Enzo
The light through the canopy was wrong.
Autumn sun still slanted through the branches at the proper angle, catching on bark and stone and the copper leaves that clung stubbornly to the higher limbs. The hour was right. The season was right. The road beneath Sugar’s hooves curved exactly where it had curved for centuries.
And still, the forest didn't look like itself.
The shadows beneath the trees held too much dark.
They gathered in the hollows between roots and beneath the low sweep of branches as if the earth had drawn a breath and forgotten to release it.
Even the river below the slope sounded muted, its usual rush softened into something distant and muffled, though I knew we rode no farther from it than we ever had.
I'd taken this road as a boy, as a prince, as a commander returning from border disputes with blood on my coat and reports waiting at the seat.
I knew where the pines thinned. Where the deer crossed.
Where the hill dipped enough for the western tower of Tharros to appear, dark against the sky, long before the rest of the city showed itself.
This was my province, my road, my forest. It should have known me. Instead, it watched.
Nadia sat in front of me on Sugar, reins loose in her hands, her body quiet in that particular way of hers that meant every part of her was listening.
Her attention had been fixed on the woods to our left since we passed the old boundary stone an hour ago, where the land began its long slope toward the river and the trees grew thick enough to swallow sound.
She hadn't spoken since, and that was answer enough.
The bond between us remained steady beneath my sternum, a low, warm presence I'd begun to carry without thinking, the way a man carried his own pulse. Beneath that warmth, something in her had gone cool and precise.
Recognition.
That unsettled me more than alarm or uncertainty ever could have. She had brushed against something she expected to find, and its shape had matched too closely for comfort.
Her fingers tightened once on the reins, then loosened.
I felt her reach toward the shadows along the road—that careful extension of her attention into places I could see but not enter.
The shadows answered badly.
I knew by the stillness that settled through her. By the way her breath didn't change. By the way every dangerous part of her went quiet at once.
She didn't turn to look at me. She didn't have to. I shifted one hand from the reins to her hip and left it there, a steady point of contact between us.
The forest pressed close around the road.
Ahead, Aldric rode with his back straight, his captain’s cloak falling clean from his shoulders, every inch of him arranged into duty. Too arranged.
The road bent south and the shadows bent with it. Somewhere beneath the trees of my own province, something that didn't belong here moved carefully enough that even the birds had decided not to sing.
We reached the village in the early afternoon.
I hadn't intended to stop.
The provincial seat was still days ahead, and every mile between us and Tharros proper sat beneath a silence that had begun to feel less like absence and more like patience.
But the village lay close against the road, tucked into the fold between two low hills, with its small square open to travelers and its fields sloping east toward the river.
I knew this place. Othen’s Ford.
Twenty-seven households. Three wells. One shrine to Evara beneath an ash tree old enough to have watched my grandfather ride this road.
Barley on the eastern slope. Oats in the lower fields.
A narrow bridge that flooded every fifth spring and had been rebuilt twice in my lifetime because the villagers were too stubborn to abandon it and I was too sentimental to make them.
It should have smelled of bread, damp wool, livestock, and late harvest. Instead, it smelled thin.
It was ash from morning hearths, mud, and rot beneath the sweetness of fallen pears. No chickens scratched near the square. No children watched from the low stone wall beside the shrine.
The ash tree still stood, its branches half-bare for autumn, but every leaf left on it had curled inward as if the tree were trying to keep something from touching it.
Fuck.
I drew Sugar to a halt as Nadia went very still in front of me as if she were listening to something even I couldn't hear.
Aldric reined in at the head of the column, already turning before I spoke, his captain’s eyes moving over the square, the shuttered windows, the empty pens beside the lane.
The magistrate came out to meet us before I had decided whether to call for him. Othen had held this post for seventeen years, a narrow-shouldered man with careful records, careful manners, and the unfortunate habit of apologizing when rain fell on days I visited.
He bowed correctly. Low enough for respect, not so low it wasted time.
“My prince.”
“Magistrate Othen.”
He offered water for the horses. Shade in the square. Space for the column to rest before the next stretch of road. Every word was proper. Every courtesy exactly where it belonged.
But he didn't meet my eyes.
Anger moved through me at whatever had taught a man in my province to look at my boots while his fields failed around him.
I dismounted.
Nadia stayed on Sugar, reins loose in her hands, her gaze drifting over the village with the lazy stillness of a knife deciding where to fall. Through the bond, her attention sharpened along the edges of the square, touching shutter gaps, empty alleys, the dark beneath the shrine steps.
She didn't like this place one bit and neither did I.
“How are your fields?” I asked, scenting the rot on the air before the magistrate could decide to lie to me.
Othen swallowed, the answer already on his face.
“Honestly,” I demanded, before he could dress the truth in something meant to survive a report.
His hands folded tighter in front of him. “The eastern fields have begun to fail, my prince.”
The words landed like a blade drawn slowly from a sheath.
“The barley came in forty bushels short of last year’s count,” Othen said, his voice steady only because he was forcing it. “The oats in the lower section didn't come in at all.”
“At all,” I repeated.
“No, my prince.”
I looked past him to the lower fields. From the road, they should have been stubbled and gold-brown by now, cut low for harvest, with stacked sheaves drying near the lane.
Instead, a grayish wash lay over the earth, neither frost nor flood damage nor any blight I recognized, but something else entirely—a quiet, creeping wrongness.
“What did the soil say?”
“Our local green witch read it twice.” Othen’s eyes flicked up to mine at last, then away. “Ordinary. The rains were ordinary. No souring. No rot at the root. No worm sign. The seed came in clean, sprouted clean, and then…” He stopped.
“Then?”
His throat worked. “Then the field seemed to forget it was meant to grow.”
For one breath, the whole square held still.
A village magistrate shouldn't have had to say a thing like that to his prince, and a prince shouldn't have had to understand exactly what he meant. I felt Nadia’s attention sharpen against my back, cold and precise, while the shadows beneath the eaves didn't so much as twitch.
I wished they had. Movement would have given me something to kill, and I really wanted to kill something right about then.
“Forty bushels short on barley,” I said. “No oats in the lower field. What else?”
Othen hesitated.
There it was—the thing he hadn't wanted to say with Aldric sitting ten paces behind me and half the village listening from behind closed shutters.
I said nothing. Sometimes command was nothing more than silence held longer than comfort allowed. I'd learned that lesson young.
Othen broke first. “Animals have gone missing from the upper pens, my prince,” he said, his voice tightening.
“Taken by wolves?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head quickly.
“Men?”
“No sign of men.” His hands clenched together.
“Then say what you mean,” I said, my patience thinning as unease settled heavier in my chest.
His fingers flexed once. “Not killed. Missing. Gates closed in the morning. Latches still set. No blood. No wool caught on the rails. No hoofprints outside the enclosure.”
“How many?”
“Six head over the last two weeks.”
My jaw tightened.
Two weeks. Six animals didn't simply vanish from a village this size in two weeks unless something had settled in and decided it belonged there more than the people did.
He saw it and paled, but he continued. Good man.
“A pig three nights ago,” he said. “A milking goat this morning.”
Nadia’s breath didn't change, but through the bond, something in her went very quiet. The kind of quiet that made every instinct I possessed turn toward her.
But I didn't look. Not yet.
“Predator sign?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“None, my prince,” Othen said. “The dogs barked the first night. After that, they hid.”
Gods fucking damn it.
I turned my head slightly, enough to see the nearest cottage from the corner of my eye. A shutter shifted, barely enough to count as movement if a man wanted to deny it later.
People were listening, and I didn’t blame them. This was their village. Their animals. Their fields. Their children locked indoors in the middle of the day because something had taught the dogs to hide.
