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Even now my hands tightened inside my gloves into bloodless fists at the memory... that he would look at her as his when we were just wed, when she was mine.

Fuck.This was not the time to feel jealous, an emotion I had assuredly never once felt in my life. It was beneath me. Right now she was out there all alone, belonging to no one and needing help in the most desperate way. If not from me, then from someone else. Anyone else. Even those I did not like. If her shit family could help get her back and keep her safe, I wasn’t too proud to call on them to do so.

A flash of tattered clothing filled my mind. Shards of blue fabric scattered on the ground and in bone-thick talons. I rubbed hard knuckles against my eyes as though that might erase the memory swirling thick and viscous through my head, unrelenting since yesterday.

I didn’t want to believe the worst. I couldn’t accept she was dead. Devoured before I got there. Not yet. No. After all, a dragon had stolen me away and I’d survived. Tamsyn was far sturdier than a child. And cleverer. As much as I had scolded her, she had resolved our encounter with the brigands in an efficient manner, taking her necklace right off her own neck to pay them.

Maybe she was alive in a dragon’s lair somewhere, just as I had been as a child. I only needed to find her.

Desperate thinking. Grasping. Hopeful. Pleading. But it was not impossible.

I could not bring myself to think her dead. Even though everything pointed to it, I could not. Could not imagine it.

Those moments had been a blur. I’d been so fixated on the danger. On her shredded clothes. On Arkin’s smoking corpse. The stink of charred flesh. The twenty-foot dragon that wasn’t supposed to exist hovering midair, wings churning great gusts of wind.

That didn’t mean Tamsyn hadn’t been there, though, in the fray. Tucked beneath a dragon arm, clutched where I couldn’t see her.

Desperate thinking. Grasping. Hopeful. But it was not impossible.

If she was alive and something happened to me, if I failed to find her, if the dragon I hunted got the best of me, I needed to know someone would look for her. Someone else would save her.

I will come for you.

As much as I wanted to break him in that moment for speaking those words to my newly wedded (and bedded) wife, the captain of the guard—Stig, she had called him—had said that. He’d meant those words.

For Tamsyn’s sake, I needed to make certain her people knew what had happened to her.Her people.That went down my throat in a bitter swallow.Iwas supposed to have beenher people. Me. As much as I had resisted the notion.

I hated that I might need them, needothers. That I might not be enough to save her. And yet I emptied my head of that thought, because the only thing that mattered was Tamsyn.

Tamsyn not dead.

Tamsyn whole and unharmed.

Mari stared at me with frustration creasing her usually smooth brow, and I realized she was waiting for me to respond. “We cannot keep this pace.”

I swallowed back the burn of defeat. We had to keep going. A dragon flew faster than we could ever ride. We could not stop.

Given our quarry was airborne, there was no trail to track. Not as I was accustomed. I’d only marked the direction the creature flew. It could be anywhere by now, could have turned in any direction. It was impossible to know. And yet I had a sense. A knowing that I trusted. I couldn’t explain it, so I didn’t try.

But my warriors were less than trusting. I’d heard them muttering behind me over the last several hours. A first in my life. They gave me their allegiance and obedience and had always followed me unquestioningly, but they had their doubts now.

“Fell... the horses will drop if we don’t rest.”

I growled, “If they drop, then we get up and keep going.”

Mari’s eyes widened. It was something I would never have said before. I had now, though. And stubbornly, I kept on. Tamsyn had to be found. The dragon had to be put down like any feral, man-eating creature.

Ahead of us, the narrow path we traveled split into two even narrower paths, nothing more than game trails each, trampled down by the recurring tread of smaller animals.

Because people went no farther than this.

Mari sidled up beside me, the fine lines bracketing her mouth settling into deeper grooves. “Now what?”

I nudged my heels and advanced before stopping hard at the fork, as though I had struck a wall and could go no farther. My destrier neighed and pranced, not having it. He sensed it, too. He wasn’t even willing to try. It was as though an invisible hand had reached up to block him.

Just as well. Our mounts would not fit down either path. We would have to leave them behind.

Mari expelled a breath as though it was too big to keep inside herself. “See. We can go no farther.”