Page 15

CHAPTER 15

I n his dreams, Callum was trapped in a prison cell with no windows and no doors, so tightly quartered that even his sleeping mind did not understand how he could have arrived here in the first place. Dropped through the ceiling perhaps, though that too was shut fast.

Dripping water. The tap of distant footsteps. And somehow, inexplicably, the crackle of ice on a winter pond. This was what he deserved, where he ought to be. He could not even fault Hawk for dumping him here. If anything, it was long overdue.

Something bit his ear, and he cursed the rats. How could they get in , he thought distantly, with no windows, no drains?

The bite came again, and Callum sat up, breathing hard.

He wasn’t in an Aglyean dungeon, as much as he might deserve that fate. He was in the forest, surrounded by the smell of pine.

Laena’s shimmerling companion was on his shoulder, scrambling in a frantic circle as Callum craned his neck to see what she was doing. The creature moved so fast that she was little more than a blur of light and color against the dark fabric of his jacket .

Apparently distressed by his lack of action, Brin scurried to his neck and leapt, clamping her jaws around his earlobe.

Callum cursed, tugging the creature gently into his hands. “What’s the matter, silly thing?”

The shimmerling might be worthy of admiration, but it was still a silly thing. Brin worked her jaws, straining for his ear like her greatest wish in the world was to bite him again.

Pinning her gently between two fingers, Callum looked around. It was dark, the fire burned to coals. Strange that Laena would not have added a log to it. Stranger still that she had not woken him for his watch. She’d said he looked exhausted, but she seemed too sensible to sacrifice her own sleep for his when she knew days of walking lay ahead of them.

But Laena wasn’t sitting by the fire, nor had she propped herself on a tree and drifted off. She was nowhere in sight.

Callum rose. Perhaps she’d gone to relieve herself in the woods. Surely she wouldn’t have wandered far.

He opened his mouth to call her name, and the sulfurous burning of a heart-tithe poured into his senses, thick and nausea-inducing. For a heartbeat, memories threatened to pull him under, determined to remind him what a heart-tithe had meant for Hawk’s father.

Panic clawed for his chest, like a feral thing locked away for far too long, but Callum pushed it down deep. Panic would save no one. Action might.

Cursing, he crossed the clearing in two strides. “Brin,” he said. “Can you light the way?”

He didn’t know if the shimmerling would understand, or whether it only responded to Laena’s requests. But the little creature scurried down to his elbow and began to glow, giving off a warm pinkish light that allowed him to follow the trail where Laena had left the campsite. He’d spent enough time in the wilderness to have developed a decent skill for tracking, thanks largely to Edmun’s training .

The thought of the old soldier squeezed his heart, but he pushed that down, too. There would be time to mourn him later. Edmun would want him to find Laena.

The thickness of the underbrush made it clear enough: broken twigs and crushed fern stems, and here and there a thread of brown cloth that matched her skirts. The scent of the heart-tithe thickened as he followed the trail, the ball of panic working itself into a frenzy as it tried to free itself from its prison.

He could not afford to let it free. He could not afford mistakes.

The trail ended beside a fallen log, and Callum stopped to stare.

The log was covered in a thick layer of frost. Fern fronds brushed up against it, green and hearty, and the branches above were thick with spring leaves. But there was no denying the presence of the frost, the ice that coated the bark.

Beautiful. But full of magic, surely. The smell of the tithe was undeniable, and yet… and yet something about the frost called him forward. Made him want to lean closer. He held back, balling his hands into fists and resisting the urge to touch it.

Brin had no such hesitation. She leapt down onto the log, skittering across the frost as if she hoped to go ice-skating. Callum pressed a hesitant finger to the bark, brushing against the fronds of frost. It didn’t feel evil. It felt… fresh. It felt new .

There was no denying, though, that the smell of the heart-tithe lingered in the air. And that Laena was nowhere to be seen.

“What happened here?” he asked.

But Brin had no answer to give. She settled into the crook of his elbow, letting out what he interpreted as a worried squeak.

The frost was strange. Stranger still was the complete disappearance of the trail. Callum searched the area, calling Laena’s name until the sun had risen well into the sky. Nothing .

