No longer was he the kind, loving prince who always had time for even the lowliest of his people, who spent his idle hours handing out food to the hungry and coin to the poor. Instead, he became a vicious tyrant, worse, perhaps, even than they had feared his brother might be, a tyrant who bent his entire will—and the entire energy of his people—toward finding his vanished brother and those who had been closest to him and making them suffer.
Yet for all of his prince’s efforts in the last fifteen years, only one of the men he’d deemed traitor had been found, a youth, really, one of no more than nineteen years, a boy who was said to have served as Prince Bernard’s squire, the youth given the unenviable task of cleaning the constant blood which coated it from his lord’s axe, of carrying his weapon when it was not in use. On that score, at least, he’d had an easy time of it, for it seemed that the prince had never been far from his weapon. It was, after all, the arbiter of his will, the one and only answer which he gave to any who dared to question him, gave even to those, like the Fey king, who had offered no question at all, only kindness.
Dalen had been there when Prince Feledias, had extracted the price of what he’d deemed his treason from the youth. He had not wanted to be—would have given anything to have been anywhere else for even now, so many years later, the visions and sounds he had witnessed from the young man haunted his dreams—but had been forced to attend, his duty as one of his king’s honor guard. The youth had been made to suffer terribly before he had finally found what peace death offered, suffered not under the hand of a skilled torturer but at the hand of his very own prince, a man who the youth had loved deeply and to whom he had been forever loyal. And while it had been terrible, the worst event in a life that Dalen sometimes thought was full only of terrible events, even now he had to admit that whatever training he lacked in the ways of a torturer, Feledias had made up for with cruel vigor and an energy which he brought to bear using the many tools and implements of the torturer’s trade until the young man was no longer recognizable.
Only a pile of bloody, mewling flesh that had, finally, been allowed to die. No, Dalen did not want to anger his prince. Whatever possible fate he might face at the hands of his prince’s brother—a fate which made his normally sure feet uncertain beneath him—even that paled in comparison to what he knew Feledias was capable of, should he fail him.
So, with the forest looming close around him, and with memories of the boy’s screams and pleas and questions of what he had done—all of which went unanswered—echoing in his mind, Dalen stalked through the forest, following the tracks of the man and the youth. There were surprisingly few, and those he did find Dalen thought must have come from the boy while the big man, despite his size, seemed to move across the land like a ghost, leaving neither hint nor track of his passage.
But whatever skills in woodcraft he possessed, the youth did not share them, and it was only because of this that Dalen was able to track them at all, carrying on the unenviable task set him and tracking down the most notorious warrior in the world.
It was difficult to mark the passage of time here, beneath the boughs of the great trees, and it felt as if the world of men, the world of which Dalen was a part, did not, could not exist in this place, as if conceits such as time had no meaning. Yet, he knew that it was late in the evening, perhaps even the early morning hours, and he was surprised to find that his targets had not yet stopped to rest. He had heard the stories, of course, of Feledias’s brother—there was not a man or woman living who could claim otherwise—stories which had served sometimes as cautionary tales and other times as horror stories, but he knew, too, that the man, despite the stories, was just a man and that like every other man, he would need to stop, to rest, sooner or later. And if not him, then certainly the youth who traveled with him.
Yet as he continued to work his way through the Wood, hurrying to catch them up, to have this part of the task done so that he might leave this blasted forest behind and return to the relative safety of his prince’s company, Dalen began to doubt. Did they intend to travel through the night then? Leading him a chase that would last forever, one in which they never stopped, one in which they continued to outdistance him despite the efforts he put in—even foregoing some of his usual caution in favor of speed?
Or—and this was a far worse thought—had he lost their trail, somewhere? Was he now following the meanderings of some animal of the forest or some Fey creature out of nightmare? Would he grow lost in the Wood, tracking someone—or something—which was not even his target? Was he lost already? Dalen was not a man to panic, was known for his courage among his fellow soldiers, for trackers such as he spent much of their time alone, braving the elements and enemy forces without any help from their comrades. But now, he did not feel brave, and while he might not have normally been a man to panic, he felt some panic now, a churning, unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He moved faster, trying to be as quiet
