She gave a doubtful sniff. “Are you certain? Whoever has your wife and the queen could demand half the kingdom’s treasury, and you’d pay it without hesitating.”
He’d bankrupt three kingdoms to get them back if necessary. “True, but they’d have a hard time spending all that wealth in any meaningful way without drawing attention.”
The trek down the drover path was slow as they followed the tracks made by the haywain in the drying mud. To their left, the trees thickened into a black wall of towering limbs with tufts of underbrush carpeting the forest floor. The fields to the right gave way to more woodland until they were hemmed in on two sides.As Dendarah continued to track, Brishen took up lead guard while Anhuset covered the rear.
The tracks didn’t veer or change as the path led deeper into the woods. Brishen held up a fist to signal a stop, pointing to where the road made a slight bend. A haywain stood parked to one side, its concealing tarp thrown back, the horse to pull the contraption gone.
Weapons readied, the three crept forward, staying between their horses as they drew closer to the wagon. They halted at the sight of a figure slumped not far from the rear of the haywain. Brishen motioned for his companions to stay put while he tracked a semicircle around the person, arrow ready to fly if they so much as twitched. He nudged it with his boot and the body rolled over with a soft thud. Brishen pivot slowly to peer into the concealing underbrush before gesturing for Dendarah and Anhuset to join him.
Dendarah bent for a closer look. “The haywain’s driver I presume.” She pointed to the dead human’s head, not far from the body. He stared up at the dimming stars with sightless eyes. “Whoever beheaded him must have considered his usefulness ended.”
Anhuset gestured to the haywain with a jerk of her chin. “That rattletrap of a wagon is held together by a prayer and some rotten string.” She pointed to the dead man. “And by the look of him, he didn’t have two coins to rub together. Not likely a robbery.”
“Someone who needed help for a price but didn’t want a witness spilling knowledge about the task later.” Brishen tried not to let his fear race away with his reason and make assumptions. “Then again, maybe the horse was of value. If not to pawn, then maybe to eat.” While the second wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, the feeling of the first rang truer.
Undeterred by the filthy state of the man’s clothes or his lack of a head, Dendarah patted him down from shoulders to ankles, pulling aside his tunic to check inside and did the same for his ragged trousers. Her search yielded a reward when she located a pocket sewn into the tunic.
Brishen growled low in his throat at the sight of the delicate flower carved from white moonstone hanging from royal guard’s claws by a length of broken chain. Fury threatened to swallow him whole as he took it from her with a shaking hand.
Anhuset reached out and lightly tapped the flower. “Is that Ildiko’s?”
“Yes.” Brishen hissed the word between his teeth. His instinct was right, confirmed in a way that made his heart jolt. The memory of Ildiko’s delighted expression when he gave her the necklace tortured him as did his imagining the human yanking it hard enough from her slender neck to break the chain. He slammed a foot into the corpse’s leg, wishing he was alive so he could be the one to kill him.
Dendarah completed her search, finding nothing else among the dead man’s clothes, and moved on to scrutinize the ground around him. She pointed to a strip of grass at the road’s edge where it had been flattened into the soft ground. “Someone else, smaller and lighter lay here.” She bent for a closer look. “They’re barefoot. At some point, they lay on their belly, then their side.” She crept forward a few footsteps and ran across another spoor. “They stood here.”
Anhuset added her own tracking to Dendarah’s, noting more tracks—this time hoofprints—crossing the road from the woodland to their right. “One rider joined by a second one in short order.” She traced the path from which they emerged, disappearing into the brush that stood knee-high under the whispering trees.
Brishen tucked the necklace behind the padding of his hauberk and left Dendarah for an inspection of the haywain. The rickety cart groaned in agony when he climbed onto the deck. The tarp that once covered it offered up no clues, but the deck did. Tiny spots of blood speckled the wood slats along with knotted threads of fine linen that had caught in raised splinters. Someone had lain here, possibly bound, shifting positions so that the deck’s dry wood caught skin and fabric, tearing both in places. His claws caught on a few strands of hair. Long and wavy, they appeared a dark gray under the moonlight, but he’d bet his remaining eye they would gleam red in the sunlight.
He shoved aside the grim images that rolled through his mind’s eye. He’d be no help to either Ildiko or Tarawin by tying himself into knots over what might be happening to them now, but his gut roiled as he gently wound the hair around one of his fingers. Whoever had taken Ildiko had passed her to their human accomplice somewhere beyond Saggara’s border. He’d tossed her into this wagon and taken the quiet drover road that led deeper into Kai territory instead of away from it. There were still no signs of Tarawin.
“Look who I found grazing nearby.” Anhuset emerged from the wood, leading a thin dun horse by a frayed halter. “Having a meal instead of being one.” She scowled at the dead man. “I bet that arse-wipe kept this horse half-starved and overworked. Good riddance.” She tipped her head back to the forest behind her. “It’s as I thought. One rider came through first, followed by a second. Both stopped here, probably just long enough to kill the driver and retrieve the hercegesé.”
Dendarah joined Anhuset for a moment before following the hoofprints where they disappeared into the woodland on the other side of the road. Her shadowy form melted into the landscape.
Anhuset watched her go. “Whoever has the queen and the hercegesé, they’re either careless or in a hurry or both. They didn’t have much time to put any decent distance between them and Saggara before you called a hunt. Even on a strong, fast horse, they wouldn’t get far, and they lost time by concealing her in the haywain.”
Brishen wished it were that straightforward. “Or they’ll hide and bide their time as we search. If they went through the woods, the underbrush would make their tracks more visible. With two riders, they can split up, taking Ildiko one way and Tarawin another.” That would make things so much harder.
“They’ll extract more ransom from you if they keep them together instead of making you choose.”
The thought of having to choose between his wife and his daughter made him physically sick. “I don’t think it’s ransom they want. If so, they would have left a message of some kind at Saggara where we’d see it and instructions for what to do next. We have nothing.”
Keeping company with a corpse while waiting for Dendarah to return wasn’t soothing Brishen’s anger or calming his fears. He paced, pausing at times to scrutinize the spoor they already found or search the haywain yet again. He almost shouted his relief when the tracker emerged from the wood, farther up the road from where he and Anhuset stood. She jogged toward them on silent feet.
“Two horses, both heading east. If I were familiar with the horses, I might be able to tell if one was carrying a second rider, but with just hoofprints to go by, it’s impossible.”
Brishen shrugged and turned to retrieve his mount. “It doesn’t matter. We have enough to assume whoever they are they have Ildiko and possibly Tarawin.” He gestured to the cart horse Anhuset had retrieved. “Send it back down the road. There’s open pasture it can graze on until someone discovers it.”
Dendarah grabbed her gelding’s reins and guided it around the dead man. “What about him?”
Brishen didn’t bother to turn around, his gaze hard on the wall of trees ahead and the path taken by Ildiko’s abductors. “Leave him for the scavengers.”
The white flower lay heavy against his chest, a reminder of happier hours.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ildiko lunged for Tarawin, forgetting her captor’s grip on her arms. He yanked her back hard enough to make her teeth rattle and her back crack. She ignored the pain and his hissed warning to be still. Struggling to break free, she glared at Ineni. “I will tear your head off with my bare hands and feed it to the crows if you’ve hurt that baby.”