She was gone. Vanished into thin air, leaving nothing but a trail of frost behind.

There was one course of action to take, when a company of soldiers became separated. You made for the main road, and you searched for one another. Barring that, for information. As a last resort, you might seek out assistance, if you could find it.

Out here, that seemed all too unlikely.

Callum returned to the campsite to dowse what was left of the fire. He couldn’t be sure exactly where they’d landed on the coast, but with the morning sun at his back, he should eventually reach the main road to Inasvale.

He’d avoided it during their first day of walking, fearing the heart-tithers who’d come after Laena on the ship, and the assassin from the palace. There was now no room left for doubt; they had come for Laena. Not for her sister, and not for the Aglyean soldiers. But why? What could Silerith gain from killing her, or capturing her?

It was a conundrum. The bruises on Laena’s throat had made it abundantly clear that the palace intruder had indeed intended for her to die. The shipwreck, too, could be interpreted as an attempt at murder. Even the attack she’d described in her garden, strange though it had been, could well have ended in her death. He didn’t want to imagine the blight from that crystal she’d shown him, of the magic invading her garden. He wanted to forget it existed at all.

If they wished her dead, why not slit her throat now and be done with it? Why haul her away?

Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps there was no way she could still be alive.

And perhaps it was naive to assume Silerith’s involvement. Their king was ruthless, to be sure, but he was also strategic. He would not send assassins in the night without a strong reason. He might want Katrina to rule Etra, for reasons of his own, but he would pull those strings from behind the scenes. Rarely did he make himself known. In fact, it was only through Hawk’s network of spies that they even knew he held the throne at all.

Silerith was a complicated country, one given to violence. If anything, they tended to keep to themselves.

Try as he might, Callum could not untangle it. He was desperately short on information, the puzzle pieces so disparate they might belong to entirely different pictures. He needed Hawk’s brain to help him sort through it, to ask the questions Callum never thought to ask. To tease out the truth.

But Hawk wasn’t here. Even if he had been, the days when he would talk through a puzzle with Callum just for the sake of it had died with his father. Along with his trust in Callum. Though an argument could be made that this particular puzzle involved him, too.

There was no answer to be had, not at the moment. But Callum worried anyway, with Brin perched on his shoulder, her neck craned forward as if she, too, was searching for the road. He wasn’t even sure what to do once he arrived there, whether there would be any sign that Laena had passed this way. Or what he would do once he found her. He had raided dozens of criminal dens, faced hundreds of heart-tithers, but he’d always had a crew of soldiers with him. Backup.

He didn’t know how he’d get her back. Only that he had to. The panic in his gut had settled into a constant tension, like a pot stuck just before boiling. He needed to get her safely to Vunmore. It was the only option.

Hawk hadn’t trusted Callum since he’d been absent on the day of his father’s murder. He’d been helping the younger prince, Thaddeus, to reach Inasvale against Hawk’s own wishes, worried that Thaddeus would meet with trouble if he attempted to travel alone.

When Callum had returned to Vunmore, he was met with black flags and mourning, and a friend who could not forgive him .

The way Hawk had shut him out, it was as if he believed Callum had intentionally allowed King Magnus’s murder. As if he’d had something to do with the attack, the way the heart-tithers had known the inner workings of the palace well enough to spirit themselves straight to the king’s own chambers. As if he’d held the knife in his own hands.

He hadn’t done any of that. He’d spent the last year rooting out as many heart-tithers as he could find, but he was never sure if he’d captured the king’s murderers. No one had confessed to the crime.

So Callum had to fulfill his duty where he’d failed so badly in the past. And he would not allow himself to acknowledge any other reason. The way Princess Laena’s eyes shone when she smiled, how he itched to run his fingers through her curls. He would not think about her laugh, or that she’d saved him from drowning after the shipwreck.

And he did not think about any of those things at all, until the sun peaked in the midday sky. Just as Callum was beginning to fear he’d walked in the wrong direction all morning, a flash of movement drew his eyes up into the trees.

Not a bird or an animal. A man. He wore a brown stocking cap pulled over red curls, and he sat perched with his back to Callum, his attention fully focused in the other direction.

