CHAPTER 54: LOSE TRACK

Levan could not stay still. The forest rushed past him in streaks of green and shadow, the thundering hooves of his horse beating a merciless rhythm into the earth. He did not slow, not even when the branches clawed at his cloak or the wind stung his eyes raw.

He was going northwards, always northwards, toward the village that had clung to his thoughts all night like a whispered promise. It was uncanny how many times he had gone through this path, if only to chase the truth that had clawed at him ever since the world crumbled before his eyes.

Hope had stirred in him then, fragile and dangerous. Because word had reached him that one of The Blithe’s victims — a woman thought lost for nearly five years — had opened her eyes at last.

She had once been a close companion to his mother, close enough to know the truths buried beneath silence and smoke. And for one breathless night, the thought of her survival had burned like a beacon.

But hope was cruel. Cruel because the message that lit like fire in his chest came twinned with her death. She had opened her eyes after five years only to be silenced before her lips could shape a single word. Murdered, they said. Strangled like a loose end that should never have been left untied.

Levan’s grip on the reins tightened until the leather bit deep into his palms, his knuckles bloodless against the strain. The horse beneath him sensed the weight in his chest and the storm rattling through his veins, quickened its pace through the thicketed path.

He could not quell the fury that pressed against his ribs no matter how much he tried, nor the hollow grief that rode close behind it. The forest blurred past him, dark and whispering, as though the branches themselves bent low to bear witness to the bitterness lodged in his soul.

When the forest finally broke into clearing, there it was — the old house, its roof bowed, its timbers warped with age. A place he had visited far too many times when all that lay within had still been shadows and silence. Now smoke curled faintly from the chimney, the Hydra Knights gathered like mourners at the threshold.

The moment he dismounted, they bowed low, not a word leaving their mouths. Their silence alone was enough to tell him what awaited. Levan strode past them without breaking pace, the door creaking open beneath his hand as he entered.

The air inside was heavy with the faint sting of Hallowbloom herbs meant to ward rot, but it could not mask the stench of death. His boots thudded against the worn floorboards as he crossed to the low bed where the body lay. The blanket was pulled over her face, thin and frayed, as if meant to grant her a final courtesy.

He yanked it back with a swiftness that betrayed his desperation — desperate for it to be someone else, for fate to have played a trick. But no. The face that greeted him was hollow and sunken, lips parted as though her final breath had been stolen rather than surrendered, but it was undoubtedly hers.

Her arms, frail and wasted from years in The Blithe’s grasp bore the permanent tracings of its cruelty, the darkened veins like withered branches, the black fingers that looked like claws rather than humans’ anatomy, the long scars of surviving too long in that half-death. By the time the Caelwyn healers set foot in Noctharis, it was already too late for her.

Still...How ironic, because it was not The Blithe that claimed her in the end. Around her throat, bruises bloomed in cruel violet and black, a clear ring of fingers that had forced silence upon her. Not even death had softened the violence of it.

Levan’s jaw locked, the sound of his own breathing harsh in his ears. He had hoped against reason, against everything that she might yet open her eyes again. That he could have asked her, begged her for the truths she carried about his mother. And now those truths lay buried in a corpse that had survived suffering only to be cut down the moment she awoke.

His hand tightened on the headboard until his nails bit into the wood, his eyes closed and his head hung low if only to quell the rage and frustration that was boiling mercilessly. The house seemed to shrink around him, pressing in with the weight of what was lost.

And then a step sounded behind him, measured but weighted with reluctance. It was Captain Harken, his most steadfast man, the one who had marched beside him through fields of blood and fire lingered at the threshold.

For all their years of iron loyalty, he hesitated now. Because the air in the room was too suffocating, thick with a wrath so still and silent it seemed ready to consume everything in its reach.

"Your Highness," Harken’s voice was gruff and respectful, but edged with unease.

"Report," Levan said curtly.

Captain Harken slowly approached and held out a folded scrap of linen. "One of the Knights found this in the clearing, there was a second body in the heart of the forest."

Levan did not look at him, only opened his eyes to glance at the item in the Captain’s hand. He unfolded the linen to reveal a sharpened dagger, unused. Its blade still glinting.

"Was it identified?"

"Yes. It was a nurse at the old church westward of the village, Marienne Lamont," Harken slowly folded the dagger back and glimpsed at the lifeless body on the bed. "Her niece."

Levan listened tentatively. Marienne Lamont. Her niece. The name was not unfamiliar to him. He had seen the girl before, coming to the cottage no more than once a month, always with a basket clutched to her chest and eyes already brimming with tears.

