Hytham and I found the site of the attack soon enough. Gwinny sensed it before I did, stamping her hooves at the copper tang of blood on the air. The sickly sweet damp of decay that warned of mournlings hadn’t yet infiltrated the area, a luckier turn than I would have bargained for. But based on what Bansaerin had witnessed, we would either track down the mournlings or they would come to find us.

  The first sign that we were drawing close was the felled trees. They lay in different directions—the aftermath of something far stronger than the wind.

  Peering at the clearing widened in the trees’ wake, I understood how the soldiers had been lured in, believing it to be a place of refuge. They had no way of knowing how near the river gorge was on the other side of the copse, how the tight trail that led to the clearing might speak to a trap as much as it did a place of respite. I couldn’t help but wonder if the mournlings had set the trap for them, but such schemes were beyond the disturbed spirits, however deliberate their actions appeared from the outside.

  When we reached the end of the narrow path, I tugged taut Gwinny’s reins. My gorge rose. Swollen corpses of horses lay strewn about, with a meaty flank tossed to one side. Another horse had been perfectly pierced through its center.

  Gwinny startled, trying to turn back. I soothed her as best I could before swinging down to join Hytham just inside the clearing. He stood, grim-faced, surveying the carnage.

  “I . . .” The words faded from my tongue. What was there to say in the face of such a scene? How could anyone who witnessed it blame Bansaerin for what had transpired? This was destruction beyond the capabilities of any mortal being I’d ever heard of since the Fall.

  Thinking of Bansaerin and his unjust imprisonment steadied me. “I’m going to climb up and see what they might have missed remaining on-level with the attacks.” Bansaerin had said the mournlings were enormous. I still wouldn’t have imagined ones large enough to tear the leg off a horse and fling it across a clearing.

  Partway up the tree, I steadied myself upon a broad oak limb, careful to balance my weight near its base against the trunk of the tree.

  Below me, Hytham approached one of the horses. I hadn’t noticed before, but the barest flicker of movement, like a wind only the flowers sense, animated the creature’s oozing ribcage.

  Hytham’s jaw tightened as he looked down on the wounded creature that only just clung to life. He removed his pike from his back and flipped it upside down, exhaled, and slit the horse’s throat with the end of the pike. Hytham dropped his head, and the horse lay still.

  At another time, I would have saved the horse, insisted upon healing her. But the carnage before us was unlike anything I’d ever seen. If we were going to save Bansaerin, I’d have to be very careful with my expenditures of spells. I sensed Hytham thought as much too.

  From my higher vantage point, I studied the pattern of the horses, the drag-marks where the bodies had been. If the herald had been the one to find and arrest Bansaerin, he had also effectively destroyed any evidence of Bansaerin’s innocence in the patterns upon the ground. Horse hooves and bootprints marred the earth in all directions.

  I narrowed my gaze, searching. There had to be something.

  All prints save one.

  On the edge of the clearing, there was a set of drag marks that led away from all the others. “Hytham,” I called down, “what’s over there?”

  The adjudicator followed where I was pointing, taking care with his footing. This near to the river, water clung to the earth. At least one Hume was careful of the trail he led.

  I climbed up a branch higher, twisting about in the tree until I found the drag-marks again and could see where they led.

  “It’s going toward the river,” Hytham yelled up to me.

  I squinted my eyes, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Large puncture marks, near-perfect circles, lay at intermittent intervals on either side of the drag-marks.

  Turning back to the clearing itself, I found a few such marks but couldn’t make sense of them.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “I’m coming down.”

  Hytham met me at the bottom of the tree, and I led him to the nearest example of the marks. “These lead down to the river as well.”

  He squatted over the earth and prodded at the circular indentation. The end of his finger emerged wet and covered in dirt, but no other results emerged from his investigation. “I made a few inquiries before I came to meet you at the stables,” Hytham said as he rose. “They never found the sheriff’s body.”

  “And so the drag marks toward the river?”

  Hytham nodded. “They could lead us toward him and potentially prove the innocence of your friend.”

  I smiled at the adjudicator who immediately looked away from me. It was the first time Hytham had referred to Bansaerin as someone besides ‘the assassin.’ In more ways than one, we were on the right track.

  “The river isn’t far,” I explained, perhaps needlessly as its roar echoed all around us but the trees were thick enough to obscure it from sight. “We should secure the horses here.”

