When he entered the house, he took the stairs two at a time. The corridor was dark. Her door was closed. He knocked twice, two sharp knocks, enough to let her know he was back, not enough to wake her if she was truly sleeping.
No answer.
He'd knocked again.
Nothing.
The bolt. She had the bolt. If she were asleep, the bolt would be thrown. He pressed his palm flat against the door and listened. His hearing extended well beyond human range. He could hear the rain on the roof, the settling of stone, the night groom murmuring to his kethral two floors below.
No sound of breathing behind the door.
He turned the handle, and the door opened. The bolt had not been thrown.
The room was empty. The bed had not been slept in.
His chest went cold.
The stable. He was already moving. Down the corridor, down the stairs, across the courtyard, and into the driving rain. The night groom looked up in alarm as Rhaezon threw the stable doors wide and counted. The stalls. He counted the animals. One kethral gone. One of the easier mounts. Not Shade.
"Where?" The word came out clipped and dangerous. Tessyn stepped back.
"I — my lord, I only just came on shift, I didn't?—"
Rhaezon left him mid-sentence and ran for the groundskeeper's cottage. The lights were on. He hammered the door open and found Vasek in the front room, his weathered face drawn with worry, a healer Rhaezon recognized from the market town bending over Vasek's wife in the back room.
Vasek looked up. The blood left his face.
"My lord — I'm sorry, I'm sorry. My wife took a turn and Lady November — she offered before I could stop her, she said she'd fetch the healer herself, I told her to wait for you but she was already saddling the?—"
"How long ago?"
"An hour. Perhaps more. The healer arrived twenty minutes past. Lady November has not returned."
The rain hammered the cottage roof. An hour. She had been gone an hour, alone, on a dark road she barely knew, in weather that could kill a kethral on the plateau switchbacks, and he had been riding the perimeter checking fence lines while she?—
He did not finish the thought. He was already back in the stable, throwing tack onto the fastest animal he had. His hands moved with a precision that belonged to a different part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive for thirty years before this, while the rest of him was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere airless and dark where a door opened onto a room that was supposed to contain someone and didn't.
He knew this feeling.
He had been here before. Ten years ago, in the eastern wing, when the Crimson Ledger came and he had been too slow and the world had burned and Saevra?—
He shut it down. Wrenched the girth tight. Swung into the saddle and drove the kethral out into the rain at a pace that was not safe on wet stone in the dark and he did not care. The animal lunged forward, all six limbs finding purchase on the slick plateau road, its ears flat against the wind. Rhaezon leaned into the speed and let the rain tear across his face and thought:One hour. She has been gone one hour. She is fine. She is sitting in the tavern by the fire being warm and sensible and she is fine.
The fear did not listen.
It sat in his chest like a fist, squeezing. Not the cold assessment of threat he had trained into himself over decades. This was older. He had buried one wife. He had rebuilt his world around the absence. He knew what the universe could take from him in an instant, how completely.
The kethral's hooves threw water in arcing sheets as they descended the switchback toward the market town. The twin moons were hidden behind cloud cover. He navigated by memory and by the animal's sure-footedness and by the low thrumming current of dread that propelled him forward faster than sense allowed.
He smelled her before he reached the tavern.
Her scent was specific — warm, human, underlaid with the particular sweetness that was hers alone, one he had first caught in the slaver hold and never been able to set aside. He could track it now through rain and wind and the competing odors of a market town at night. It was there. Close. Coming from the tavern whose windows leaked firelight onto the wet cobblestones.
And threaded through it — sharp, acrid, unmistakable — fear.
Her fear.
He dismounted before the kethral fully stopped. His boots hit wet stone and he ran toward the door. His hearing cut through the rain, through the thick tavern walls, and delivered the sound of a man's voice, thick with drink, the words reaching him in fragments as he closed the distance:
