She shifted lazily under her blanket of furs, groggily becoming aware of the thin rays of daylight filtering in through the boughs of her shelter. Eyelids lifted open, and she spent a few moments in silence, watching specks of dust float in and out of the bands of light that were hitting her face. She reached out a gloved hand from her warm cocoon and swiped at the flecks, watching as the current stirred them in new ways. Clouds of her breath, visible in the cold morning sun mingled with the light and she knew it was time to get up.

She sat up, resting her hands on the ground beneath her, feeling the pine needles and cold soil between her fingers. The irony of the situation was not lost on her; if things had gone the way they were meant to, she would have felt a feather bed and silk sheets rather than hard, cold earth. She would have had a warm body sleeping next to her, and a hot breakfast awaiting her.

The only thing that awaited her was the long bow leaning against the stump of the tree she had taken shelter under. Breakfast was not served to the Queen of Albion anymore.

Birds sang their songs and the trickle of a not so distant stream mingled with the slow dripping pitter-patter of melting snow leaving the outstretched and frozen limbs of the forest around her. She set about rolling up her furs, and preparing herself to hunt down breakfast. She gave the string of her bow a quick once-over, and thumbed the point of one of the iron tipped arrow heads she had bartered from the Dwellers of Mistpeak, checking its sharpness.

In the age of industry, a long bow was a seemingly archaic and inefficient choice for a weapon to be sure. But having abandoned her throne and breaking her word to Reaver, current circumstances called for discretion, and galumphing through the forest with a rifle would certainly draw unwanted attention.

Upon her arrival to Mistpeak, she, with little thought, handed over all of her finery; jewels she had worn to Walter's funeral, the rich satin mourning clothes she had worn, a large satchel of gold, and the engagement ring that Reaver had given to her that bore a diamond nearly the size of an infant's fist. She had no need for any of it anymore. She'd sooner throw it all in the river, but she knew that Sabine's people would put the riches to good use. The only things she elected to keep were her ornately wrought pistol and sword. All she asked for in exchange was some travelling clothes, some furs, some salted meat, the bow, and Sabine's oath that he would never speak of her again.

With his solemn promise in her ears, and an undeniable sensation of terror that she was actually doing this, she set off, further north to the uninhabited frozen wastes of the mountains; practically unknown to mankind, this was the safest place she could think of. The few who dared to brave this place were only the bravest of hunters, and not even then did they always return to their homes. The weather was fickle and changed almost hourly. Sometimes it was bone-chillingly cold, the wind like a razor and the snow sharp and stinging. Other times, like now, it was quiet and serene. When the sun dared to come out on days like today, slight melting would occur. Cheering as it was, she knew that when the melt froze into ice and became coated with a thin dusting of snow, it would become very easy to break a leg or tumble down an incline of jagged stones if one wasn't paying attention.

Wolves howled at night, more than once she had to fight off an ice bear that got curious and poked its snout into her shelter. Sometimes she heard the growls and huffs and groans of something she could not identify.

She also knew she was being followed.

Certainly, the entire castle would have been in an uproar following her disappearance. Ruling the kingdom would have fallen to Logan once more, and she expected he was putting every effort into finding her, although from what she could tell, the men tracking her were not royal guard. No, she suspected it would be awhile yet until they thought to come this far north. The men who tracked her were rough, filthy, tattered sorts: Mercenaries. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who had hired them.

Her jilted groom had surely not reacted well to news of her vanishing into thin air. It was difficult to keep a smile from her face at the thought of ageless Reaver finally being denied something.

There was no love in their agreement to marry, no affection or desire to be bound together in blissful, loving matrimony till the end of their (her) days. It was a marriage arranged purely out of political necessity; having borrowed a great deal of money from the industrialist in the days leading up to the war against The Crawler, and having it impressed upon her the importance of the bloodline of heroes to carry on, they both grudgingly agreed to marry. On paper it looked nice. Romantic even. The upper class women had their share of gossip and fawning over the immortal deviant finally settling down with the brisk hero who had finally captured his heart.

Such nonsense was brushed off effortlessly by both parties; Queen Esther knew that Reaver's duty as a husband would go only as far as putting children in her womb, and standing on ceremony. She did not labour under a flawed delusion that he would be loyal to her only, or that he would be anything else short of what he actually was; a baggage-ridden, murderous scoundrel. He would have heirs, he would have riches, he would have a castle, and the title of "King Consort." He couldn't possibly lose by agreeing to this as one day, Esther would inevitably die of age, and he would still be the handsome, youthful man he had been for centuries. Being a pirate king was not enough to quell Reaver's ambition. If it was within his grasp, how could he pass up the chance to be king of all the land indefinitely?

They had been set to marry the evening following Walter's funeral, and the icy cold dread in her stomach was certainly a contributing factor to her flight. The idea of living the rest of her life with someone who was counting down the minutes until she died was nauseating. It felt like walking into the jaws of an enormous beast, for she didn't doubt for a moment, that if she had followed through with her marriage, that she would be dead long before old age came knocking on her door.

Recklessly, she let the mercenaries catch fleeting glimpses of her as she moved from place to place over the weeks. She never engaged any of them, or gave any indication she was aware of their presence. She simply fed them the occasional sight of her, be it the light of a fire, or a quick snatch of her passing through the trees.

It would have been too easy to kill them all and have Reaver waiting endlessly behind his splendorous solid oak desk, grinding his teeth into dust out of furor. She knew they would report back to him that she had been seen. She knew that once that happened they would come to try and capture her. That's when she would send them back to Reaver, piece by piece until he got off his entitled ass and dared to brave the mountains and fetch her himself. She hadn't risked her life hundreds of times, lost friends, fought a bloody war with pure darkness, and thrown away dream after dream to go without a fight into the arms of her fiancee, like a subdued woman.

She wasn't sure if she'd ever go back. Oddly, she found she had everything she wanted right here.

She pulled her pocket watch out from the folds of her jacket. Its golden hands told her it was nearly ten in the morning. Ten in the morning had been the time they had agreed on, right?

She pulled aside the branches of her pine-tree shelter and squinted in the bright morning light reflected off of the gleaming snow. She glanced around a few times before pulling an old, worn piece of elk antler from the furs around her neck. She placed it to her lips and blew, and the cry of a falcon echoed around the hills behind her.

Silence fell and she waited, between the sounds of melting snow and running water, for the sound she had been waiting over a week to hear again; the call of an eagle sounded off in the forest and a smile lit her face: Ben was close.