24
Kason
The Sorrowmarket looked wrong from half a mile out, and my wolf understood why before my eyes had fully confirmed it — too much smoke for an ordinary evening's cookfires, too much silence beneath the smoke for a market town that should have still been settling into its usual dusk noise.
"They're already here," I said, and felt the whole column shift behind me, Iron-Guard drawing weapons, Ilinca's horse closing the distance to mine without either of us needing to discuss it.
"Dobrin," she said, low and urgent, already scanning the smoke-hazed rooftops for the distinct stall she'd described to me a dozen times without my ever properly picturing it until this moment.
"His stall's near the eastern gate. If they came in from the forest road, that's exactly where they'd hit first."
We rode into chaos considerably worse than either of us had braced for.
Fire had taken two buildings near the market square, wolfsbane-tainted smoke thick enough that even my own eyes stung with it, and the particular screaming, scattered panic of ordinary people caught in violence they had no framework for understanding, let alone surviving.
My wolf surged forward before my mind had finished processing the scene, the same old instinct that had carried me through a decade of border skirmishes taking over entirely — assess, engage, protect, in an order that left no room for anything else.
"Guard formation around the square," I shouted to the Iron-Guard captain riding beside me. "Get the civilians moving toward the western gate, away from the fire. I want a perimeter around the wardsmith at all times, do you understand me — she does not leave anyone's sight."
The order came out clipped, absolute, the authority I'd spent a lifetime learning to project in exactly this kind of crisis, and I felt, even as I gave it, a fresh understanding of the impossible balance Ilinca and I had been trying to strike for weeks — that protecting her, in a moment like this one, genuinely did require decisions made fast and without her input, the very thing I'd promised to stop doing, except that some decisions, I understood with a clarity that had nothing comfortable in it, simply couldn't wait for careful deliberation without costing someone their life.
We found Dobrin near his overturned stall, a bloodied gash along his forearm and a gutting knife still clutched in his other hand, having apparently held off two of Costin's men single-handed long enough for his neighbors to scatter toward safety.
"You came," he said, disbelief and relief warring plainly on his face as Ilinca half-fell from her horse to reach him. "I didn't think — the message only reached the town an hour ago, some rider from the castle shouting warnings through the square, and then they were just here, all at once—"
"Are you hurt badly?" Ilinca's hands moved over the wound with a wardsmith's assessing efficiency, tearing a strip from her own cloak to bind it before he could protest.
"Shallow. I've had worse from a bad filleting knife.
" He managed something close to his usual grin despite the blood and the smoke, though his eyes kept cutting toward the chaos still unfolding beyond the square.
"Petra's messenger group. They're pinned near the inn, Ilinca. I couldn't reach them before—"
I was already moving before he'd finished the sentence, my wolf reading the direction of the danger before my conscious mind had fully processed his words, and left two of the Iron-Guard with Ilinca and Dobrin while I took the rest toward the inn, understanding, with the singular focus violence always brought me, exactly what needed doing and in what order.
We broke the siege at the inn within minutes, Costin's men substantially less disciplined than I'd braced for, more interested in causing chaos than holding fixed positions against an organized response.
I fought the way I'd trained to fight for two decades, my wolf close enough to the surface that my vision sharpened and my reflexes ran a half-step ahead of conscious thought, and understood, cutting down the third attacker in as many minutes, that whatever Costin Drell had intended for this raid, he hadn't accounted for a Crown Prince's personal guard arriving in strength before his own forces could fully establish control.
Petra's messenger group had barricaded themselves in the inn's cellar, sensible enough to hold their position rather than scatter, and I found the young woman herself standing at the barricade's edge with a fire poker gripped white-knuckled in both hands, ready to defend the space with whatever came through the door regardless of the odds against her.
Something in her fierce, unwavering stance reminded me, briefly and painfully, of the same particular courage I'd watched Ilinca carry into every confrontation since the day I'd first met her.
"They're clear," I called down, once the last of Costin's men near the inn had been driven off or subdued. "Stay here until the Iron-Guard confirms the square's secure. I'll send word."
She nodded, still gripping the poker, and I turned back toward the square with the particular satisfaction of a threat contained, a rescue completed — a satisfaction that lasted exactly as long as it took my ears to catch the sound that would undo everything else I'd accomplished in the last ten minutes.
It was, I would understand later, precisely the miscalculation that made the entire ambush possible.
I heard Ilinca's scream before I fully registered what it meant, distant and sharp over the chaos, and felt my whole body turn toward the sound with a violence that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the, bone-deep certainty of a mate bond recognizing genuine danger before the mind had finished processing the threat.
I ran. I don't remember deciding to, the same way I hadn't decided to seize a soldier's wrist in a market three months before — my wolf simply moved, faster than my legs alone should have carried me, back toward the square where I'd left her supposedly protected, supposedly safe behind two of my own most trusted guards.
I found wreckage instead. One guard down, wolfsbane-tipped arrow still lodged in his shoulder, alive but unconscious.
