Back in Vartas, life continued in the esteemed empire.
The afternoon light came through the shutters in thin strips, cutting across the floorboards and not doing much else. The room was small. It smelled like old wood and dust, and of four people who had been in the same city too long, without a reason to stay.
Ginn let out a slow breath and looked at nothing in particular.
"It's pointless," he said. "August isn't here."
Nobody argued. Rooster was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. Steil was at the table, turning a coin over his knuckles the way he did when he had nothing useful to do with his hands. Evanc was by the window, watching the street below with the focused expression of someone who had stopped expecting to see anything interesting.
"So we go back," Evanc said. It wasn't really a question. "That's the only move left."
"I've been trying to get information on what happened to our army," Steil said, not looking up from the coin. "Nobody knows anything. Or they know, and they're not saying." He paused. "Might be both."
"Same wall I keep hitting," Ginn said. "Julius doesn't trust me. I pushed too hard, and now he's made it clear I'm not welcome near anything that matters." He stood, rolling his shoulder once. "The king is not going to be happy about this. We came to find August. We're going back with nothing."
The coin stopped moving. The room went quiet.
Then Rooster shifted in his chair.
"Have you heard about the magic knights?"
Everyone looked at him.
"What about them?" Steil said.
"They're everywhere," Rooster said. "All over the city, spread out into the surrounding areas, too. I tried talking to one of them yesterday. Took some doing, but he gave me something." He paused. "Missing children. Apparently, it's been going on for a while. The royal guard deployed search units in numbers you'd use for a military operation."
Ginn frowned. "For children."
"That's all he said."
The room sat with that for a moment. Ginn turned it over once, then let it go.
"Doesn't matter," he said. "That's their problem. Our mission ends here." He looked around the room once, taking in the four walls and the thin light and three men who had followed him into a city they had no business being in, for a mission that was never going to work. "Pack everything, we will be leaving soon."
Rooster leaned forward slightly. "I'm telling you, it's not a small operation. These aren't a few guards asking questions in the market. Full units. Coordinated. Moving through districts like they're clearing them one by one."
Steil finally looked up from the coin. "How long has it been going on?"
"Couldn't get that out of him," Rooster said. "But the way he said it — not like something that started recently. Like something that's been building."
Evanc turned from the window. "Children don't just disappear in numbers large enough to mobilize the royal guard without someone noticing early. Someone noticed. They just didn't say anything publicly."
"Or couldn't," Steil said.
"Either way." Ginn's voice was flat. "Not our problem."
But he filed it somewhere anyway. The way you filed things that didn't fit anywhere yet.
He glanced toward the window before he turned away. Past the rooftops. Toward the palace.
"You know what the king told me to do while we were here?" he said.
Nobody answered.
"He ordered me to kill the emperor."
Silence.
Ginn let out a breath through his nose. Somewhere between a laugh and something that wasn't.
"Maybe he doesn't care much about us," he said. "About any of us. About the kingdom, even. Sending men to do something like that and calling it a mission."
Steil set the coin flat on the table. "Maybe."
"Trying to kill a bedridden emperor," Evanc said quietly, "is like trying to scare a sleeping lion."
"His majesty has forgotten what that man is," Ginn said. He picked up his coat. "We leave now. Nothing stays in this room."
They were well outside the empire's walls by the time the light started going orange. The road behind them was empty. The road ahead was long and cold and led north to a king who was going to ask questions Ginn didn't have good answers to.
"Where was Rina's post again?" Evanc asked. "She was meant to hold a position outside the walls."
Rooster raised a hand. "There."
She was coming at a run. Not sprinting but close — the kind of pace that meant something without being a full emergency. Her hair was loose. She was breathing hard by the time she reached them.
"You're heading back," she said.
"North," Ginn said. "We give the king what we have."
"Wait." She put a hand up. "Come with me first. There's something you need to see. It could be a lead."
Ginn started to shake his head.
"Ginn." Her voice had an edge he hadn't heard from her before. Not panic. Something closer to urgency that had been sitting in her chest for a while and had finally run out of room. "You need to see this."
He looked at her for a moment. Whatever she'd found, she believed it mattered. That much was plain.
"This better be quick," he said.
The shelter was a worn-out house at the edge of a small settlement, the kind of building that had stopped being anyone's home long enough ago that nobody remembered whose it had been. The door stuck. The floorboards had opinions about being walked on.
On the bed in the back room lay a girl.
She was young. Maybe nine, maybe ten. Her arms and legs were wrapped in cloth that had been changed recently — clean bandages over whatever was underneath. She was asleep, or something close to it. Her face, even in rest, had the particular tightness of someone whose body hadn't fully accepted that it was somewhere safe.
Ginn looked at her. Then at Rina.
"Why am I looking at a child?" he said.
Rina crossed her arms. "I was scouting the area. Checking the forest edge as you told me." She paused. "I saw her come running out of the trees. There was a man behind her."
"And?"
"I stopped him. The girl was—" She stopped. Started again. "She was in bad shape. She kept talking about her brother. Said he was killed when they tried to escape."
"Escape from what?" Rooster said.
Rina didn't answer that directly. She looked at the girl instead.
"She was covered in wounds. Cuts on her arms, her feet, places that—" She stopped again. "She kept talking about a dark place. Said it was full of nightmares. She said that over and over for a long time before she calmed down enough to sleep."
"Rina," Ginn said.
"She was repeating something." Rina's voice went cautious. "Like she was carrying a message. Like someone told her to say it, and she'd been holding onto it so long it came out even when she wasn't trying."
"What message?"
Rina swallowed.
"Save me. I'm still alive."
The room went still.
Ginn didn't speak for a moment.
He was thinking about a boy he'd watched grow up in the Frost Kingdom's court. Blue hair that embarrassed him when he was twelve and that he'd grown into by eighteen. A prince who laughed too loudly at his own jokes and trained twice as hard as anyone expected him to because he knew what the crown required and had decided early that he would be ready for it.
He was thinking about a battlefield report that never came. An army that went south and stopped existing. A king who received silence where his son's voice should have been and responded by sending men to kill a bedridden emperor instead of asking what had actually happened.
Save me. I'm still alive.
It made no sense. August had been at the front of that retreat. Flames had taken everything behind him. Nobody survived that.
But nobody had found a body either.
He looked at the girl's wrapped hands. Small. Steady now in sleep in the way that exhausted things were steady. Whatever she'd seen in that dark place had been enough to make a child run through a forest on wounded feet rather than stay another hour.
August would not have sent a child with a message unless he had nothing else left to send it with.
And then something behind it started moving — a thought he didn't want to follow, pulling at connections he hadn't been looking for, pointing at something that made no sense and complete sense at the same time.
Impossible, he thought. How long has it— He stopped. But the army. The silence. Nobody knowing.
"Say that again," he said.
Rina held his gaze. "Tell me that's a coincidence."
Ginn said nothing.
"We...may have been looking in the wrong place," she said quietly.
The coin in Steil's pocket hadn't moved in a while. Rooster was very still. Evanc had turned from the window.
Outside, the light had gone from orange to the darker color that came just before full dark. Somewhere deeper into the forest, something that Ginn didn't know about yet was waiting without knowing they were coming.
He looked at the girl one more time. Then he looked at his team.
"Show me where she came from," he said.