By Alexandria McElhone

Rain tapped lightly against the canvas, and Hazel watched droplets gather and slide down the outside of the tent. The camp lay hushed, save for the muted movements of the first early risers. Soon they would be on the road again, following the war host to wherever it marched next.

Cathval slept beside her, his arm draped securely around her shoulders. She studied him for a long moment before resting her head against his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall, listening to the rhythm of his heart. A fragile pocket of calm. A borrowed sense of safety before she left.

She hoped he would understand.

But Hazel’s mind was not in that tent. It was not travelling with her friends and kin, nor with the war host. It was across the sea, on the small island off Bronagh, watching over the Sunstones. It had been there ever since she had read the war report from Manx.

She had been alone in the command tent, poring over maps and quietly questioning her place in this fractured world, when her eye caught a single word in the report. “Sunstones.”

For a heartbeat, she was certain her heart had stopped altogether. Still, she forced herself to read. They had entered the Sunstones unseen. They had completed two rituals before being discovered.

Though she sat alone, the world around her seemed suddenly deafening.

She could see them as clearly as if she stood there now; the stones rising across the bay, solemn and ageless as the sun climbed behind them. She imagined herself at her front door, her daughters inside, and in the distance the Sunstones standing watch over them. One of the few constants in her life, in her children’s lives.

To think that the war had crept so close to her threshold, to her children’s beds, made her stomach turn.

In that instant, she resolved to go home. She needed to bring her daughters away from the island. The baggage train, harsh and uncertain as it was, had become the only place she trusted to keep them safe. Safe enough for them and for the other children who had found shelter within her walls. The ones who had already known the sting of war and the hollow ache of losing kin. At least they would be close; she could protect them herself if needed.

It had been a foolish hope, perhaps, but Hazel had once believed the island could remain untouched. A sanctuary for the displaced and the wounded, a place where grief might soften, and fear might loosen its grip.

Reading that the Sunstones had felt the enemy’s presence and that the invaders had succeeded in whatever dark purpose had drawn them there, shattered the last of Hazel’s innocence.

She would wait a little longer beneath the blankets, wrapped in arms she was coming to rely on. Then she would wake him and tell him her plan. All being well, she would meet him and the others again in Cymrja.