Nadia #2
"Tell him again. Tell him from me. And the body—I want him buried by tomorrow morning, deep, with a sealed grave. No questions. The wound stays in this cellar. Are we understood?"
"Yes, my prince. I know a good witch who can seal it and won’t ask questions if she knows it comes from you."
"Good." Enzo’s attention finally left me and settled on Joren. His voice softened, just slightly. "He has family in Tharros. I'll see to them personally when I arrive. They'll be told he died on the road in an accident with the horses. I'll handle the rest."
"Thank you, my prince."
"Don't thank me. We failed him." His jaw worked once. "I'll find who did this."
I'd never in my life heard a noble say “We failed him” about a wagon driver. I'd heard nobles say a great many things about the people who served them, and “We failed him” had never been any of them.
I took in Joren Vask's quiet face on the cellar table and felt something tighten in my chest that had no business being there at all.
Enzo pulled the sheet back up gently. His hand rested for one second on the dead man's shoulder before he turned away.
"I need to make arrangements," he said. "Travel papers. A message to Tharros. It'll take an hour."
I mentally rearranged everything I thought I knew about Enzo. His father had once told me that Enzo didn’t have the temperament to be king, but that was patently false. He understood ruling a province a fuck of a lot better than most nobles I’d ever come across.
"Of course,” I said. “Take what you need."
He held my gaze for one more moment, the weight of what we'd just seen passing between us without words. Then he was gone, the magistrate following him out, leaving me in the cellar with a dead man and a problem that was suddenly much larger than I'd ridden in with.
I didn't stay in the cellar.
I'd seen what I needed to see, and standing over the body of a man I hadn’t known wasn't going to help anyone, least of all him.
I followed the magistrate and Enzo back up the stairs into the common room of the Three Crowns, watched Enzo settle at a corner table with parchment and ink that the tavern-keeper produced from somewhere with no prompting, and slipped out the front door into the village square.
The afternoon had gone overcast.
The village was small enough that I could see most of it from the square—the smithy with its smoke, the bakery with the woman in the flour-dusted apron now serving a small line of customers, the saddler with its sign creaking faintly in the wind, the long, low building that must have been the unloading yard the magistrate had mentioned.
Three children chased each other around the village well, shouting.
A dog slept in a patch of weak sunlight.
I let the shadows tell me all about it.
Surface shadows, mostly—doorways, alleys, the long line where the bakery roof met the smithy's wall, the dim corner under the awning of the saddler.
I pressed gently, just listening, the way I'd pressed against a hundred thousand shadows in a hundred thousand cities, and the village told me its small business in the way villages always did.
A woman in the bakery worrying about her sister's lying-in.
Two men at the smithy arguing about a horse.
The magistrate, faintly, in the back room of the Three Crowns, telling Enzo about three other deaths along this trade route in the last six months that nobody had thought to connect.
Three.
I went still.
I pressed a little harder.
—another one in Veylan. The driver was found in the river, but his cargo was missing. Same wagons. Same routes—
—and at Marston. They said it was bandits, but no bandits I've ever heard of took every crate and left the horses—
—thought we were the only ones, my prince. Thought it was just us—
Enzo's voice, quiet and absolutely controlled: Show me everything.
I withdrew.
This wasn’t a single killing. This was a pattern.
Someone had been systematically diverting supplies from Tharros for at least six months, killing the drivers and dressing the kills to look like vampires.
Which meant someone in Tharros was either letting it happen or making it happen.
Which meant the man I was traveling with had a problem considerably larger than he'd been told about, and we still had two weeks of road between us and the source.
I exhaled slowly.
And then, because I am who I am, I went looking for the saddler. Not because I needed anything. Because if I was going to spend another two weeks on Sugar, I wanted to know what a properly fitted saddle would have cost.
The bell over the saddler's door announced me into a warm shop that smelled of oiled leather and beeswax. A young man behind the counter—apprentice age, his hands stained dark from his work— lifted his head and smiled politely.
"Afternoon, miss. Can I help you?"
I drifted toward the wall of saddles. "Just looking. What's the wait on a custom fit?"
"Three weeks, miss. Master Hilden's the only one in the region who does the fine work, and he's just one man." He smiled apologetically. "I told the prince the same when his sending came through. He wasn't best pleased to get the answer."
I stilled.
"His sending?" I asked.
"Aye, miss. Came through a few days back, asking after a saddle for a"—He gestured vaguely at my general dimensions—"smaller rider.
Wanted something ready by the time the prince came through with the lady he was traveling with.
Master Hilden's got nothing in stock that would fit anyone your size, and a custom takes the time it takes.
We sent word back saying as much. The prince's reply said he'd manage.
" The apprentice tilted his head. "I think he was hoping we'd surprise him. "
"And there's nothing," I said. My voice came out perfectly even, which was good, because my chest had gone strange.
"Nothing that would fit, miss. I'm sorry. Master Hilden could rush a custom in two weeks if you wanted to leave a measurement, but I don't expect you'll be in the village that long."
"No," I said. "We won't."
I made polite conversation for another minute that I couldn’t have repeated under torture. Thanked the apprentice. Left the shop. Stood on the front step of the saddler with the bell still chiming softly behind me and tried to make sense of the thing in my chest.
Enzo had sent a message to this village somewhere on the road, asking after a saddle that would fit me.
He hadn't mentioned it.
He'd failed, and he hadn't mentioned that, either.
Which meant he'd been thinking about me—about my comfort, about my body on a horse he already knew I couldn't ride—at some point in the past three days.
Probably alone. Probably while I'd been pretending to sleep.
He'd sent his attention out into the dark on my behalf, gotten “no” for an answer, and never said a word.
I didn't know what to do with this information.
I had a long history of training in what to do with information of any kind, and not one moment of it had prepared me for the specific, narrow, devastating problem of Enzo quietly trying to make my life less uncomfortable and not bothering to inform me of the attempt.
I stepped off the saddler's stoop into the village square.
And someone inside the shadow on the far side of the square was watching me. Not casually. Not the absent glance of a stranger registering another stranger and moving on. This was the still, patient attention of someone who knew how not to be noticed.
I didn't have to look twice to know what it meant. My past had finally caught up to me.
And it had brought a knife.