They couldn't find Mirek anywhere. And Tish wasn't even sure she wanted him to be found. He was dead. It was obvious.
But nobody said that aloud.
"The body," Mamon was asking Rudra. "How do we find it? The Perma Forest is vast."
The Parthan Prince kept looking above. One of the soldiers came jogging up. "We did search the surroundings, Your Highness," he addressed Mamon. "The grounds are spotless in this area. Maybe we should—"
"Search the trees," Rudra said. "They tie their victims to the branches. Because humans tend to search the ground first."
It was one of the most disturbing things Tish had heard all day. She looked up as well, at the shadowy leaves and the pitch-dark sky, still waiting on the blessing of dawn.
The night seemed to stretch on forever.
And the Benevian soldiers searched from tree to tree for a dead man.
Tish walked somewhat behind Rudra, keeping the Parthan Prince and his — well, friend? More than that? — Nayan Dev, in her line of sight without being too obvious about it. She had refused to ride a horse. So had Prince Mamon.
The soldiers held torches, which did little to light the surroundings. The flames guttered low and orange, struggling against the thick mist that had crept back in after the fight — not the kind of mist that drifted, but the kind that sat, pooling heavy around the horses' legs and swallowing the torchlight only a few feet out, as though the dark itself were pressing back against every flame that dared enter it. The light didn't travel so much as it drowned, turning the men carrying it into dim, floating smears of orange surrounded by black. Beyond the small circles the torches carved out, the forest gave nothing back — no glint of eyes, no rustle of leaves, nothing to suggest the trees ended anywhere at all.
"So we are really trusting them," said Mamon.
"As if we have any other choice," answered Tish.
Mamon paused for three long seconds before asking, "Where is Percival?"
Tish didn't look at his face, afraid he would see something she didn't want him to.
In truth, Tish was trying very hard not to think about what had happened on the wall.
"Then go alone."
She tried not to think of Percy's cold words, even as they echoed in her head.
"Go save the monster. Or die by his hands."
"He didn't want to come," Tish said carefully.
She could feel Mamon staring. "Okay," he said, just that. "Okay."
Tish hadn't wanted to save Rudra. She hadn't even wanted to help him. She hadn't. Hadn't.
She had just felt it was unfair for him to die abruptly — if he did — after turning her life upside down for over a year. And then she had found him confronting a shapeshifter speaking in her own voice, muttering words like a prophecy. And she had immediately regretted coming to find him.
The silence stretched thick and awkward until Tish felt the impulse to break it by doing something productive.
"Did you find something?" she called out to Rudra. A stupid question. He would have told them if he had.
Rudra turned around. So did Nayan.
"Not quite," he said, "but the air in this direction is starting to smell less nice."
"Less nice," Mamon repeated flatly. "That's your expert opinion. As a dragon."
Rudra frowned. "I'm sorry, but there's no technical term for," he waved a hand — the sleeve of his borrowed tunic riding up past his forearm as he did, since whichever soldier had donated it had clearly not accounted for the possibility of dressing a dragon —
"something that was smelly, died, became more smelly, and then got dragged around by other smelly people."
It was very difficult to take a man seriously when his trousers ended a good four inches above his ankles and his shoulders looked moments away from splitting the seams of a tunic meant for someone half his size. He looked less like the terrifying beast that had levelled a quarter mile of forest an hour ago and more like an overgrown boy who'd stolen his younger brother's clothes as a prank.
She almost said something. She didn't. Because .... priorities.
"You said dragged by other smelly people," she said, focusing on the only sane thing she'd caught onto. "People. Not... shapeshifters." She said it like a fact, not a question.
Rudra nodded. "Shapeshifters smell like rot and something sweet. This is different."
His words didn't make sense. Still. It was better than nothing.
"Hold on, by people?" Mamon's voice rose. "Like humans? Here? In the middle of nowhere?"
"But are we in the middle of nowhere? Really?" Tish looked around, at the solid wall of darkness around them that seemed to press down on their procession from all directions.
Tish could practically taste the thick layer of disbelief in Mamon's voice, but she couldn't feel the same. "Your Highness," she whispered, "how long have we drifted from the front gate?"
Mamon paused. He looked down at her, eyes a little wide. He didn't answer. Instead, he turned around and shouted, "Loké! Bring the map!"