Callum slid behind a tree. But the man never turned, never surveyed the forest at his back. Callum crept forward, easing his boots into the underbrush to silence his footsteps.

The man still didn’t stir. And after a few minutes of silent stalking, Callum could see that his attention was trained entirely on the road.

He’d made it.

Callum crept closer, until he could see where an enormous tree trunk had been felled just a touch farther down the road. Any carriage that came this way would be forced to stop while the driver cleared the path .

So the man in the tree was a bandit. One of a team. He turned a slow circle, scanning the trees. No one was sneaking up on him. No one was watching from above.

Experienced thieves should know to watch the woods for scouts or random travelers like Callum, not only the road before them. They should know to listen for out-of-place sounds. And they would have picked a better location; few rich caravans ever made their way along the roads in this area. These thieves didn’t even know a proper region to hold their stakeout.

And that gave him an idea.

Scanning the woods a final time, Callum crept closer to the road. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it was easy to locate two more of the would-be thieves; even the ones stationed on the other side of the road were so intent on their mark that they did not notice him approach. It was all too easy to see them, though most had at least thought to don green and brown clothing. However, camouflage was useless when you fidgeted constantly, rustling tree branches and silencing the nearby birdcall.

And it was the work of a few minutes to find their leader. From his crouched position at the base of the fallen tree, he frequently reached up to signal his fellow bandits, his white hair flying in every direction as he did. Though Callum could not see what there was to signal about, with no coach on the way. Certainly not his own presence.

Drawing his knife, Callum backtracked, cutting a wide berth behind the first bandit he’d spied. Every second of delay put Laena in more danger, but it would do no good to rush after her unprepared. So he crept through the woods, aiming for the white-haired man.

By the time one of the scouts noticed him and cried a warning, his knife was already pressed to the leader’s throat.

The old man flailed, signaling wildly, and Callum leaned in close to the man’s ear. With any luck, he would not have to kill anyone today. “If your archer shoots,” Callum said, “you’ll be dead before I will. Best call them off.”

The man swallowed hard, his skin perilously close to the edge of the knife. He held up his fingers in an X that Callum very much hoped meant he was instructing them not to shoot.

He hadn’t actually seen any of them with a bow, but surely they couldn’t be that inexperienced.

“My wife’s been abducted from these woods,” Callum said.

It would be foolish to admit she was a royal, even to amateurs. He was outnumbered here, and one of them could be targeting his heart. They might agree to his terms, then turn on him and demand a ransom if they thought she would bring in more than he could offer.

“Wasn’t us, gent,” the man choked. “I swear it.”

Callum gave a short laugh. “Oh, I know. You couldn’t abduct a willing victim, let alone a fighter like her.”

The man bristled. “I take issue with that implica?—”

“I’ll pay your band to help me retrieve her,” Callum interrupted. “You’ll make more than you would robbing petty coaches out here.”

“How would you know how much I make robbin’ coaches?”

“I think you’ve never robbed a coach before in your life,” Callum said. “I think you have no idea that it might be three days until one passes, and that when it does, the only folks who live out here are country mayors and monks. You might make three silvers, and that’s if you’re lucky. Hardly enough to feed your crew, let alone pay them.”

The man swallowed again, and Callum found himself wishing he would just take the deal. He could dispatch this band without issue—though the archer might provide a bit of trouble—but he found he didn’t wish to.

These bandits weren’t working any magic. He wasn’t even convinced they’d managed to rob anyone.

“I think perhaps you’d rather be doing something else,” he said, when the leader remained silent. “Also, I won’t kill you if you promise to help me. Win, win.”

“How’d you know I won’t turn on you?”

“Because you want half my gold now and half of it when we reach Inasvale.”

The man hesitated, like he was trying to think of a way around it. Callum squeezed a little tighter, and the man let out a squeak. “All right, gent, all right. You’ve convinced me.”

“Tell them.”

“Was getting to it, wasn’t I?” The old man held up his hands, palms open. “Change of plan, boys. Highway robbery’s done for the day. Today, we’re gonna be rescuers.”