Chapter 34
KAEDRIN
The scream reaches me from across the square.
I know Elin's voice. I'm moving before I've consciously identified it, cutting across the market lane at an angle that closes distance fast. The bakery door is swinging open when I reach the square's edge — a hooded figure coming through it at speed, something bundled under one arm, not slowing for the people in the way.
I go after him.
He has twenty feet on me and he's moving with frantic efficiency, having decided where he’s going.
He cuts through the afternoon market crowd, shouldering people aside, and I move through the wake he leaves — the turned heads, the knocked stall display, the woman stumbling backward with her basket.
I gain ground in the open stretch before the fountain and lose it again when he ducks through a gap between two stalls that I have to go around.
After I clear the gap he's at the market's far edge.
One more second and he'd have been in reach.
He goes left onto the south lane, and I see the cloak, and I see the dark hair beneath the fallen hood, and I see Fenwood's profile for exactly one moment before he rounds the corner and the crowd closes behind him.
I run the corner and the lane is empty.
Thirty yards to the south gate. Beyond that, the forest road. I stand at the corner and read the open ground — no moving figure, no disturbance in the people near the gate, nobody running. He didn't go through the gate in the open. He went somewhere between here and there.
He knows this town. He's been working it for years. He has a route I don't.
He's going into the forest, which means he has a destination. Ruins, a cache site, somewhere with cover and enough remoteness that a man with a hostage has time to make demands or make decisions. I don’t know the forest paths well enough to guess his destination, but I know he marked routes in this direction on his maps.
I head back to the inn at a run.
I pull a chest from under the bed. My heavy weapons, for special occasions, and I take the longer blade, the short one already on my hip, and the crossbow I've kept unstrung since arriving because I didn't expect to need it in a town this size.
I string it in the doorway and take the full bolt case.
I don't intend to get within negotiating distance and find myself outmatched.
The bakery is in chaos when I reach it — customers spilling onto the stoop, voices overlapping, Brennor stands on the outside of a growing crowd trying to organize something. I scan for Maris and find her coming around the corner from the south lane at speed, the crowd parting for her.
She sees me and crosses the distance in a few steps.
"Did you see him?" Her voice is flat and controlled, which costs her more than it would cost most people. Her hands are at her sides and her eyes are moving fast. "Do you know where he went?"
"He's heading into the forest." I check the crossbow's string tension by feel. "I’ve studied the paths he's using. He has a destination, possibly the old ruins.”
"That's where he's going with her." She says it without flinching.
"I think so." I look at her and study her face—blank, expressionless. "I'm going after them, and I won’t let him get away again."
She exhales through her nose and straightens her spine. "Then go." She pauses, then: "If anyone can bring her back, it's you."
The words are simple and she means every one of them.
"I'll bring her home," I say. My internal terror at Elin being taken is a feeling I don’t have time to assess. The only way to get her back is action, and action is exactly what I plan on taking.
"Promise me." She steps forward and grips my forearm with both hands, her fingers pressing into the leather of my vambrace. "Not ‘I'll try.’ Not ‘I'll do my best.’" Her hazel eyes are direct and fierce and terrified all at once. "Promise me you bring her home."
"I promise." I put my free hand over hers for a moment. "I promise, Maris."
Her steady eyes brim with unshed tears. Then I close the distance between us and kiss her — hard and brief and completely certain — and she grips the front of my cloak and kisses back with the same urgency before letting go.
"Bring her home," she says.
I'm already moving.
The forest road south of town is the one Fenwood used in his maps for the secondary escape route — the drover's track that joins the valley road before the border. I take it at a run for the first quarter mile, reading the ground as I go.
Fresh prints on the road shoulder. One adult, moving fast, footfall heavier on the right than the left — weight distribution of a man carrying something on his left side. The stride is long and urgent, the kind of pace that costs a person quickly over rough ground.
The prints follow the road for two hundred yards and then cut off the shoulder entirely into the trees on the east side.
I go in after them.
The forest here is old growth — the tree cover dense enough that the afternoon light comes through in broken pieces, the undergrowth thick enough to slow a man who’s unfamiliar with the paths.
Fenwood knows them. I've seen his maps. But knowing a path from above and moving through it fast with a struggling child are different problems, and the trail he's leaving is visible — disturbed leaf litter, a broken branch at chest height, a heel scuff in the soft ground near a tree root where he corrected his balance.
I follow it at a pace I can sustain.
The ruins are on Fenwood's third map, barely marked — a small notation in the margin that I read as a waypoint rather than a destination at the time.
Old stone structure, pre-settlement, deep enough in the forest that it wouldn't appear on any current survey.
Far off the trade roads, no reason for anyone from Brindle Hollow to go there, good elevated ground with sight lines in three directions.
A man who spent months in this region would know it. A man who needed somewhere to store a final cache and keep a few loyal people out of sight would use it.
I should have found it sooner. I file that away and keep moving.
The trail bends northeast, which confirms the direction.
The ruins sit on a low ridge roughly a mile and a half from the town's edge — close enough to access quickly, far enough to be invisible.
Fenwood has been hiding in plain sight of the investigation for days, which is either audacious or desperate, and at this point I suspect both.
I move faster.
The tree cover thickens near the ridge base and the light drops further.
My footing shifts from leaf litter to older ground — compacted and dry, the kind of earth that forms under established canopy where nothing grows.
The trail is harder to read here, but the bent grass at the ridge's lower slope gives me the direction I need.
I slow before I reach the crest.
Voices.
Not one — several. Low and fast, the overlapping sounds of people conducting urgent business.
The scrape of something heavy being dragged across stone.
A man's voice issuing a short instruction, then another responding.
Crates being moved, or packed, or both. The particular sound of a camp breaking quickly, no patience for anything careful.
I stop ten feet below the ridge crest and go still.
Through the trees above me, the top of a stone wall is visible — dressed stone, old mortar, one corner still standing to height.
The ruins are larger than the map notation suggested.
I count at least three separate voices, which means Fenwood has people here.
More than I expected, based on how many I've already taken off the board.
He's been holding some in reserve. Of course he has.
I unsling the crossbow and check the bolt seated in the channel. I draw it back quietly, lock it, and keep the weapon low. My longer blade is loose in the scabbard. The short knife is on my left hip where I can reach it with either hand.
I listen for Elin.
For a moment there's nothing — just the voices and the movement sounds and the wind through the canopy. Then, faint underneath all of it, a small sound. Not crying — something more deliberate. Elin's voice, too quiet to make out words, talking to herself as she works through something alone.
She's alive. She's conscious. She's doing the thing she always does when she's frightened and trying not to be, which is narrate her way through it.
I breathe out through my nose, slow and controlled.
I move up the last ten feet to the ridge crest on my hands and knees, staying below the sight lines, and look over the top.
The ruins open into a rough courtyard — broken walls on three sides, the fourth open to the forest. Three men visible from here, moving fast around a stack of crates near the back wall. Fenwood stands apart from them, his back to me, looking at something I can't see from this angle.
I shift my position two feet to the left.
There — in the corner where the two highest walls meet.
Elin, sitting on the ground with her knees pulled up, her back to the stone.
Her curls are loose and her scarf is gone and her eyes are moving around the courtyard with the sharp attention of a child taking in every detail.
She's not restrained. She hasn't been bound.
She spots the movement at the ridge line.
Her eyes find me and go wide and I put one finger to my lips.
She watches me for one second. Then she looks back at Fenwood's back and says nothing.
Good girl.
I assess the courtyard and start working out the angles.