The other missing entirely. Dobrin on his knees beside the overturned stall, blood no longer only from his own wound, shouting her name into smoke that had thickened considerably in the few minutes I'd been gone.
"They took her," he managed, when I reached him, his voice cracking on words that landed in my chest like a physical blow.
"A dozen men, maybe more — they came through the smoke, and the guard fought, and then someone threw something, some kind of powder, and she just — she went down, Kason, she went down and didn't get back up, and they had her on a horse before I could even reach her—"
I searched the square with a thoroughness that had nothing rational left in it, overturning stalls, checking every shadow the smoke hadn't yet claimed, my wolf howling somewhere beneath my human composure with a grief I hadn't let myself feel since Emil, and found, at the square's northern edge, exactly what I'd been dreading — hoofprints, fresh and numerous, leading away from the Sorrowmarket toward the eastern forest road, toward territory the Iron-Guard hadn't yet secured, toward wherever Costin Drell had decided to take the single most valuable target the Unbound had spent generations hunting.
She was gone. Taken, alive by every indication I could find, which offered exactly as much comfort as it took away — alive meant time, alive meant hope, alive also meant she was currently in the hands of a man capable of things I'd spent the entire ride here trying not to imagine in specific detail.
"Kason." Teodor's voice, close behind me, carrying the specific careful steadiness of a man managing his own horror in order to be useful to someone else's. "We need to move. Now, while the trail's fresh, before nightfall costs us the tracking advantage we currently have."
I turned, and found the entire Iron-Guard assembled, waiting, watching me with the particular expectant readiness of men who understood, without needing to be told, exactly what came next.
"Then we ride," I said, my voice coming out markedly steadier than anything currently moving through my chest. "Every man who can hold a blade. We ride until we find her, or until there's nowhere left on this earth for Costin Drell to have taken her."
We rode into the deepening dark with torches and grim purpose, Dobrin insisting on joining despite his wound, his knowledge of the eastern forest roads proving more valuable than any of us had accounted for in the first desperate hour.
The trail held clear for nearly three hours, hoofprints and the acrid trace of wolfsbane my wolf could track even through darkness, and I let myself believe, for those three hours, that we might actually close the distance before whatever waited at the end of that trail had the chance to fully claim her.
The trail went cold at a river crossing well past midnight, hoofprints vanishing into water that gave no further indication which bank Costin's forces had chosen to exit on, and I understood, standing at that riverbank with torchlight guttering in a cold wind and my wolf howling somewhere beneath my composure with a grief I couldn't yet afford to fully feel, that the pursuit's first, best chance had just run out entirely.
"We split the search," Teodor said, already thinking three steps ahead despite his own visible exhaustion.
"Both banks, at first light. I'll send riders to every border patrol between here and the Unbound's known territories.
Someone will have seen something, Kason.
A party moving a captive doesn't travel invisibly, whatever head start they've currently bought themselves. "
"At first light," I agreed, though every instinct in me screamed against the delay, against the specific helplessness of waiting even a few hours while she remained in danger I couldn't yet measure or address.
"Dobrin — you should return to the town.
Your people need you, and there's nothing further your knowledge of these roads can offer once the trail's gone cold in open water. "
"I'm not going back yet." His voice carried a stubbornness I recognized, distantly, as kin to Ilinca's own.
"She's the reason half this town is still standing tonight instead of burned to the ground waiting for a rescue that arrived too late.
I'll go back once I've done what I can to help find her.
That's not negotiable, Your Highness, respectfully. "
I didn't argue further. Some fights weren't worth the energy they cost, and Dobrin's loyalty, however stubborn, was exactly the kind of loyalty I understood better than most men currently breathing.
I understood, somewhere in that first desperate hour of pursuit, that I had just failed the one promise that mattered more than any other I'd ever made — to stand beside her rather than simply protect her, and to never again let a moment's decision cost her the choice that should have been hers alone.
I had been standing beside her. I had still, somehow, lost her anyway.
Dawn found us still at the riverbank, the search parties assembling in the gray half-light exactly as Teodor had planned, and I stood apart from the organized activity a long moment, turning the whole of the previous night over with a clarity that had nothing merciful left in it.
I had ridden into that town believing I'd finally learned the lesson Emil died trying to teach me — that love without control was still love, that standing beside someone meant something different from standing over them.
I had believed it sincerely, in the moment I'd sworn it to her at the stables, and I understood now, watching the sun rise over a river that had swallowed her trail sometime past midnight, that sincerity alone had never once been sufficient to keep anyone safe.
Teodor found me there, some time later, and didn't offer easy comfort, which I was grateful for more than I had words to properly express.
"We'll find her," he said instead, simple and plain, the particular steadiness of a man who intended to make that promise true through sheer force of will if nothing else sufficed.
"However long it takes, Kason. I'm not leaving this search until she's found, whatever it costs either of us to see it through. "
"I know." I turned from the river at last, the first search parties already fanning out along both banks. "I intend to hold you to that. And myself, considerably more than I've ever held myself to anything before."
We rode out with the dawn, into a search that would, though neither of us yet understood its full shape, stretch far longer than either of us currently had the patience to imagine.