Nadia
We crossed into the village three days deep into a journey that was supposed to take two weeks, and I’d already started counting in increments of “How many more days of this can I possibly survive?”
Ten, by my count. Possibly twelve if the weather held.
By the look of the growing storm in the distance, it absolutely would not. I needed a new saddle… or a new spine. I couldn’t figure out which. Or maybe I needed a real bed, food that hadn’t been packed for travel, and a bath sometime before the next century.
I could stake out a mark for days, but riding a horse? This was officially where I drew the line.
The village rose out of the autumn fields in the gentle, ordinary way of places that had been there long enough to belong—stone houses with slate roofs, smoke rising thin and gray from chimneys, a road running straight through the heart of it and out the other side.
Familiar in the way of every small village in every province I'd ever passed through.
I'd already decided, on principle, not to learn its name.
We were still technically in Morathen. Tharros' border lay another week or so to the east, give or take Enzo's color-coded contingencies.
But Enzo rode this path often enough that the line on the map clearly didn't apply to him in the usual ways, because the moment the villagers noticed who'd come through their gate, the whole place reorganized itself around him.
A woman hanging wash in her front yard lifted her head, her hands stilling on the line. A boy driving geese across the road froze mid-step. A smith with arms like tree trunks straightened from the anvil, set down his hammer, and walked out into the street without bothering to remove his apron.
"My prince," the smith called with the easy familiarity of a man greeting someone he'd known and trusted for a long time. His face had the open warmth of a man genuinely glad to see who had ridden through his gate.
"Bren," Enzo answered, his voice fractionally warmer, the way a hearth banked low sparked to life when someone added kindling. "How's your son?"
"Walking, my prince. Healer Kessen said he'd never have full use of the leg again, and he's out there chasing chickens." The smith's mouth split into a grin. "We owe you that."
"You owe me nothing. I just paid the bill."
"You sent the royal healer."
"That's a different conversation."
The smith laughed—a deep belly laugh of someone who'd argued this point with Enzo before and lost—and turned to call into the village square: "His Highness is back!"
The village mobilized.
I had seen a lot of nobles enter towns over the years.
Most of them got the careful nod, the performed deference, the cold civility of people who knew they had no choice in the matter.
I'd watched a duke ride through a Northern village once, and not a single resident had met his eyes the whole time he passed.
They'd bowed because they had to and turned away the moment they could.
This wasn’t that.
This was three children running into the road, waving wooden swords, and shouting, “Prince Lorenzo, Prince Lorenzo!” This was a woman in a flour-dusted apron, emerging from a bakery with a basket already in her hands, like she'd been keeping bread aside for the next time he came through. This was a young Fae in the doorway of a tavern raising a cup in salute, and Enzo nodding back with the smallest movement of his head that said: “Yes, I see you, yes, I’ll be by later.”
He’d clearly stopped here many, many times. And not because his rank required it.
I sat on Sugar and watched it happen, feeling something in my carefully maintained assessment of him shift sideways and refuse to right itself.
"My prince?" the smith questioned, his attention turning to me with polite curiosity, clearly having clocked the stranger on the second horse and waiting to be told what to do with her.
Enzo glanced at me. Whatever he saw on my face—and I'd decided my face was doing nothing—earned the smallest fractional adjustment of his expression before he turned back to the smith.
"My traveling companion. Nadia. She'll be with me as long as I'm here."
The smith's eyes flicked over me once, took in the leather and the blades and the slightly questionable seat on Sugar, and offered a respectful nod. "Welcome, my lady."
Those words had landed somewhere I hadn't been touched in a very long time. My lady. Decades since anyone had called me that and meant it. I hadn't realized I still recognized the shape of it.
I nodded back anyway. "Bren."
Bren's eyebrows lifted slightly when he realized I'd caught his name without an introduction, and then he was turning toward Enzo again, his expression shifting into something more serious.
"My prince. There's been trouble. The magistrate's been waiting on you to come through. One of Tharros' drivers was found dead."
Enzo's pace stilled. "Dead."
"Aye. The magistrate's been holding the body in the cellar at the Three Crowns.
Wouldn't say much beyond that to the rest of us.
