Little Palace

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Chapter 7

But I knew you
Playing hide-and-seek and

Giving me your weekends, I

I knew you
Your heartbeat on the High Line

Once in 20 lifetimes, I

And when I felt like I was an old cardigan

Under someone's bed

You put me on and said I was

your favorite

Cardigan by Taylor Swift







Cardigan by Taylor Swift

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THE NEXT FEW DAYS passed in a blur of discomfort and exhaustion. They stayed off of the Vy and kept to side roads and narrow hunting trails, moving as quickly as the hilly and sometimes treacherous terrain would allow. Milene has lost all sense of where they were or how far they had gone.



   After the first day, Aleksander and Milene had ridden separately, but she found that she was always aware of where he was in the column of riders. He didn’t say a word to her , and as the hours and days wore on, She  started to worry that maybe, just maybe she had somehow offended him. (Though, given how little they had spoken, she wasn’t sure how she could have managed it.)


Occasionally, She caught him looking at her, his eyes cool and unreadable.

Milene has never been a particularly good rider, and the pace the Darkling,Aleksander set was taking its toll. No matter which way she shifted in her saddle, some part of her body ached.


She stared listlessly at her horse’s twitching ears and tried not to think of her burning legs or the throbbing in her lower back.


On the fifth night, when they stopped to make camp at an abandoned farm, Milene leaped from her horse in joy. Though, her body was so still stiff that she settled for sliding stumbly to the ground.



    She thanked the soldier who saw her mount and walked slowly down a small hill to where she could hear the soft gurgle of a stream. She knelt by the bank on shaky legs and washed her face and hands in the cold water.

The air had changed over the last couple of days, and the bright blue skies autumn was giving way to sullen gray.



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