They tore across the front lawn. Some of the guards waved to us as they returned from the woods having found no sign of the kidnapper.
But the arjaths didn’t know that. They entered the forest, running along the same trail we took that fateful day. I wondered if they were only overly excited about the idea of going for a nice ride again.
Suddenly, they turned off the worn path and into the forest and across the snaring undergrowth. They moved slower now—still much too fast for my taste—and lowered their long necks and snorting noses to the ground. The damp leaves and rotting wood rose and fell as their powerful nostrils sniffed.
Snorter came to a stop first and pawed impatiently at the undergrowth with his front leg.
I hopped off him and rooted through the leaves where he pawed.
“What have you found, boy?” I said. “Huh? Is there something under there?”
I dug up wet leaves, rotting plants, even the hind legs of a discarded frog. And there, tucked away underneath it all, something small and hard. I got a good grip on it and pulled it free.
I smiled at seeing it, knowing I wasn’t crazy for coming out here, knowing my instincts were right all along.
“What is it?” Waev said. “What have you found?”
I raised it for him to see.
Caked in crud, with thick lumps hanging from it, was another one of Cleb’s spy toys.
Waev just stared at the piece of plastic.
He’d never fully believed my theory. I still had my doubts until this moment, but now we’d found Cleb’s toy out here in the middle of the forest—in a place it had no right to be—it meant I was right, and someone was leaving a trail for us to follow.
“You were right,” he said, taking his hat off. “They did come this way.”
The arjaths sniffed the ground and looked ready to take off in another direction.
Toward the next breadcrumb.
I climbed on Snorter’s back and gave him free rein. He weaved between the trees, leaping easily over fallen trunks, and paused only to check he was heading in the right direction. I was entirely absorbed with trying to stay in the saddle.
We found three more spy toys, one after the other. They seemed to have been dropped at regular intervals. The first figurine was a young boy who wore an astronaut’s backpack that allowed him to zip through space—very fitting, I thought—and another character that had the appearance more of a wizard than a spy. The most recent one was Titus, the arch-enemy.
I tucked them each in my pocket and looked forward to when I would get to hand them back to Cleb—after they’d been scrubbed clean.
I hopped in the saddle for Snorter to take me on to the next breadcrumb when he took a few steps forward and immediately stopped. It didn’t just happen to Snorter but Waev’s arjath too. They pawed at the ground in two different locations.
“What do you think it is?” I said. “Food?”
“Possibly,” Waev said.
We hopped off our mounts and dug at the locations the arjaths suggested. I found my breadcrumb. Another spy figurine. I raised it at the same time Waev raised his.
The arjaths were already digging at other locations too. I collected and tucked them in my pocket.
Now we were at a total loss.
I peered at my surroundings. In each direction, there was nothing but endless woodland as far as the eye could see.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Where did they go?”
“Maybe they spilled from Bianca’s pocket,” Waev said.
I felt the blood drain from my face.
And what made them spill?
I swear, if he harmed so much as a hair on their head…
“Now what do we do?” I said.
I’d been growing excited at the speed we’d been closing on their location.
We could be close and we’d never know it. The arjaths brought us most of the way but without knowing which direction to head next, the kidnapper was as good as gone.
“Looks like we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way,” Waev said.
He stood and ran his eyes over the area, first one way and then the other. He didn’t say a word. Then, he hopped over to a patch of ground strewn with leaves.
“Have you found something?” I said.
I joined him and peered at the same area he was. I straightened up and turned away.
“There’s nothing there,” I said.
“Not to the untrained eye,” he said, not taking his eyes off the patch of soil.
“They went that way,” he said, pointing.
“What?” I said. “How can you know that?”
“Because they left tracks,” he said.
Tracks.
“There’s something in my past that’s a little… dark.” Wasn’t that what he said? Could that darkness he told me about be linked to battle or war? And maybe he could read tracks because he had been trained to?
I didn’t care how he could do it. If it pointed the way, I was willing to forgive anything he might have done in the past.
“Then let’s go!” I said, climbing into Snorter’s saddle.
We traveled much slower now. We didn’t have the arjaths’ incredible sniffing ability and instead had to rely on Waev’s tracking skills. He made sure he never lost track of the direction we were headed.
We wound through the trees and I felt the tension ratcheting up one notch at a time. Slowly. Painfully.
The sun had yet to rise. That, I assumed, was a good thing. Cleb could only travel so far on foot. He would need to take a rest. And if Bianca had to carry him, it would tire her out so she had to stop too.
A bird screeched and flapped through the trees a yard in front of us. It spooked the arjaths. Their ears perked up and shifted left to right independently of each other, hearing things we had no awareness of.
The arjaths were skittish. Maybe they sensed we were getting close too, I thought.
I ran my hand comfortingly
