Enzo #2
I kept my voice level because anything else would have been cruelty.
“Send a rider to the seat tonight. Tell them I want a fealty-sworn sorceress from the third district here within two days to ward this place.
Tell them I'm bringing the column south and will arrive in four. Tell them to ready the keep.”
Geren gave one sharp nod. “And Aldric?”
There it was. Quiet. Careful. The question beneath the question that should have been asked fucking weeks ago. I didn't look toward my captain.
“Captain Aldric rides with me.”
Geren absorbed that without so much as a flicker. “Yes, my prince.”
He turned and began moving soldiers with the efficient brutality of someone who’d understood the village before I had finished speaking to the magistrate.
I crossed back to Sugar and mounted behind Nadia and gathered the reins.
“How long?” I asked in dialect.
Nadia’s answer came low. “Three weeks at the outside. Possibly less. Whoever is operating in your woods has been working fast.”
“How fast does it have to spread before it is no longer reversible?”
She was silent long enough that my hands tightened on the reins. “For the children, weeks,” she said at last. “For Marra? Days.”
The word went through me like a knife.
“Days?”
“Yes.” Her voice stayed steady, which made it worse. “She’s closer to the edge than you saw.”
I looked once toward Marra’s house. The door was shut again. The shutters barred. A man inside with an axe and a woman afraid of sleep. Then I turned my attention toward the road.
“Then we ride faster.”
We made the ridge above the stream by sunset.
I pushed the pace harder than the horses liked.
The last hour of daylight became a controlled gallop wherever the road allowed it, the column stretching long behind us, wagons rattling over stone, men riding with their heads down and their mouths shut because none of them were fools enough to complain.
By the time we reached the ridge, the horses were lathered, the men were exhausted, and the western sky had gone red behind the black teeth of the trees.
I didn't apologize.
Geren had camp forming before the last wagon cleared the rise.
Fires at the four cardinal points. Wagons drawn into a defensive half-ring where the ridge dropped south into the trees.
Horse line to the north. Aldric’s tent to the east. Mine and Geren’s to the west. Watches doubled before anyone asked whether they should be.
Good. Let them be tired. Tired men could still hold steel. Dead men could not.
I didn't sit. I didn't eat. I walked the perimeter while Vessa carved the ward-stones, because if I stood still too long, I was going to start thinking about bandaged children and black eyes and a road that no longer felt like a road.
Vessa was small, old, mean as winter bramble, and loyal enough that I would have trusted her with my throat open and my enemies in the room. She didn't need supervision.
I watched anyway. I needed to see the wards close.
She carved the eastern stone last, her knife moving through the surface with short, practical strokes.
No ceremony. No muttering. Vessa considered theatrics a sign of weak training and had once told a court witch half her age that if he needed candles to find his own magic, he had no business using it indoors.
The ward took.
A low hum moved through the stones at my feet, soft but whole, and for the first time since Othen’s Ford, something in my chest loosened by a fraction.
Across the camp, Nadia felt it, too.
I knew because her attention brushed mine for half a heartbeat—brief approval carried through the bond, cold and practical as ever.
Very Nadia.
I crossed back through camp as evening settled.
Men moved in tired silence. Leather creaked. Horses blew hard through their noses and tugged at their lines. Smoke from the fires dragged low over the ridge before the wind took it, and beyond the ring of light, the forest waited with the wrong sort of patience.
Nadia stood at the eastern edge of the ridge, looking into the trees.
The last light had turned the world gold, as late autumn light loved to do, gilding the grass, the stones, the curve of her cheek, and the dark fall of her hair.
Yet beneath the canopy, the shadows remained untouched by it—too dark, too dense, the wrong color entirely.
I came to stand beside her, and for a moment, neither of us spoke.
Below the ridge, the woods sloped toward a narrow stream I could hear but not see.
I had camped here before. Hunted here. Sent patrols through this pass a hundred times.
At this hour, the trees should have been full of evening sound—birds settling, insects rasping, small things moving through brush before full dark.
There was none of it.
Only the stream. Only the fires behind us. Only Nadia breathing once, slowly, as if she were tasting the air and hated the flavor.
“The seepage is worse here,” she said in dialect.
I looked at her. She didn't look away from the trees.
“The deep is bleeding through the canopy. I haven't felt it like this since I was a child.”
The words settled between us, quiet and devastating.
Since she was a child.
Since before the hiding. Before the running. Before she became the woman beside me because the girl she had been had no other way to survive.
My province had no right to make her say that.
“How close?” I asked.
“Close.” Her gaze moved along the tree line. “Somewhere east. Within an hour’s walk.”
The fires cracked behind us. Aldric’s voice carried faintly from the other side of camp, calm and competent, giving some order I didn't bother to hear.
Nadia did. Her eyes shifted once toward the sound, then back to the trees. “I need to scout.”
“No.” The word left me before command could polish it.
She turned her head then. Slowly. The look she gave me should have cut something. It probably did.
But I didn't take it back.
“You are my mate, not my king,” she said. “And I have orders, too.”
Gods help me, I hated the steadiness in her voice.
“I’m giving you one now.”
“No.” Her mouth twitched without humor. “You’re trying to. There’s a difference.”
We hadn't had this argument yet, but it had been waiting for us since the village. Since Marra’s eyes. Since the boy with the bandaged hands. Since Nadia had looked at my woods and seen a door where I saw only trees.
I couldn't go with her.
The camp couldn't lose both of us. Aldric sat across the firelight at his own tent, composed into perfect duty, the very picture of a loyal captain waiting for his prince’s next order. If I disappeared into the shadows with Nadia, he would know we knew.
And if he knew, whatever held his leash would know by morning.
Nadia watched me reach the conclusion and she didn’t soften and inch. That would have been easier to hate.
“You will not engage,” I demanded, scrabbling for control in a situation where I had none.
“If I have to, I will.” Her eyes never left mine. “But I won’t start anything.”
The answer landed like a blade between my ribs. Every part of me rejected it.
The prince who couldn’t afford to lose his most valuable ally. The commander who knew exactly how many things could go wrong in those woods. The man who’d spent years learning how to survive loss. The mate who wanted to drag her back from the tree line and lock every gate between her and the dark.
All of them.
The bond carried it too easily—fear, anger, helplessness, all tangled together into something sharp enough to choke on.
And beneath its steady warmth, I felt her frustration answering mine.
Not directed at me, but at the shape of the choice itself. At being the only one who could walk into those shadows and return with answers. At knowing I would let her go because the alternative was worse.
Because people were already suffering. Because children were bleeding. Because my fear, no matter how fiercely it burned, couldn’t be allowed to matter more than the lives depending on us.
Fuck.
I caught her wrist, and she let me.
That nearly undid me more than if she had pulled away.
I drew her in hard and fast, one hand at the small of her back, my mouth against her temple.
Not long enough to be comfort—not with half the camp watching and treason sitting by the eastern fires—but long enough to feel the warmth of her skin and let the bond carry what I couldn’t let myself say aloud.
Come back.
Her fingers tightened once around my sleeve, a brief pressure that carried its own answer.
I will.
Then she stepped away.
The shadows at the base of the nearest tree thickened around her boots, gathering as though called. For one terrible second, the forest seemed to recognize her.
Then the darkness folded around her.
And she was gone.