Disclaimer: Libba Bray owns these characters; I do not.
All her life, she's been running away from her obligations and her family. Now she's running away from her friends.
She's scared - scared of how the others looked at her, scared of how they treated her, scared of the Winterlands, the only place that will take her now.
What hurts most is the knowledge that she could have had it differently. She could have had her knight, and she could have crossed over. She was convinced she wasn't ready - now she realizes that she was. Now she realizes the choice she made was the wrong one, and it hurts to know she was wrong.
She never was a brave girl. Her mother used to tell her she was useless, except for her exceptional looks. Bravery was not a quality her mother would have cherished, of course, but perhaps it would have given her more enjoyment in life. And if she was brave, she could have crossed over. She could have done what the dead are supposed to do.
As she crosses near a lake, she fights the urge to peer in. The old Pippa Cross would have never resisted the chance to look in a mirror; her vanity was that great. However, she's not sure she wants to see what she looks like now, with how frightened her friends had looked upon seeing her.
Her curiosity wins. She hesitates, and wanders over to the shimmering water, and looks in.
She screams. She's a monster. All of the qualities that she prized so highly, the qualities that could make even the shiest man court her, were gone. In their place was sheer ugliness that would only grow worse.
She turns her face away, crying loudly and freely. She wishes the others would come back for her, but she knows that they won't. She betrayed them.
She fingers her distorted face, wiping the tears away. It's not just her face now that's distorted, she realizes. Her entire soul is distorted now. And that knowledge stings more than having the ugliest face in the world would.