  Gwinny stamped her hooves on the other side of the clearing, perfectly understanding my intention.

  “You’ll be fine,” I whispered to reassure her. I looped her reins around a tree branch, keeping the knot loose. The branch was thin enough that if she needed to bolt, she would be able to break it free.

  Hytham murmured to his stallion as well, running his hand along the horse’s neck. His fingers were long and thin with knobby knuckles, but his hand was steady and his voice kind, precisely the sort of handler to win the trust of a horse.

  “Have you traveled often through this part of the forest?” Hytham asked me as we picked our way over the uneven terrain, following the drag-marks toward the river. The mournling had angled slightly away from the water at first rather than plunging directly through the trees and over the side of the taller part of the gorge beyond the clearing.

  “Not often, no. And not for some time. When I was training as a hunter, I camped near here a few times, tracking the ibex. But after I became a spiritspeaker, the nature of my duties for the clan changed.”

  “Did you miss it? The hunting?”

  I must have sounded more wistful than I’d meant to be. “It was lonely at times. And quiet. Lots of my training involved waiting in meditation, but it’s a different sort of waiting than I experienced in the forest, especially in the company of other hunters.”

  A closed-lipped grin tugged at the corner of his lips as he glanced at me. “My experience in cloister was also quite lonely at times. I advanced more quickly through the ranks than most adjudicators, which often left me on my own or among strangers.”

  The drag marks led beneath a fallen tree, with two indentations in the earth, possibly from the sheriff’s boots though I couldn’t say for certain. Hytham paused in his explanation and launched himself agilely onto the top of the fallen tree. He knelt and reached down for me.

  I took his hand, and the adjudicator pulled me up onto the log, catching my elbow to offset the tug on my hand. He steadied me atop the log, our breath mingling in a frosty cloud between us.

  I took a shaking breath, surprised by the nearness, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ears.

  “Do you know what’s on the other side of the river?” Hytham asked, his voice low. Almost all traces of Breolish had faded from his Lifkin accent.

  I wanted to ask who his tutor had been for his command of the tongue to sound so natural, but the river divided my attention. “Caves,” I answered, wobbling a little atop the log.

  Hytham steadied me before jumping down. He extended his hand toward me again and helped soften my landing. My boots squelched into the mud on the other side of the fallen tree, falling exactly into line with the trail of the sheriff’s body.

  We followed it to the river’s edge. The drag marks stopped at the rocky shore. Had the mournling transporting the sheriff swum across the river? I craned my neck back, searching the trees overhead for some sort of sign.

  The rapids here were too fast-moving, the water too deep for us to wade or even swim across. The trees above spanned the width of the river, the pointed tips of one side meeting those of the other. “We’ll need to climb or swing our way across.”

  Hytham frowned, his own study of the area following the path of my own. “I still cannot understand what the herald would gain by lying and twisting the words of your friend,” he said. “But I want to believe you. Regardless, we need to cross the river.”

  He was right. I searched the bank, trying to find a way across.

  “There,” I answered, pointing to a vine obscured by the foliage overhead. The opposite shore was higher than ours. We’d need to climb before swinging our way across.

  Hytham paled slightly. I didn’t want to ask him whether he had experience scaling trees in Roane, though I doubted he could have had much practice in a city.

  “I’ll go first. Follow my steps.” I picked my way carefully up the tree, testing every hand- and foothold so ensure it could bear Hytham’s weight as easily as it could mine.

  I slipped twice on the climb, heightening the color in my cheeks by the time we reached a tall enough branch. The second time Hytham caught the ankle of my boot before my heel struck him in the chest. It seems I should have been more concerned with my own climbing skills rather than his.

  “How about I go first this time?” the Hume said, gesturing toward the thick vine that draped along the tree branches thirty-odd feet above the white river rapids.

  I nodded, sliding out of the way so Hytham could inch his way out to the branch’s edge and take hold of the vine. “I’d aim for that tree, opposite.” I pointed to the somewhat bare, wide-branched tree I meant.

  “Right.” Hytham’s throat bobbed. “I’ll do just that and fling the rope back to you. Nothing to worry about.”

  I repeated this last to help reassure him. With one final glance back at me, the Hume launched himself out and over the water.