I held Othen’s gaze when he finally raised it. “What else?”
His face closed, but I’d seen the rest of it. Nadia had, too. I felt her attention settle on him, terrible in its patience.
Othen glanced once toward Aldric.
There.
A single glance. Small. Instinctive. Gone almost before it existed. Aldric sat motionless at the head of the column, his expression unreadable, his horse perfectly still beneath him.
I stepped closer to Othen and lowered my voice. “What else, Magistrate?”
His mouth trembled once before he controlled it. “My prince…”
“Say it.”
This time, when Othen faced me, he held my eyes. The fear taking residence there wasn’t for his fields.
His gaze cut toward the small, thatched houses at the edge of the square. A woman stood in one doorway; one shoulder braced against the frame as if she had forgotten how to stand without support. She held a small boy on her hip.
His hands were bandaged. Both of them. White cloth wrapped around fingers too small to have earned that much blood. Something in me went very still.
“The children,” Othen said quietly.
Nadia dismounted before I asked. Her boots hit the packed earth without a sound, and Sugar, for once in her contrary life, didn’t protest being abandoned. Nadia crossed to my side without hurry or flourish, but every eye in the village seemed to find her anyway.
“What about the children?” I asked.
Othen’s throat worked. “Some of them have been waking with cuts.”
Nadia’s attention sharpened beside me. “Where?” she asked.
The magistrate startled at her voice, then looked at me.
“She asked you a question,” I said. “You’d better answer it.”
His face paled. “Their hands, my lady. Palms. Fingers. Some across the inside of the wrist, though none deep enough to kill. Small cuts. Clean cuts.”
“How many children?” Nadia asked.
“Perhaps a dozen.”
A dozen. The number struck harder than it should have. A dozen children in one village waking with opened hands and no memory of the blade.
Fuck.
I didn't look at the boy in the doorway even though I wanted to. I wanted to cross the square, take his little bandaged hands in mine, and promise his mother that whatever had touched him would never do so again.
But promises were easy things for princes to make in frightened villages. Keeping them required blood.
“How long?” I asked.
“Perhaps a fortnight, my prince. Perhaps less. The first mothers thought the children had scratched themselves in sleep, or hidden accidents from the day. Then more woke bleeding.”
Nadia’s gaze moved slowly over the houses.
Shutters cracked just wide enough for eyes. Pale faces in the gaps. A little girl half-hidden behind a grandmother’s skirts, one hand wrapped in a strip of linen. A boy near the well with his fingers tucked beneath his arms as if he could hide the bandages by holding still enough.
No children playing. No dogs barking. No laughter. Only a village holding its breath around its own young.
Nadia cursed viciously under her breath.
“There’s more.” Othen swallowed again. “Marra Holfen, my prince. Three nights ago.”
At the doorway, the woman holding the boy looked away, and this time it wasn't fear that crossed her face. It was recognition.
Gods damn it.
“We found Marra at the edge of the eastern woods at first light,” Othen said. “She'd walked there in the night. Barefoot. Her feet were bleeding from the stones.”
Nadia went utterly still, like a blade hearing its name spoken from another room.
“Her eyes,” Othen said, then stopped. “They were black, my lady. Wholly black. No white. No iris. Nothing.”
The square seemed to lose what little warmth the sun had given it. Even the horses quieted. I didn't breathe for a beat. Beside me, Nadia’s face revealed nothing, but the bond went cold enough to hurt.
She knew this.
Because apparently every road in my province now led to something that had already put its hands on her life.
Othen said that by midday, her eyes had returned. Marra remembered nothing. Not leaving her bed. Not the woods. Not the blood on her feet. She hadn’t slept since.
The words were calm. The meaning was not.
A woman taken from her bed. Children opened in the night. Animals gone without tracks. Fields forgetting how to grow.
My territory wasn't falling apart. It was being tested. Touched. Tasted. And whatever had done it had been careful enough to leave everyone alive.
So far.