Said it was for your ears." The smith glanced around the gathered villagers with the careful precision of someone who knew exactly who could hear him.
"Whatever it is, my prince, he's been waiting on you to handle it. "
Something in Enzo's expression went very still, attentive in a way he hadn't been a moment before.
"Lead on," he said.
The Three Crowns had clearly been the village's main gathering place for the better part of a century—low beams, a fire already going in the grate, three trestle tables, a long bar, and the smell of something rich and roasted from the kitchen.
We were greeted at the door by the tavern-keeper, a thin witch with gray-streaked dark hair who took one look at Enzo and went pale.
"My prince. Thank the saints."
She led us through the common room to a private chamber in the back, where a heavy older man with a chain of office around his neck was already on his feet.
"My prince," he said. The same warmth as the smith, edged now with something more raw. "I'm sorry to greet you with this. I didn't know who else to send word to that would know what to do with it."
"Tell me."
The magistrate exchanged a look with the tavern-keeper. She withdrew, closing the door behind her.
"Four days ago," the magistrate said quietly, "a supply wagon came to us from Tharros.
Standard route, standard driver—Joren Vask, you'd know him, has been driving for the province for ten years.
He never made it to the unloading yard. Found him in the cart in the eastern field at dawn the next morning, horses standing dumb in the traces. He was dead. The cart was empty."
Enzo's expression did something I almost missed—a fractional tightening at the corner of his mouth, his eyes going hard.
"The supplies?" he said.
"Every crate gone, my prince. Clean. Like the wagon had never been loaded."
"And Joren?"
The magistrate swallowed. "Throat torn out, my prince. It looked like a vampire kill."
A silence settled in the room that was different from any silence I'd been in with Enzo before. It was dense the way air went right before a storm broke.
"Where is he?"
"Kept cool in the cellar under a stasis working. We didn't—I didn't know who to send for. I didn't trust the report to anyone but you. Sent a rider to Tharros the day after, told them only that Joren had died on the road and we were holding him for the family. Didn't mention the wound."
"Good." Enzo's voice had gone tight in the particular way I was learning meant he was furious. "Show me."
The cellar was cold, which was a mercy since even the stasis spell couldn’t hide the scent of death.
Joren Vask had been a big man in life—broad shoulders, callused hands, the lined face of someone who had spent twenty years driving wagons in all weather.
In death, he was the same big man with all the life gone out of him, laid out on a long table with a clean sheet pulled up to his chin.
The magistrate drew the sheet down with the gentle reluctance of someone who'd known him.
The injury was a bloody mess.
His throat had been torn out so thoroughly that the wound went nearly to the spine. Ragged edges. Considerable blood loss. The kind of damage a vampire feeding wildly might do, if that vampire had no interest in being careful with the meal or was too crazed with hunger to give a fuck.
Enzo studied it for a long moment.
I did, too, with the long history of looking at dead bodies that came with my work and a fairly developed instinct for when someone was telling me a story that didn’t add up.
This one fit that bill to the letter.
I leaned closer. Enzo glanced at me but didn't speak.
"The wound's wrong," I murmured.
The magistrate's head came up.
"The angle," I went on, pointing without touching.
"Vampire feeding goes here." I indicated the side of the throat, where the artery ran close to the surface.
"That's where the meal is. This wound's too central.
Too low. It was opened from the front like someone meant to display it, not feed from it. "
Enzo was already nodding, his eyes on the wound. "And the depth. A feeding vampire takes what they need. This was meant to look excessive."
"And there's no bruising," I added, my voice quieter. "The skin around the wound is too clean. He didn't fight. Either he was dead before the wound was made—or he was very recently dead, and the wound happened after."
The magistrate went the color of curdled milk.
"Someone killed him," Enzo said. "Quietly. Probably from behind. Then opened his throat to make it look like one of mine had done it."
"Exactly," I said.
His eyes met mine across the body for a long, weighted moment. There was something in them I hadn't seen before, something cold and contained and absolutely terrifying if you knew what you were looking at.
"Magistrate," he said, not looking away from me. "Who else has seen the body?"
"Just me, my prince. And the boy who found him. I told him to keep his mouth shut. He will."