Rune started to ask her what it was, but a sapphire thread snagged on a leaf caught his eye. Then, other signs of Princess Johanne’s passage presented themselves: trampled grass, broken twigs—even a strand of golden hair, glimmering in a shaft of sunlight. The clouds, which had come on so quickly, were breaking up now.
He signaled his men. “John, take the lead.” John was the best tracker in the company. “Swifthand, could you identify the body?”
The lieutenant’s face was green with the need to be sick, but he nodded. “I believe it was Devon Bearhaste, Your Highness.”
Lady Nadine gave a small meep of horror.
How strange to think of the man being dead. They’d just been sitting beside each other at lunch. They’d made polite conversation, traded pleasantries. “Are you certain?”
“Reasonably,” the lieutenant said. “I won’t describe it, for the lady’s sake—”
“Thank you.” Rune wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.
“But the Bearhaste crest was on the jacket. I don’t know how he”—Swifthand swallowed hard—”got like that so quickly, but…”
A few of the men shifted uncomfortably.
“All right.” Rune nodded toward John. “Let’s find the princess. Keep a wary eye out for the creature.” But with the sunlight returning and the birdsong beginning again, it seemed the immediate danger had passed—at least for them.
It wasn’t long before they began to uncover what had happened to Princess Johanne.
“She must have been in a blind panic,” muttered John, following her trail. “She zigzags a little, probably moving toward the clearest route, but every time she started to turn toward the road again, she cut north for no reason.”
A sense of terrible foreboding stalked Rune as the group followed after John. He’d heard the grim stories—the ones his parents and the other Caberwilline nobility dismissed as paranoid rumors and fearmongering—but to potentially be caught up in one of them…It was a different thing entirely. It was far more frightening than exciting.
“Halt!” John called ahead. “Everyone stay where you are.”
The party halted.
John turned to Rune and jerked his head. “Your Highness.”
Rune approached cautiously. He and John weren’t close anymore—not after the incident with Rune’s brother—but he’d always trusted the man’s instincts.
Immediately, Rune saw what had John so concerned.
Yellow.
Ribbons fluttered in the breeze, the tiny bells clinking every time a gust came through. The yellow silk was picked at and faded in some places, but still bright enough for anyone to notice. And if they somehow didn’t, there were those bells, crafted from a lightweight metal developed solely for this purpose. Bells attached to these yellow ribbons were the only ones in the world to use this particular alloy and make this particular tone, because they needed to be recognizable to anyone from any kingdom.
Lady Nadine pushed her way between the guards. “What—Oh.”
On the other side of the ribbon-bound trees, there was only a faint shimmer in the air, a suggestion that something wasn’t right. It could have been heat ripples. It could have been his eyes watering. It could have been any perfectly natural thing—if not for the yellow line.
Then: “Hanne!”
Lady Nadine surged toward the malsite in a flurry of emerald silk, but a guard—Daniel—grabbed her just as she reached the line of ribbons. She struggled, yelling raggedly for Princess Johanne. Manicured fingernails scraped across the guard’s cheek, but he ignored it as he hauled the lady-in-waiting away from the yellow line. Other men-at-arms moved to block her way if she somehow escaped and tried again. Still, Lady Nadine fought and strained, an anguished shriek tearing from her throat.
“Lady Nadine.” Rune clenched his jaw as he stepped forward, empathy welling up inside. He knew that panic, that sense of utter dread; he knew every horrible thought the lady-in-waiting must be having. If Princess Johanne had been too frightened to notice the warning…“My lady, please. Throwing yourself into a malsite won’t help. If you cannot control yourself, Captain Oliver will remove you to your carriage.”
Slowly, Lady Nadine came back to her senses, but her whole body began to tremble, both with the realization of what she’d almost done and with the truth about her cousin. “Oh Ulsisi,” she groaned, and her knees buckled. If the Numen of Pain and Sorrow heard her cry, they didn’t move to help.
Daniel did, though. He held her upright, gentle in spite of the fact that they were enemies. “I’ll stay with her,” he said. “Captain Oliver and I will make sure she doesn’t…” He glanced at the malsite.
“Good.” Rune nodded, then lifted his voice. “Everyone else, search the perimeter. Double up, in case the creature is still nearby. Look for footprints, broken plants—anything that might indicate the princess went around the malsite—but do not cross the yellow line.”
The law was the same in all three kingdoms: malsite warnings should be posted ten paces outside the actual site, but it wasn’t always ten paces exactly. It was difficult, and dangerous, to measure for and place these warnings. Not to mention that Rune’s stride was longer than, say, Nadine’s, so ten paces was different for each of them. And anyway, most of the lines had been made four hundred years ago, after the last Incursion, and no one had ever volunteered to remeasure the distance from the yellow lines to the malsites.
These malsites were the scars of that event, that last Incursion: any time the Malstop flickered, globules of darkness spewed across the world. As malice had the self-attracting properties of quicksilver, it gathered, built upon itself, and formed malsites. They all should have been cleared away—they always had been after other Incursions—but the Red Dawn…So much pain had come from that.
Rune joined the search around the yellow line, but without much hope. The only trail they saw went straight into the malsite.
Nevertheless, they scoured the area, calling the princess’s name as the sun drifted westward and evening began to close in. No one went past the yellow line, but when Rune came back around after his latest circuit, he found Lady Nadine slumped on an exposed root, her hands covering her face as she sobbed. Daniel and Captain Oliver stood over her uncertainly.
Rune knelt in front of the young lady, waving the guards to join the search.
“I’m sorry,” Rune said, and it was the truth. Lady Nadine clearly loved Princess Johanne. She admired the princess in the same way Rune had admired his brother, all warmth and respect and willingness to follow him anywhere.
Although the girls weren’t sisters by blood, he imagined them growing up similarly to Opi and him: sharing studies, training, and trouble; trading gossip and tips for surviving in court; fighting about things that didn’t matter.