Enzo
“Where is she?” I asked.
“In her house,” Othen replied. “She hasn’t come out since.”
“I’ll speak with her.”
Nadia moved before Othen could answer, falling into step at my side as the magistrate led us across the square.
The village watched us pass from behind doorways and shutters, every gaze clinging to me with the desperate, silent expectation of people who’d been taught princes could fix things.
I'd never hated a belief more.
Marra Holfen’s house stood near the eastern lane, small and neat, with a bundle of drying herbs tied above the door and every shutter barred from the inside. Othen knocked once, spoke softly through the wood, and waited.
Long enough that I saw him glance at the shuttered windows and wondered if he feared she wouldn’t answer at all.
Finally, the door opened. Her husband stood on the other side, broad-shouldered, hollow-eyed, with a wood axe in one hand and exhaustion carved so deep into his face that I wondered when he'd last sat down.
He saw me and lowered the axe at once. “My prince.”
“No apologies,” I said before he could make one.
His mouth snapped shut, and he stepped aside. The house smelled of cold hearth ash, boiled herbs, old fear, and the sharp bite of vinegar someone had used to clean blood from a floor.
Marra sat by the dead fire with her hands folded on her lap.
She was small, dark-haired, and still in the way people became when they no longer trusted their own bodies. Her feet were bandaged. The cloth was clean, but not clean enough to hide the rust-colored stains beneath. Her husband stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder, his knuckles white.
Nadia stopped just inside the door, her gaze sweeping the room in a single measured pass.
The hearth, the shuttered windows, the worn floorboards, even the shadow pooled beneath Marra’s chair—nothing escaped her notice.
Only after taking in every corner did she turn her attention to the woman herself.
Marra didn’t look up.
“Lady Holfen,” I said gently.
Her fingers twitched at the sound of my voice.
“Marra,” her husband whispered. “The prince has come.”
That made her flinch.
Fuck.
I lowered myself onto the chair opposite her rather than stand over her like judgment in a coat, while Nadia remained at my shoulder, silent as smoke.
“What do you remember of that night?” I asked.
Marra’s lips parted, but nothing came out. Her husband’s hand tightened on her shoulder, and Nadia’s gaze flicked to it.
He released her immediately.
“I went to bed,” Marra said at last. Her voice was raw from too little sleep and too much terror held behind her teeth. “I remember banking the fire. I remember closing the shutters. I remember thinking I should write to my sister.”
“Your sister?” I asked gently.
“In Alderwick. The next village east,” Marra replied. She swallowed hard, her fingers twisting together on her lap. “I haven't heard from her in a fortnight.”
A flicker of worry crossed her face, and for a moment, she seemed less haunted woman and more frightened sister.
“Did you go to check on her?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered.
“Why?”
Her eyes lifted then. Brown. Exhausted. Haunted. Fear shimmered there so plainly it made my chest tighten.
“Because the road through the woods no longer feels like a road,” she said, her voice trembling. “Every time I thought about taking it, I felt...” She shook her head. “Wrong. Like something was waiting for me to step beneath the trees.”
The room fell silent.
Nadia’s breath didn't change, but something in the bond tightened enough for me to feel it. I looked at her and found her watching Marra with an intensity so absolute it might have seemed cruel to anyone who didn't know her.
But it wasn't cruelty. It was recognition.
“May I see your eyes?” I asked.
Marra’s face drained of color. Behind her, her husband made a small, strangled sound.
I waited. For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then Marra lifted her chin.
Her eyes were brown. The whites were yellowed with sleeplessness, the skin beneath them bruised by exhaustion. Whatever blackness Othen had described was gone.
Or so it seemed.
Nadia stepped closer.
“Lamp,” she said.
Othen, hovering near the door, moved at once and brought the small oil lamp from the shelf. Nadia took it without looking at him and held it near Marra’s face.
The woman trembled hard enough that the lamp glass rattled softly in Nadia’s hand.
Nadia’s voice softened by a fraction. “I won’t harm you.”
Something in Marra’s expression loosened at that, the fragile trust of someone who’d spent days waiting for the next terrible thing. She nodded once.
The lamp flame bent toward Nadia’s hand as she lifted it higher, casting a warm, uneven glow across Marra’s face.
The light struck at an angle, and then I saw it, a faint webbing beneath her eyes.
