Page 38 of Winter's Fate

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 feltnew.

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 didhe 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.

---