They rode hard through the remainder of that day and long into the night, pushing their horses to the edge of exhaustion in pursuit of a head start that felt, with every passing hour, increasingly impossible to close.
The forest blurred past in exhausted, aching fragments — trees and shadow and the relentless pounding of hooves against packed earth, Wren's entire body screaming with a bone-deep fatigue she'd never experienced before this journey began. She'd learned, over the past weeks, that fear could be endured, that danger could be faced with something resembling courage. What she hadn't fully appreciated until this exact stretch of desperate riding was how simple physical exhaustion could wear down even the fiercest resolve, until every mile felt like a small, private battle against