Thin dark lines spread from the inner corners across the tops of her cheekbones, delicate as veins beneath translucent skin. Pale enough that a man determined to be a fool could have mistaken them for shadows, exhaustion, anything but what they were.
I wasn't determined enough.
The marks seemed like cracks trapped beneath a sheet of winter ice, something broken deep below the surface and slowly working its way upward.
Nadia saw them, too. Her mouth tightened, and the room seemed to grow colder for it.
“What is it?” I asked.
Nadia studied the faint dark lines for another moment before lowering the lamp. The silence stretched just long enough to tighten every muscle in the room.
Marra’s husband swallowed. “My lady?”
Nadia's gaze flicked briefly to him, then back to Marra. “I’m not certain yet,” she said carefully. “But those marks shouldn't be there.”
Marra made a small, frightened sound and dropped her eyes to her lap.
I pushed to my feet before I could stop myself. If I stayed seated much longer, I was going to put my fist through the nearest wall.
Nadia glanced at me, catching the movement at once. There was a warning in her expression.
Not here. Not in front of them.
I drew a slow breath and forced myself to hold it. Then another.
“Lady Holfen,” I said, and I made my voice do what a prince’s voice was supposed to do. Hold steady. Promise only what it could deliver. “You survived it. That matters.”
Her laugh broke halfway out of her throat.
“I didn’t survive anything,” she whispered. “I went to sleep in my own bed and woke up bleeding in the woods.”
The room went quiet.
“Then you came home,” I said. “And now you're telling us what happened.”
“I didn't tell you anything,” she whispered.
“You endured it long enough for us to find it," I murmured. "And that’s not nothing."
Her eyes filled. Her husband bowed his head over her shoulder.
I wanted to kill something so badly my fangs ached.
Before I could speak, Nadia stepped forward. Her gaze moved from Marra to Othen.
“No one sleeps alone tonight,” she said. “No child. No adult. Keep hearths lit until dawn. Lamps burning wherever you have oil. Iron and salt at every threshold and every window.”
Othen nodded at once.
“And if anyone wakes and finds someone missing,” Nadia continued, “you don't go after them alone. Wake the village. Wake everyone.”
The magistrate swallowed. “Yes, my lady.”
Nadia lowered the lamp and moved away from Marra. The woman sagged with visible relief.
We stepped back into the thin daylight outside. Neither of us spoke at first. We crossed the square together, and for the first time since we had entered the village, the people's attention shifted toward her.
Toward the blades hidden beneath her coat.
Toward the shadows that seemed to gather more carefully near her boots.
Toward the woman who’d looked at their fear and given it a name.
By the time we reached Sugar, the weight of the village’s stare had followed us across the square, clinging to my back. To Nadia’s coat. To the space where the shadows gathered too neatly near her boots. I stopped with one hand on the saddle.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked quietly, in dialect.
Nadia glanced toward the eastern woods. The shadows there didn’t move. But they listened.
“That,” she said, also in dialect, “was not a haunting.”
My grip tightened on the saddle leather. “What was it?”
Her eyes stayed on the trees. “A wide-open fucking door.”
For one breath, the village square seemed to tilt under my boots, the words sliding through me cold and sharp, and every wrong thing I had seen since the boundary stone arranged itself into one ugly pattern.
Fields forgetting how to grow. Animals vanishing behind latched gates. Children waking with opened hands. A woman walking barefoot into the woods with black eyes and no memory of what had taken her there.
A door open in my province. Open wide enough for something to reach through.
I looked toward the eastern tree line and let myself feel the full force of it for exactly one heartbeat. Then I turned away before the fury could show.
“Geren.”
My master at arms was already moving before I finished saying his name. Sixty years in my service had taught him when I was giving orders and when I was one breath away from tearing something apart with my hands.
“My prince.”
“Six riders under your second,” I said. “They hold this village until reinforcements arrive from the seat. No one enters the eastern woods for any reason. Not to hunt. Not to search. Not to prove courage to someone with fewer brain cells than teeth.”
Geren’s expression didn't change. “Yes, my prince.”
“Marra Holfen doesn’t leave her house alone after sundown. No one sleeps alone tonight. No child. No adult. The children’s hands are checked morning and evening, and every new cut is reported to Othen and to whoever commands the riders I leave behind.”
Behind me, a murmur moved through the square. Fear. Relief. And not enough of either.