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I motioned with my hand, quieting her... poking around and feeling inside myself for the voice that was not a voice, for thefeelingthat was more smoke and shadow than substance. Just an instinct. A persistent knowing.

And there it was. It came to me, brushing against my mind likea feather. As I knew it would. As it had ever since that dragon took flight. Ever since I gave pursuit, hunting the dragon, searching for Tamsyn.

It beckoned with gentle hands, a fine, fragile thread pulling me forward. My fingers curled inward, tracing the carved X that pumped like a bleeding wound, a guiding pulse that diminished if I went one way, the wrong way, and then intensified if I went another way, the right way. The way to her. I couldn’t fathom it, but it was how I knew she was still alive out there, how I knew which way to go.

“This is the direction.” I pointed west, into the densely packed wood. It was a living, breathing, pulsing wall of green. High above the treetops loomed steeper foothills. Beyond those hills, beyond the Borderlands, were hazy mountains, the distant Crags. Fog circled the peaks like gauzy rings of smoke.

The dragon had taken her that way. I wouldn’t even try to explain my conviction to Mari. I couldn’t. I didn’t understand it myself.

The warrior shook her head, her dark braids slapping against the thick leathered armor covering her shoulders. “We can’t know that. A dragon flies as the crow... and as fast as wind. We cannot know which way it turned once it left you. It could be across the sea by now.”

I didn’t think so. Not unless the creature had abandoned Tamsyn somewhere, and I doubted that. My experience echoed within me, a story I’d heard so many times that it felt like my own recollection, an imprint that went beyond memory, another tattoo etched on my skin, there until I was dead and rotting in the ground. I imagined the winged demon had the two of them holed up in a den somewhere.

But whatever the case, I feltherlike my own heartbeat.

It was gut deep, this knowledge. A bone-penetrating awareness. I sensed which way to go, compelled forth as though we were connected. Even though I couldn’t explain it, I trusted it.

“We go this way,” I ordered.

Stopping, I swung down onto the ground. With an idle pat for my taxed destrier, I tied off his reins to a nearby shrub and stepped into the great maw of the forest.

24

Stig

IMISSED TAMSYN. TWO WEEKS WITHOUT HER AND EACH DAYthe ache in my chest only intensified.

I could not stop wondering how I might have saved her. What could I have said in her room that might have persuaded her to run away with me? What could I have said to my father to change his mind? What could I have done to stop Dryhten from marrying her, from bedding her?

What? What? What?

The questions kept me up at night. Guilt niggled, pushing down between my shoulder blades, an endless pressure.

I’d failed. Tamsyn. Myself.

The day she left ran through my mind on repeat. Everything, every horrible moment a slow slide of memory I wished I could forget, but I couldn’t, because it was carved, a deep scar on my heart. She’d left with him. She was out there alone with those barbarians, suffering indignities I could not fathom.

Footsteps sounded outside my chamber. Loud, discordant shouts, distant and near, alerted me that something had happened.

Someone pounded on my door. The palace was abuzz.

I dressed quickly and grabbed my rapier, attaching it to my belt as I walked in long strides down the corridor, my boots ringing out over the flooring as I followed the din.

I was stoic when I entered the king’s chancery. I felt dead inside, and I knew I looked it, looked how I had felt for weeks now.Nothing gave me joy anymore. Nothing filled me with purpose. I went about my duties and training because there was nothing else to be done. I carried on because there was the remote hope, a thin flame of chance, that I would hear from her again, that she would send for me.

The room was alive. People were everywhere. It was chaos. Voices loud and overlapping. The queen looked pale, and one of her ladies helped her down into a chair, rapidly fanning her. My father looked unusually flustered as he talked to the king and other members of the council.

The back of my neck tingled as I made my way to the front of the chamber. I stopped beside my father, and his gaze landed on me, his brown eyes so like my own, except now they were fever bright.

“Stig!” He snapped his fingers several times, and a palace guard appeared bearing a piece of parchment. “A falconer just delivered this.”

I took the message. My gaze scanned the words. The unbelievable words. The couldn’t-possibly-be-true words.

My body physically rebelled. My stomach dropped, and I feared that my earlier meal might return on me.

“It’s not true,” I announced in a hard voice, steeling myself against the storm of emotions flooding me. “He’s lying. The bastard is lying.” I crumpled the paper in my fist and tossed it to the floor, not caring who might still want to read it.

My father nodded grimly, his gaze fixed on me. Beyond him, the king lowered himself down beside his queen, pulling her into his arms, comforting her through her tears of grief.