My eyes opened a little wider, a rill of ice running down my spine.

“As you can see, he’s not here.” She gestured towards the camp, a sharp, frustrated motion. “My boys on the wall gave a report that he headed out of the Ravenscry gates yesterday afternoon, but he never arrived, according to the captain here, and we saw no sign of an accident or ambush on the road down.”

I pondered that for a long moment.

Miro Kyril. Once a puling, sickly boy, but Edda had begged us to give him a chance. Her only son, a child born of a Forian warrior, and yet Edda had loved him.

And because I was fond of Edda, I had granted her request. The sickly boy became a dandy of a man, but he had reason to be proud of his work. If not for that inherited talent, I would have seriously reconsidered my final promise to her.

I thought of the portrait of Cirri, and of Miro’s fine taste, and the luxuries in his room that could only be afforded with handfuls of gold.

The luxuries that were most easily acquired in Port Coran. I thought of who might have passed information to Ellena, a lady’s maid who probably knew next to nothing of fortifications and legion movements.

And where would a petulant, sniveling, half-Forian boy go, if he decided gold was worth more than the lives of the Veladari?

Ah, but I had been so in love, I had been blind to all else under my nose.

“I’m saying I think he’s with her, Bane,” Visca said bluntly. “Either he convinced her to run off with him or he took her by force, but he sure as hell didn’t come south.”

“I know,” I said, reasonable and level. “He took her. He likely took her into Foria.”

“I’ve made an utter cock-up of my command.” She rubbed her temples. “We’ve lost an entire day going in the wrong direction.”

I smiled. “Believe me, I will rectify that.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Indeed.” I stood, stretched, my back muscles flexing and loosening, anticipating what was to come. There would be pain, oh yes.

Not only for Miro, whose skin I would peel away and hang on my wall, but for myself. I required blood, a vast ocean of life’s elixir. I needed every last drop of energy, the better to hunt with.

Visca let out an ear-splitting whistle, and one of the vampires in her latest legion, a young human man, hurried to her, guiding her horse.

“I’ll be right behind you,” she said grimly. “Do nothing foolish, lad. Track them, and if that track brings you to the Forian border, then you must wait for me and Wyn. We’ll get her back, but ancestors forbid we start a new fucking war from putting one toe over the wrong rock at the wrong time.”

“Let them start a war. I’ll be waiting for it.”

She gripped my arm hard, digging her nails into stony flesh as she stared up at me. “They won’t hurt her. Remember that. As long as she’s alive, she’s of great value.”

I was icy, numb. I had no idea what Visca saw in my face that caused her to release me, backing up a step.

“Not even Hakkon is that rash,” she said quietly, mounting up. “Hold onto that thought. She’s alive and well, and we’ll get her back.”

I nodded, and tore into the forest without another word, aiming north like an arrow.

With every footfall, every racing heartbeat, every minute that slipped past like sand in an hourglass, I told myself that Visca was right.

Cirri was in Miro’s hands, but alive. Possibly a prisoner, but well.

I would hunt him by land, by sea, by sky. He thought he could escape me, flee Veladar with my Cirri?

No. There was nowhere in the whole circle of the world that he could hide.

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Chapter 41 Cirri

Islid from the horse, palms sweaty, knees shaking, and collapsed to solid ground under the blessed sun.

The darkness in the tunnels… it had been like a living thing, pressing in on my eyes, my ears, filling my nose and mouth and pouring into my cells with every breath, every blink. Not even Miro’s lantern had driven away the worst of the shadows.

Instead, that single bright point of light had felt like a shout in the midst of the silence, a beacon to summon every hungry thing that lived beneath the earth.

But Bane was right. The Fae were dead, not that the knowledge had helped any. I wasn’t the only one trembling; the horse was lathered with fear and frothing at the mouth despite the slow walk under the mountains, and Miro fumbled at the reins, face still ghastly pale.

The route itself had been almost offensively simple, a mineshaft dug straight through from the eastern side of the Rift, to the western mountains of Foria. Miro had counted the junctions under his breath as we rode through. “First, left. Second, right. Third, right. Fourth, left…”

Each junction had taken us onto the next course, well-traversed by warg paws, but it was the ones we didn’t take—deep, dark tunnels shored up by rotting timbers, the mountains exhaling their dry, dusty breath through the shafts—that gave me the screaming terrors in the back of my mind.

At each one, I’d expected something to be waiting, lurking in the shadows. I’d expected the shine of eyes against the guttering lantern flame, or the gleam of skin that wasn’t quite skin as I would expect it to be.

The absolute nothing at every turn was almost worse. A constant anticipation, my muscles growing tighter and harder each time the shaft split, to the degree that I’d almost seen things, heard things, that weren’t there. Once or twice I’d been convinced there was a scratching sound following us, or a distant shriek echoing up from far below.

Even Miro had squirmed at times, jerking his head to the side as though he heard something, a spastic twitch beginning in his left eyelid by the third junction. It was still there now.

But nothing had come for us. As Bane had said, the Below was empty… at least in Veladar.

I’d thought I was hallucinating when the first faint rays of daylight appeared ahead of us, afraid to let myself hope, but Miro had nudged the terrified horse into a trot, bursting out into the salvation of the sun… where we had both released our collective breaths.

He’d allowed me to dismount and stretch my legs, but the second my feet hit the ground, they turned to jelly. On my hands and knees, touching the sweet solidity of sun-warmed dirt, I thanked the Lady, the Mother, even the gods of the Nord pagans that I’d emerged alive.

But my moment still hadn’t come. I’d hoped to find that moment in the darkness, but Miro was on his guard the whole way through, and now my plans were askew.

I couldn’t return through the mineshaft; the junctions had been not only ahead of us, but sideways and diagonal, branching in ways that turned the deceptively simple path into a snarled knot. Even if I turned tail and fled right back into that blighted shaft, even if I managed to steal the lantern from Miro and, by some miraculous chance, had enough oil to light the whole way through, the odds were high that I would choose the wrong path at the wrong junction, and possibly find myself face to face with something better left alone.

Which left the over-mountain route as my only option. I finally raised my head, squinting up at the ridge over the shaft’s entrance. This side of the mountains, on Forian soil, the timbers were bare of cold iron or charms, but they had been clawed into splintered shreds.

Beyond it, the mountains rose in high, ugly peaks. A sharp and deadly switchback trail had been chiseled into the cold gray stone. I licked my dry lips, imagining what it would take to climb it… and deciding it was well worth the effort if it meant never inhaling that mephitic breath of the earth again. Better to spend a week crawling inch by inch over the mountains than to face that soul-crushing darkness again.