Tainted Crown

by Jenn Vakey

  "Thank you for reminding me," I countered, not hiding my anger any more. I still blamed him for her being in this state in the first place. I wasn't in the mood to be lectured. Not when I knew it was my fault she was in as much danger as she was.

  Unlike when we returned from Eden, though, he wasn't going to back down this time.

  "You know how dangerous this situation could be," he said, stepping closer to get into my face. "She shouldn't be out of sight at all until she can defend herself. If I had known you weren't going to take things seriously, I would have put her in the cell to keep her safe."

  "You are not locking my fiancé up," I declared. It was all I could do not to strike him for even suggesting it. She wasn't a prisoner. I would never let him make her one.

  "Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?" Dallin interrupted. "How is my daughter in danger, and why the hell wasn't I told about it?"

  I kept my eyes locked with Orson for a moment longer, daring him to push me further. Then, when I couldn't avoid it any longer, I took a step back and shifted to face Dallin. He was just as angry as I was. For good reason. He never should have been left out of this.

  But it should have been Leeya who told him.

  "Leeya killed Adler," I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt.

  Dallin's face paled, his eyes growing wide. "She what?"

  I nodded. He had heard it correctly, even though I knew he didn't want to believe it. "I was there with her. Adler tried to kill me so he wouldn’t have any obstacles when taking the throne. Leeya stopped him." I paused before saying more. I had to be careful here. I had no doubt that we could trust Dallin with the entire truth, but Faida was here. We were also standing in the middle of camp where anyone could overhear.

  "We don't have a way of knowing whether or not Dex knows," I said simply. It was the truth. Enough for now. "We do know there's footage from the rescue in Eden that she'll be in."

  He blew out a breath and turned to look out at the camp, nodding. "His confession. I saw the broadcast. She challenged him in a way that he won't allow. Especially coming from a woman. He's too proud for that. Arrogant."

  "And if he saw me after…" I let my thought trail off. Dallin had been right by my side. He had seen my concern for her. The unadulterated panic I hadn’t even attempted to hide.

  "He'll know he can use her to hurt you," he finished. He shook his head, then turned to meet my eye. "I should have been told she was in danger. She's supposed to be safe here."

  I nodded, agreeing. "I know. Leeya would have wanted to be the one to tell you about Adler, but I should have told you the rest. That's on me."

  He met my words with a nod, then asked, "So how do we find our girl?"

  It wasn’t an acceptance of what I had done, but it was as close as I was going to get. It was his way of telling me that he trusted me to do everything I could to keep her safe. Even if he wasn’t happy with the choice I had made.

  “Have Lillith try to connect with her,” Orson said. “Faida, double check the registrar to make sure our numbers aren’t off.”

  She nodded and left without waiting for any further instruction.

  “I’ll get a small team together to start searching camp. Find me as soon as you know anything.”

  With that, Dallin and I both turned and moved quickly toward the dorm.

  The smile on Lillith’s face when she opened the door quickly fell away when she took in the two of us. Her eyes moved behind us, searching, then she met my eye again. “Where’s Leeya?”

  “We need you to try to connect with her,” I said instead of explaining.

  She looked like she was going to question it for a moment, then she nodded.

  Like with Leeya, her eyes took on a faraway look. It only lasted for a moment, though, before her brow dropped in confusion. Blinking a few times, she shook her head.

  “That’s strange,” she said. “I felt it, but then it just ended.”

  My anxiety spiked. Leeya had never mentioned having problems with it before. She’d never even had a failed attempt. So what was the problem now?

  “Try it again, sweetheart,” Dallin said from my side.

  Lillith nodded, and we all stood in silence as we watched that look take her over again. But like before, it didn’t last long.

  “She…” she muttered, shaking her head.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  “She’s breaking the connection,” she said. Her nose scrunched up, a look of something resembling hurt in her expression. “She yelled at me.”

  “What did she say?” Paxton asked before I could.

  “She told me to stop it,” she explained. “Stop trying to reach her? What the hell is going on?”

  That was what I wanted to know. It wasn’t unlike Leeya to wander, but this was. Even if she couldn’t remember her relationship with her sister, I couldn’t see her yelling at her. She had even told me before that they almost never fought while growing up. For her to be doing it now, especially when she had to know that Lillith was worried about her, didn’t leave me with a good feeling.

  “Did you pick up anything?” I asked.

  She thought about it for a moment before nodding. “I heard water. Maybe she’s in the shower. Has anyone checked?”

  Dallin and I shared a look before we both shook our heads.

