyone else. Most people joined up in small family or friend groups to search different areas of the mountains. Fellen and I were part of our usual group with the huntresses. They decided to search at the back of the valley, above the greater waterfall. The forest was thick there, but also time consuming to get to so most left it alone. However, Crest knew a shortcut, so what could have taken half the night to get to after we crossed the valley instead took around two or three hours up a steep and narrow trail. It felt like I was climbing tree roots more of the time than actual hiking up a path.

Once we reached our destination we took several minutes to marvel at the waterfall that gushed out of the cliff below us and was slowly freezing over. The river and lakes were also on their way to becoming completely frozen, though the herders worked together to break up the ice on the shallow lake so that the herds could still drink.

Then everyone spread out to gather the various windblown, broken branches and twigs scattered across the ground and in the trees. I stayed close to Fellen and kept quiet until we had slowly worked our way out of the eyesight of the group and away from the waterfall. I thought that the noise of the water would keep them from easily overhearing us, but I also didn’t want to have to shout over it.

“I saw your gift.”

Fellen stilled where she was crouched a handful of feet away, trying to pull a stubborn branch from the snow.

I continued before she had the chance to say anything, “I would have thought that with all that time you spent with your mother you would have done better work.” Bile churned in my stomach as I tried to casually toss out the harsh words and I saw her tense. If she had been anyone else it would have been so easy. But she wasn’t and that was why I had to keep going--I had to protect her. “You really thought the best way to get me to remember you was a bit of string and rags?”

She turned towards me, face wet and blotchy with angry tears, hands curled into fists. “Take that back.”

I continued on as if I hadn’t heard her. “Not that I would remember you. Like you said, how can you compete with someone who’s going to become a whisper woman? What stupid reason could I have to keep pretending to be rivals with someone slow and clingy like you then?”

“You’re lying,” she hissed.

I forced myself to smirk. “Am I? Or are those little tells I let you see just another game I used to pass the time?”

Fellen settled into her stubborn side. “I know better than that. We survived Flickermark together.”

“More like I kept you from dying.”

She was seething now. “Stop lying.”

I pulled out the beautiful hair cord she had made and dangled it from my fingers like it was a worm before I also pulled my eating knife free. I saw her put together what I was about to do as she kept glancing from the knife to the cord, the cord to the knife.

“Gimley! Don’t! Please.”

The awful sound of her pleading desperation nearly undid me; I hadn’t ever wanted to witness her brought so low—and yet I was one to do it. In a cruel way, it made sense. Like we had come full circle from when she first turned her back on me and I poisoned her food, only I was the instigator this time.

The knowledge of the leaf I had cut preemptively, safe and sound in the poisoner’s pouch, was what allowed me to keep going. I started with the leaves on one end, dismissive and contemptuous. “Why should I care what you want? This handful of rags is nothing and you’re nothing.” I finished with the leaves and started cutting the cord into useless bits. “I’m going to leave and become one of the goddess’s chosen and you’ll just be a little girl with nothing you’ve earned for yourself and idiotic dreams of grandeur.”

Fellen stared at all the little pieces of her hard work littering the snow. Her voice was a whisper, “You destroyed it.”

I was committed to the act at this point. “What else should I have done with trash?”

She took a couple stumbling steps forward and picked up a felt leaf that had fluttered towards her after I cut it. “You destroyed it.”

“Exactly. So maybe you should stay with the tribe rather than chasing after someone who doesn’t want you.”

The hazy shock went out of her expression then and she glared up at me. I couldn’t help but flinch back—there was disappointment mixed in with her rigid, hot fury.

Her voice grew as she advanced on me. “How dare you. You pride-blinded, self-important fool! This about me becoming a Realmwalker again, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

I couldn’t form an answer. She might have been two years younger and slightly shorter than me but her anger was a thing to behold. Fellen didn’t shove me like I thought she would, instead she got up in my face and made it so I had no choice but to meet her eyes or shrink back.

I refused to shrink back. But that was as far as I got. In my plans she ran away crying, perhaps after a bit of angry blustering—she didn’t confront me and take over the conversation.

She raged on, “Not everything is about you! Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, I also wanted to face the trials for myself? To prove that I could? Sure, I might have stupidly also wanted to keep being worthy of being your friend, but did you ever even consider that might not be the whole of it?”

“I—”

“Did you ever even consider that I could do something like that myself?”

And, again, I couldn’t answer, but she saw the doubt on my face all the same. Fellen quieted again, and I felt the distance yawn between us. I should have been happy, it was what I had wanted, but instead my heart was as shredded as her gift.

She drew back and her stance, her expression—everything expressed a mess of broken trust. “You never understood. I knew you were worried but…I thought—I can’t believe you think I have to protected and coddled! After everything!” Fellen huffed out a breath. “I guess I was the foolish one for thinking you could ever think well of anyone but yourself.” She glanced up at the lock of hair my healer’s beads had hung from and the moment stretched before she moved on from making the connection and insult we both knew she could have made. “Well, guess what? I’m still going.”

Fellen knocked her shoulder into mine as she pushed past. I stayed standing purely on reflex; everything felt hollow and distant like it had after I had been rejected the second time in the ravines. I heard her stop a few feet behind me, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn around.

She sighed and then spoke one last time, thick with sadness, “Be better.”