The Silver Moon Princess

Track On The Ridge

Chapter 7 — Tracks on th

The patrol camped one ridge over, close enough that I could smell their fire smoke on the

wind by the second night, and close enough that Fenna cut my training short with a single

sharp word I’d never heard her use before.

“Down.”

I dropped into the churned mud of the paddock without asking why, and it was only when I

lifted my head that I saw the shape of a rider silhouetted against the tree line on the far

ridge, unmoving, watching the valley the way a hunter watches a den he isn’t yet certain is

occupied.

“Don’t move,” Fenna murmured, crouched beside me. “Don’t shift. Anything sudden catches

the eye faster than anything slow.”

We stayed like that until the rider turned his horse and vanished back over the ridge, and I

didn’t breathe properly again until Briony came out of the farmhouse with a face gone

bloodless.

“Lord Protector colors,” she said. “Three of them, camped a ridge north. They’re not

searching randomly anymore. That’s a position. That’s someone who thinks they already

know roughly where to look.”

“How would they know that?” I asked. “We’ve been careful.”

“Careful isn’t the same as invisible.” Corwin’s voice, behind us, tight with the particular calm

he used when he was working very hard not to sound afraid. “Someone talked. Or someone

was seen. It doesn’t matter which anymore. What matters is that a waystation fifteen years in

the making just became a liability instead of a shelter.”

Briony’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t argue. “I have a second place. Smaller. Harder to find,

which is exactly why I never told anyone where it was until it became necessary.”

“How far?”

“Far enough that we shouldn’t wait for morning.”

We left within the hour, moving through the dark with the particular silence of people who’d

practiced leaving quickly without ever wanting to admit they’d practiced it. Fenna stayed

behind to scatter our tracks and buy us the length of a night. I didn’t like leaving her. She

told me, with a look that ended the conversation before I could start it, that she’d survived

worse than one ridge full of Malachi’s riders and intended to survive this too.

The land past the waystation climbed into hill country I didn’t know, steep and rocky, the

kind of ground that punished haste and rewarded caution in equal measure. Corwin led with

a lantern shuttered to almost nothing, just enough light to keep us from breaking an ankle on

the loose stone.

We were perhaps two hours into the climb when I felt it — the same prickling awareness

that had gone off at the crossroads inn the night I met Kael, except sharper now, closer,

unmistakably wrong.

“Corwin.”

He froze instantly, lantern light vanishing as he shuttered it fully.

Below us, in the narrow valley we’d just crossed, a second light moved. Slow. Deliberate.

Searching.

“They found the waystation empty,” Briony breathed, barely audible. “They’re tracking.”

“How fast?” I asked.

“Fast enough that standing here discussing it isn’t a luxury we have.” Corwin’s hand closed

around my arm, steering me off the path entirely, into rock and scrub too dense for a horse

to follow easily. “Move. Now. Quiet as you can manage.”

We climbed in silence after that, my heart hammering loud enough I was half-convinced it

carried down the hillside on its own, every loose stone under my boot feeling like a

confession. Behind us, the searching light paused once, swept slowly across the slope we’d

just abandoned, and continued on toward the empty waystation instead.

I let myself breathe again only once we’d crested the ridge and dropped into the hollow

beyond it, out of sight of the valley entirely.

“That was close,” Briony said, low.

“Too close.” Corwin’s voice had gone grim in a way I recognized — the tone he used right

before delivering news he’d rather not deliver at all. “Elara. I need you to understand

something, and I need you to hear it without arguing with me the way you argued about

Kael.”

“What.”

“That rider on the ridge this afternoon, and whoever’s carrying that lantern through the

valley tonight — they’re not searching the whole realm at random anymore. Briony’s right.

Someone gave them a direction to look in. That means one of two things. Either we were

seen somewhere on the road we haven’t accounted for.” He paused, and the pause itself told

me exactly what the second possibility was before he said it. “Or someone inside a circle

we trusted passed word along.”

The hollow around us had gone very quiet.

“You think someone at the waystation—”

“I think I don’t know, and not knowing is the most dangerous thing about tonight.” He looked

at Briony. “How many people know this second location exists?”

“Four. Myself. Fenna. You, now. And Elara.” Something troubled crossed her face. “Nobody

else. I built it that way on purpose, years ago, specifically for a night like this one.”

“Then it holds,” Corwin said. “For now. But we move again by morning regardless, because

a waystation that took fifteen years to build just fell to searching riders in a matter of days,

and I am no longer willing to trust that any hiding place stays hidden for long.”

I sat with that as the hollow’s cold settled into my bones, thinking of the ledger Briony had

shown me, of hundreds of families whose safety had unraveled exactly this fast, exactly this

quietly, and understood with sudden clarity that whatever fragile time I’d imagined we had

left to prepare had just been cut down to almost nothing.

Somewhere below us, in the valley we’d barely escaped, the searching lantern swept once

more across the abandoned paddock where I’d learned to hold my first full shift, and then

went still, hovering exactly where the mud still bore the deep, telltale prints of a wolf who

had no business existing at all