  Lillith rolled her eyes. She pushed past us and started walking down the hall. Had Dallin not been here, I probably would have followed her. This definitely wasn’t the time to even make him suspect just how close Leeya and I had become in her time in Alkwin.

  She didn’t need to say anything when she stepped back out moments later before I knew what she had found.

  Leeya wasn’t there.

  “Give her a few minutes, then try again,” I told her. “I’m going to grab Kip and see if he can tell us where she is.”

  “The dog?” she asked, eyes wide with disbelief.

  Nodding, I said, “It worked when Linley was taken. He should be able to follow her scent.”

  She looked doubtful, but I turned without explaining further and hurried out of the dorm. Dallin by my side.

  “Zaydan’s in the new garden,” I told him. “I’ll grab Kip. Get Zaydan and meet me back here.”

  He nodded and took off at a run.

  The children were on the playground when I reached the schoolhouse. Linley gave me a questioning look as I approached. She took a step toward me, but I shook my head and whistled for the dog. I had a feeling her empathic abilities had already cued her in that something was going on. I didn’t want to worry her further. Instead, I gave a look to Evanly that I knew would let her know to keep a close eye on her. Not to let her wander off. I didn’t have time right now to search for both of the ladies in my life.

  “Come on,” I said to the dog. Zaydan must have taught him quite a bit, because he stayed by my side as I turned and jogged back toward the dorm. Either that or he too could tell something was wrong. It had been one thing for me to tell him in that meeting with the entire community to go find Linley and for him to listen. She and Leeya were the only people he really spent time with. I think this was the first time he had gone anywhere with me alone.

  “What’s going on?” Zaydan asked, running up with Dallin just as I reached the building again.

  His eyes shifted to the dog, and I watched as that carefree manner of his fell away. I would only need him to talk to Kip if something was wrong.

  “We need him to track where Leeya went this morning,” I told him. He gave a tight nod, and I turned toward Dallin. “Where was the last place you saw her?”

  “This way,” he said, tossing his head toward the left.

  We crossed through the yard until Dallin came to a stop behind the dining hall. He looked around, then pointed toward the center of camp. “She walked that way.”

  Zaydan crouched down in front of the dog and held his eye. “Find Leeya,” he commanded.

  Kip sniffed the air, then
dropped his head to the ground. After only a moment, he started walking in the direction Dallin had said she had gone. He had her scent.

  “So Zaydan can…?”

  “Talk to animals,” I said, staying just a few steps behind the creature as he walked.

  “They can’t actually talk back, but I can get a sense of what they’re thinking,” he added.

  “That must be useful out here,” Dallin mused.

  But I wasn’t really paying attention. With each step Kip took, that feeling of unease grew. It was the direction he was going.

  “What time did you say she went this way?” I asked, fearing I already knew the answer. Leeya wouldn’t have had any need to come to the storage building. Not unless she had been telling the truth when she told Dallin she had seen me.

  “Around ten. Ten thirty,” he answered. “I should have looked for her when she wasn’t at lunch. I just thought she was with you.”

  My head felt heavy as I nodded. I had a feeling we had missed lunch for the same reason. Because if she had come here when Dallin said she had, I had to believe that she had seen me talking to Maizie. If that was the case, I had no idea what all she had heard.

  Sure enough, Kip led us inside the building. He followed her trail along the back wall, lingering beside a shelf that was stocked with soaps and spare blankets. My heart sank. Looking out from here offered the perfect vantage point of where Maizie had brought me for our talk.

  Shit.

  None of us talked as we walked toward the back door and out into the yard. I managed to hold on to the last bit of hope I had that she’d just gone somewhere in camp to process what she had heard. Or what she thought she had heard. But then Kip moved in a straight line in the one direction I wished he hadn’t.

  “Kip,” I called, stopping him before he reached the tree line. The guys stopped beside me, questioning. “We need to gather a team. She’s not in the woods. At least not within the wards.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LEEYA

  The first sensation I felt when the world came back was coldness. That was quickly followed by the realization that I was wet. Not just wet. I was surrounded by the weight of water, being pushed by it.

  It took several long moments for me to understand what was happening. I was in a river, being swept along with the flow.

  Panic surged through me and I started to struggle, which only caused me to flip and get a face full of water.

  I threw my limbs out, surprised when my hands and knees connected with something hard. I couldn’t keep from being pushed forward, but the position did allow me to keep my head above water long enough to gulp in air. Then, pushing through my fear, I tried to assess my situation.

  The water was neither deep, nor wide here. That was something.

  Ignoring the pain that came with being slammed into the rocks lining the bed of the river I somehow now found myself in, I kicked and grabbed at what I could and moved toward the shore. The closer I got, the easier it became. The current wasn’t nearly as strong, so I was able to crawl the last few feet until I found solid ground.

