We rode north for two days, and somewhere on the second day, I stopped being the girl who had been rejected in a clearing.
I did not decide it. It simply happened, the way the season turns without announcing itself. One morning I woke in the camp with the ring on my hand and Kael's warriors moving quietly around the fire, and I realized I had not thought about Damon since the clearing where Selene had wept. Not once. The wound that had run through the center of me for nine days, the one I had walked into the Blackwood to escape, had closed sometime in the night without my noticing.
Kael noticed before I said anything. He always noticed.
"You are lighter today," he said, riding up beside me as the road climbed toward the northern hills. "Something has left you."
"Damon has left me," I s