She would sit by her aunt’s bedside, speaking in trembling tones, coaxing her to hold on, to open her eyes, to live long enough to see the sun again. It was the kind of devotion that lingered even after she left, a faint echo of hope in a house that had long forgotten it.

Harken went on, "She was found hanging from a tree near the draught lake, clutching a torn scrap of the aunt’s apron in her hand which contained this dagger. By the state of the body, it can’t have been more than a few hours since she died, I’d say no more than dawn."

"So the niece strangled her and then hanged herself?" Levan’s tone was flat, an idle question that already assumed its own impossibility.

"That was how it looked at first," Harken said. "But there’s no forced entry or struggle beyond what’s on the aunt. The cottage was tended, no sign that anyone else entered. The niece’s fingers were stained with her aunt’s blood, and yet there’s no footprint to account for a second set of footsteps."

He huffed grimly. "The knights left on patrol and found her body some miles down the track. If someone wanted a tidy stage, they could have made it appear as murder followed by remorse. But then the tracks also suggest she fled in haste. Whether it was guilt that drove her, or a hand forcing her to silence herself, we cannot yet say."

Levan’s eyes flickered back to the linen, to the corpse, and then he sighed, feeling the pulsating in his temple as he closed his eyes long enough to feel the pressure build behind them. His hands twitched, aching for something to silence the gnawing helplessness clawing at his chest.

The cottage, the Blithe-marks, the strangulation and the staged suicide...They were pieces of a puzzle that refused to fit together, and normally — normally — Levan thrived in such puzzles. Cold logic and sharper patience than most men possessed had always been his weapon. But not today.

Not with five years wasted, not with a woman who had finally opened her eyes only to have them shut forever. His chest felt scalded by the cruel irony, and the simmering rage beneath his ribs clawed for release. If Harken had not been standing there, he might have torn the very walls apart with his bare hands just to bleed out the fury that was gnawing him hollow.

"Search the route from the clearing to the corpse again," he ordered finally. "Every hints, every broken twig, nothing is to be dismissed. Bring the niece’s body here; I want to see her face. Send word to Captain Ragnall that no one leaves this county without my knowledge."

"And Harken—" he looked at the captain, voice coiled to a lethal calm, "—find who in the village had access to both women. Question them without mercy. Held the church the niece worked at accountable. Identify her relatives and keep watch. If this was meant to be private, we will make it public."

Harken bowed, the command settling over him like winter. "At once, my prince."

Levan stood a moment longer, mulling over the corpse for one last time before he forced himself to tear his eyes away.

The hours that followed were consumed by the search. The Hydra Knights swept through the woods and village alike, their presence a shadow at every threshold. The church was questioned, the nurse’s kin accounted for, the cottages turned inside out for signs of trespass.

Yet for all their diligence, nothing pointed to a hand beyond the niece’s. On the surface, the village was cleared of suspicion. But Levan knew better. The silence that lingered in the lanes, the lowered eyes of the villagers, the careful way doors shut at dusk...These were not the marks of innocence, but of fear.

By the time he decided to leave everything in Captain Harken’s hands, dusk had already swallowed the edges of the sky, streaking it with a fading bruise of red. He mounted his horse, the weight of the day pressing into his shoulders until his very bones felt leaden.

And then, against his will, her face surfaced in his mind. Of course. That stubborn little smile she wore when she carried something in her hands like it was a treasure. The warmth of the bun, the way her eyes dimmed when he told her to stay and the way she had flinched when he raised his voice.

Suddenly...so suddenly...

The thought gripped him like a hand around his throat. He did not even know why he was thinking so hard over this. But what if...she was still there waiting? Hours and hours in that chamber, probably clutching a cold bun by now but still patient in the way only she could be. He had asked her to do so without weighing the consequences then, but now...

When he stepped into the palace grounds again, his gut twisted with an unwelcome, foreign hesitation so sharp and sickening that it made him halt before the entrance. Not at the possibility of her absence, but of her presence. That she might truly still be there as proof of her foolish devotion. All it would take was a single turn of his steps, one corridor to the right, and he would be at his door.

It was not even supposed to affect him so much when he has other matters worth worrying over. And so, as if he was angry at himself, he turned the other way. Past the lantern-lit corridors that would have taken him to his chambers and into the silence of the library, where the scent of parchment and dust was easier to bear than her gaze.

He pushed through the tall carved doors of The Ivory Study, closing himself into its cold solitude in hopes to clear his head.