The Silver Moon Princess

The search Closes In

topped asking questions,” she said, tracing the marked route with one ink-stained finger. “Look at how the pattern shifts here, past the second village. Early on, they were fishing—vague descriptions, wide nets. Somewhere around here, the questions got specific. A name. A direction. Somebody gave them something solid to follow.”

“Someone talked,” I said.

“Someone in Millbrook mentioned a girl who broke a well and left in a hurry with her guardian. That’s not betrayal, Elara. That’s ordinary gossip reaching the wrong ears eventually, the way gossip always does in a realm this size.” Briony didn’t soften the fact even as her voice gentled around it. “It doesn’t make it less dangerous. It just means this was never a matter of if. Only when.”

Corwin stood at the window, arms crossed, watching the tree line like it might produce riders on its own. “How long.”

“If they hold this pace, working the route village by village—eight days. Maybe less, if Malachi loses patience and simply floods the region instead of being careful about it.”

“Would he?” I asked. “Hunt openly for a girl from a well-breaking, with nothing but rumor to go on?”

“He wouldn’t need proof for his own people,” Fenna said, not looking up from the blade she was sharpening at the far table. “He’d only need a story. An untrained silver wolf, dangerous to nearby villages. That’s not a hunt for the Duskmoon heir, on paper. That’s a hunt for public safety. Nobody questions the details of that kind of story. I’ve watched him build a dozen just like it.”

Something cold settled low in my chest—the same specific cruelty from Briony’s ledgers, methodical and reasonable-sounding, now aimed directly at me.

“Then we stop being careful about how fast we move,” I said.

“Careful is the only reason you’re alive to say that,” Corwin said, sharper than he probably meant to. “I understand the urgency. I share it. But rushing your training before it’s ready doesn’t protect you, it gets you caught mid-shift in front of people who’d use exactly that as proof of the story Malachi wants told.”

I wanted to argue. Weeks ago I would have. Instead I made myself sit with the frustration the way Fenna had been teaching me to sit with the shift itself—not fighting it, just directing it somewhere useful.

“Then tell me what’s actually possible,” I said. “Eight days. What can we realistically finish.”

Briony exhaled, some tension easing at the question, like she’d been waiting for me to ask it instead of simply reacting to the fear. “I can reach three more families willing to give direct testimony, if we move carefully. Testimony changes the case entirely, Elara. A ledger is a record. A person standing up and saying what a ruling actually cost them is a weapon.”

“And Kael.”

“We wait,” Corwin said, in a tone that made it clear exactly how much he trusted that particular variable. “If he meant what he told you, we’ll hear something. If we don’t—”

“He’ll come through,” I said, with more certainty than I entirely felt, and watched Corwin decide not to push it.

The next three days passed in a controlled, grinding rush. Fenna doubled the pace of training until I was holding full shifts past the hour mark without losing my grip on my own mind. Briony rode out twice, returning each time more drawn and more resolved. Corwin barely slept, watching the ridge road like it owed him an accounting.

I fell into bed each night bone-tired in a way that had nothing to do with the shift and everything to do with racing a clock none of us could actually see.

It was the fourth evening, mud-streaked and hollow with exhaustion, when Briony came around the side of the farmhouse at a dead run, and I knew before she said anything that the eight days had just become considerably fewer.

“Riders,” she said, breathless, one hand braced against the doorframe. “Ridge road. Maybe three-quarters of a mile. Lord Protector colors—six of them, and they are not moving like a patrol that’s still guessing.”

Corwin was already at the weapons rack. “That’s not a search party stopping to ask a farmhouse questions.”

“No,” Briony said. “That’s a party that already knows exactly what house to knock on.”