  The moment I pulled myself from the water, I dropped down onto the wet surface. I was exhausted. To make matters worse, what had felt like comfortable weather when I was running through the woods wasn’t any longer. I was soaked through and freezing.

  What the hell had happened? I remembered being in the woods, but I had no idea how I had ended up in the river. Even more worrisome was that, when I tried to think about Alkwin, I couldn’t remember where it was. Not even a direction that I could start moving in to try to get back to it.

  Memory problems sadly had become my norm, but this didn’t feel like the same thing. I could clearly remember camp itself. The people, the buildings. Given what I had been told, there was only one reason I could think of for that missing information. During the meeting that first day, Orson had mentioned that part of the magic in the wards would remove the location of the camp from your mind when you were outside of them. It prevented someone from being able to give the information out if they left and were captured.

  That could only mean that I was no longer within the wards. I was outside of Alkwin.

  I should have been happy for that. It was what I had wanted when I was running through the woods. To be able to find my way out and get to the city. To take my pain out on Dex.

  But there wasn’t any relief to be found in my current situation. Just fear and a need deep inside to get back within the safety the wards provided.

  I let myself rest there for as long as I could before the cold became too much and I pushed up. The sun was still high in the sky, but I couldn’t count on it staying like that forever. I needed to get to shelter before the sun went down. Especially since my clothes were showing no sign of drying quickly.

  With no way of knowing exactly where Alkwin was, I did the only thing I could think of. I started following the river back in the direction I had come from. If I was lucky, I would eventually run into someone who could take me the rest of the way back. Either that or I would walk until I ended up at the waterfall.

  Unless there was more than one river that crossed through Alkwin. But I didn’t want to think about that. Not unless a time came that I had to.

  Either way, following the river would at least get me inside of the wards. I could figure everything else out after that. When I was safe.

  After what felt like an hour of walking, I came to the realization that I had traveled much further than I thought. Well, I was going to believe that instead of considering that I could very well be moving in the wrong direction. The only thing I could really be certain of was that I hadn’t crossed back through the wards yet. That was proven every time I tried to think of Alkwin and turned up an empty void instead of locational information.

  I was just about to give in and take a break when a new sound broke through those of the woods and river. A voice.

  I stilled, straining my ears to listen. I turned my ear ahead, trying to make out exactly where it was coming from. Nearly a minute passed without it coming again. I almost called out, letting them know I was here. Sure by this point that my absence had been noticed, I was fairly certain Rhydian would have people out looking for me. I didn’t like needing to be rescued, but I was more than ready to get out of my still damp clothes and eat something. To take a hot shower and expel the cold that had settled into my bones.

  Just before the words left my lips, I heard the voice again. Well, voices. Two men, by the sounds of it. But that wasn’t what stopped me from announcing myself. Even with the water echoing around me, there was no mistaking the direction the voices were coming from.

  Not the direction they should have been coming from.

  I froze, caught between the desire to reach civilization again and the need to flee. I couldn’t understand it. It was very possible that the search team could have just come from a more direct route than I was traveling in. I couldn’t even begin to guess how slim the chances were of someone from outside of Alkwin just happening upon me out here in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like we were close to the city. Rhydian had said it was a day’s walk.

  There was still a voice in the back of my mind screaming for my attention. If there’s any sign of trouble, hide, it said. I mean it, Leeya.

  So I listened.

  I turned and ran away from the river, doing the best I could to keep from stepping on anything that would make my retreat obvious as I went. I didn’t go too far, though. While running until I was completely swallowed by the woods might have helped to protect me from a threat, assuming the people coming really weren’t from Alkwin, I didn’t want to risk getting lost out here. I needed to stay close enough to the river that I could follow it back if I needed to. It was the only thing I had to lead me back to the wards, and they were the only guaranteed way of keeping enemies from Eden away.

  I moved behind a thick patch of brush that was still close enough that I could see the edge of the river. I crouched down low to th
e ground and fought to keep every muscle still. To be silent. It wasn’t an easy task with the way I was shivering, but I managed.

  Then I waited.

  Close to fifteen minutes passed before the sound of footsteps was loud enough for me to hear. Lots of them, which meant there were more than just the two people I had heard. I was still pleading silently that this was just a group from Alkwin. But what I heard as they spoke told me beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t. That I was in trouble.

  “She can’t be far ahead of us,” someone said. “Are you sure she’s still following the river?”

  “It’s not like I have a tracker on her, Arion,” another replied abruptly. “But that’s where she’s been every time I spotted her.”