Snow whispered against the planks like a warning the world was trying to give quietly.

Sister Ellinor Whitmoor stood with her gloved hand pressed to the wanted notice, the paper thin and brittle beneath her fingers. Five hundred dollars. Alive. The word stared back at her more sharply than the inked sketch of her own face. The artist had softened her—rounder cheeks, calmer eyes. They had not captured the way fear sharpened her vision now, nor the ache that lived permanently beneath her ribs, where prayer used to settle.

The convent bell had once rung at dawn and dusk, measuring her days in certainty. Now time was measured by footsteps in snow, by the distance between towns, by how long she could keep moving before the cold began to gnaw at her bones. She had not worn the habit for disguise at first. It was habit in the truest sense—cloth learned by muscle and memory. Only later did she understand how deeply it unsettled people to see a nun traveling alone through the mountains, eyes alert instead of lowered.

They called her a traitor. A foreign element. A seditionist.

Ellinor exhaled, fog blooming before her face, and let her eyes drift across the lines of accusation. Harboring fugitives. Yes. Spreading anti-federal doctrines. If mercy had become a doctrine, then she supposed that too was true. She remembered the first man she hid beneath the chapel floorboards—his hands shaking so badly she had taken them in hers without thinking, grounding him with touch alone. She remembered the second, and the third, and how the silence of prayer had begun to feel louder than any gunshot.

Behind her, the forest creaked. The trees were old, patient witnesses, their branches heavy with snow and secrets. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once, then went quiet.

Ellinor folded the edge of the poster down gently, almost reverently, as if it were scripture. “You’ve made me smaller,” she murmured to it, not unkindly. Smaller things were easier to hunt.

She turned away from the wall and stepped back into the falling snow. Each flake caught briefly in her veil before melting, as if even the storm could not hold her for long. The cross at her throat knocked softly against her chest with every step—a reminder, not of obedience, but of sacrifice freely chosen.

They would keep chasing her north, she knew. Into narrower passes. Colder nights. But there were others waiting beyond the mountains—families with doors cracked open just enough, children who still believed that holy women were meant to protect, not surrender.

Ellinor pulled her cloak tighter and disappeared into the trees, leaving the poster to flutter uselessly on the wall.