His name was Matteo, not Mattie, and he didn’t complain about the walking. Or, well, she assumed he didn’t—they were still working around a language barrier, but he’d been nothing but smiles since Doneil had healed his leg, and he was practically bursting with chatter.

From the way he kept checking his once-broken knee joint, they probably could have told him to run a fifty-mile loop and he wouldn’t have uttered a single complaint.

Clearly, he really hadn’t heard of healing magic before.

Suspicion drove deep inside her.

Where the hells was he from that he hadn’t heard of it? Even Sannya and her daughters knew about healing magic. This wasn’t the third century. Magic wasn’t confined to the other-worldly anymore. They were connected. Even humans could learn it, if they had the predisposition.

Doneil, at least, was working on finding the answer. The two muttered with each other in the back, each trying to parse a common thread of communication between themselves—a double language lesson, it sounded like, trading random vocabulary for things they could point at on the trail.

She rode ahead, with the prince.

Not talking.

He hadn’t changed much since the homestead, though she detected a layer of concentration in his expression that hadn’t been there before—he, too, was thinking about their new ward. It added a stern edge to his face, sweeping all of its angles into being flat and dull. Though his dark jacket and hair should have linked him more with the image of a crow or raven, she couldn’t help but still be reminded of the small, wiry nuthatches that flitted in the undergrowth.

He just had that manner about him. Quick, taut. Always ready for action. A crow usually needed to tense, prepare itself, even if it only took half a heartbeat to do so—a nuthatch was always ready.

Plus, his jacket had faded somewhat. No longer an even pitch-black, but mottled in some areas. Grayer.

The road stretched out ahead of them in a soft bend, a cool, shady palette of greens, grays, and browns, and their horses’ hooves made steady clops on the hard-packed dirt. It was better-tended here, a remnant of an old Kingsway, still with the sand mixed in and signs of old, now-dilapidated shelters in the surrounding woods. The spring at the side of the road trickled with snowmelt. They’d left the maples behind, but the scent of pine filled the air from farther upwind. Another dogwood leaned over the path ahead, its bold white flowers standing out among the rest of the green.

She gave it a dull stare, hyperaware of the matching insignia traced into her weapons’ sheaths.

This is either an unsubtle portent or sheer dumb luck.

If it was the latter, some idiot must have had a planting frenzy. She’d seen about two per mile marker.

If it was the former, it didn’t take a genius to guess its meaning.

Go home. Honor your family. Fulfill your duty.

Memories flitted through her mind—a quiet, brief scuffle in the dark, Tarris’ furious, pained eyes, his brief yell; her body stiff as a board as she stood in front of the Council, her father watching from his place behind the king.

Hot shame burned through her face.

They’d even spoken of removing her Twelfth Circle.

Bright sun, why didn’t I just let him have his feel?

Her jaw clenched, and her grip tightened on the reins. She’d been so naive—so ignorant. The royals always got what they wanted. She should have just let him get it out of his system. Heavens knew he’d flirted with almost every female guard he’d been assigned, and a few of the men.

If she’d done nothing, he would have moved on.

But she hadn’t done nothing. Instead, she’d drawn attention—and harmed her charge in the process.

She forced a swallow down.

Elrya, how did I let this happen?

Maybe it was appropriate that she be escorting a Cizek. A sign of how far out she’d fallen.

“Are you exiled?”

She sucked in a breath and snapped to attention, her focus crashing into place like an avalanche.

At some point, the prince had stopped watching the scenery and had started watching her.

Dread panic flushed through her chest.

How much had he seen?

“No,” she said, wrestling her mask back into place.

Silence for a moment. Their horses’ hooves made quiet clops on the trail, occasionally grinding into sand or rock. She forced herself to purposefully relax into her mare’s gait, allowing the muscles to stretch in her lower back.

Nales frowned. “How come you aren’t in the Raidt?”

She ground her teeth together, fresh anger flaring in her chest. Was everything going to circle back to her current predicament in the Raidt today?

“Like I said before, I broke the hand of a prince. It was deemed best that I be elsewhere for a time.” She glanced over, letting him see the irritation that sparked across her expression. “It’s not an exile. I can go back at any time—and am expected to.”

His expression took a concentrated frown again. “Prince Tarris?”

Her eyes narrowed, her earlier suspicions of his language abilities resurfacing.

That guess was a little too close for one who hadn’t overheard and understood her earlier conversation.

“Yes,” she said, her voice cool. “You know him?”

“We met once. Briefly.” The flicker of remembrance that crossed his face told her that the meeting hadn’t been of much import. As a Cizek, he’d undoubtedly met many members of royal courts. “Why’d you break his hand?”

“Maybe he kept asking questions.”

He glanced at her, his look assessing—as if he were really considering that explanation. She kept her face neutral, giving nothing away. Behind them, Doneil and Matteo kept chattering away, their hand gestures elaborate. Birdsong tittered from the canopy overhead, along with the gentle rattle of high leaves in the late morning breeze. Sunlight shifted over the road.

After a moment, he broke away. His gaze slid back to the road.

“Maybe he was just wondering why you were concocting a plan that involved him.”

At first, she didn’t understand the remark, too focused on Prince Tarris to think any broader.

Then, she connected it.

Cold shock rushed through her body.

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He did speak elven. And he had heard their conversation.

Their entire conversation.

For the second time that day, the blood drained from her skin. Then it rushed right back in, anger bubbling up like boiling oil.

“What, unhappy about us underlings plotting our lives without you?” She sneered. “You could have piped in at any time, you know.”

“Clearly, you didn’t want me in it.”

“And yet, clearly, you didn’t take the oh-so-subtle hint. Are you always this nosy, or is my life just that special to you?”

He gave her a disgusted look. “Maybe I’m just sick of people using my family for their own interests.”

“Really? With your family?” The sound of her laugh echoed off the trees. “Gods, you people make me sick. You think you’re oh so bloody important, but Elrya, you know we have our own lives, too? And they don’t involve yours?”

“From what I heard, you were doing just fine involving yourself into my family with your schemes.”

“Then maybe you should learn to listen better, because if you had, you would have noticed that I thought the idea was gods-damned laughable,” she hissed, not caring that it made an inhuman sound—he didn’t flinch, anyway. “Gods alive, I wish I’d just let you walk out that gate on that fucking horse. Then I wouldn’t have to be here, protecting your stupid body.”

“I could have ordered you to come with me,” he sneered. “I have that right.”

She laughed, the sound bouncing off the trees. “Good luck with that. Do you want to cause a war? Temdin save me, you princes are all the same, just doing whatever in the ten high heavens you want. Why are we even out here? We should be back at Pemberlin, providing fortification—helping people, not swanning off to Ulchris. Hells, you should probably be going to Lorka. Isn’t that where you’re needed? Not gallivanting off into the wilds with a couple of elves?”

“No,” the prince said, the syllable as cutting as a swinging ax. “If something is happening at Ulchris, if that greater demon is back, then—”

“If, if, if, if, if. It’s always if with you.” Actually, it usually wasn’t, but she’d already said it, and she was in too deep to stop now. Her voice lowered, accent thickening to curl around the words. “Do you have any substantial proof that this demon is back? And if he is, just what are your plans for that, precisely? Because from the sound of it, I don’t think a party of three can stop a greater demon on our own. Elrya, you haven’t even told us anything about this thing other than that it might exist. Do you even know much about it?”

“That mark is substantial proof—or at least enough to warrant a check.” His speech turned into a gritty jeer, nearly matching her tone. “And I do know about this particular demon. I just don’t choose to share it with the likes of you.”

The likes of—

The anger in her went white-hot. She scalded him with a look.

“What do you mean, the likes of me? The underlings, as you people like to call us? Those undersworn to your family’s demon-cursed sword? The ones you tried to subjugate under blood and death?”

She stopped herself, reading him. His face had shuttered again, and he’d half-turned to face the road—but there was something about the way he almost avoided her gaze…

He’s hiding something.

“What do you know?” she asked, her voice deathly low. “What aren’t you telling us?”

He remained quiet. Around them, the forest seemed to have quietened, too. Doneil and Matteo had fallen silent—she could feel their attention on her, see their faces turned toward her in her peripheral vision—and a thickness seemed to have cast itself about the trees, as if the very air had woven a texture that clotted the space between them and the rest of the world.

She swore. “You and your cursed secrets. I—”

“Catrin,” Doneil snapped, his voice low, warning, lilting in elven. “Check.”

The rnari command cracked through her thoughts like iced thunder. She cut herself off, snapped her head to their surroundings. The argument dropped from her head like a guillotine blade, replaced by an intense focus as she grounded herself. In the next breath, she took in every bend and shift of their surroundings, looking for anomalies.

And found them almost immediately.

The air had thickened. It wasn’t just her imagination.

A low thrum of magic hummed through the background like an undercurrent.

She pulled down, found the trickle of energy that was her woodcraft, and reached out to the three horses.

Halt, she commanded.

Three sets of hooves ground to a stop on the trail.

Silence fell over the scene like a cloak.

Slowly, she searched the area, following the nudge of her intuition—and the taste of magic that coated the air.

Her gaze came to a rest on a spot just ahead on the road, her mind almost immediately sensing the subtle wrongness of the air, the way it wanted to turn her vision aside, make her look elsewhere.

The thread of magic wormed through her vertebrae like an oiled leather cord.

Something hidden.

She caught on a spot about mounted head height, roughly five yards up the path.

There. That was where her woodcraft said it was.

But it didn’t scream threat to her, not like the demons had. Power, yes, and tension—but not threat.

She kept her eyes on the spot and waited.

With a barely-perceptible shiver of magic, the fey hunting party melted out of their camouflage glamor like rain.