stare at me until my mother comes?” I ask, offering him a honeyed smile. “What a brilliant strategy.”
His eyes narrow. He rolls his tongue in his cheek. “Marcel, open your book again.” He turns away and scrubs a hand over his face. “We have work to do.”
“Good luck.” I settle back against the slab wall. “You’re going to need that and a miracle.”
14
Sabine
I TREMBLE AS I REACH the bend in the forest path, intersecting the road to Castelpont.
Please, Elara, let Ailesse be alive.
I take a steeling breath and step onto the road. Twenty feet ahead, the ancient stone bridge and dry riverbed beneath it look stark and desolate in the morning sun, no longer mysterious under the full moon or foreboding in surrounding fog. Now they’re only a painful reminder of Ailesse’s overconfidence and my own inadequacy.
My feet pad the ground as I force my quaking legs closer. No sign of Ailesse yet, but her amouré could have stashed her body in the shadow of a parapet.
I set foot on the bridge. I don’t see Ailesse lying on the stones. I glance at the riverbed below. She’s not dashed to pieces down there either. Swallowing, I tentatively press forward to the high arch of the bridge, craning my neck so I can see down its other side. No sign of her. My legs give way with relief, and I lean against a parapet.
Ailesse is alive.
She has to be. Her amouré wouldn’t have taken the pains to drag her anywhere else, only to kill her when he could do it here. He abducted her, like I suspected. Which is terrible, but at least her heart is still beating.
A glimpse of white snags the corner of my vision—five feet to my right, tucked up against the parapet.
Ailesse’s bone knife.
I move to pick it up. This isn’t the ritual weapon she used to kill the tiger shark; it’s the knife she crafted for her rite of passage. Every Ferrier before her has done the same. I’ve never been taught if that’s because of custom or necessity. Will Ailesse need this knife to make her sacrifice acceptable to the gods? I slip it under my belt, just in case.
I hurry off the bridge and climb down the riverbank, praying I’ll see another flash of white. Odiva’s warnings flood my mind.
The Chained need to be ferried. If they aren’t, they’ll feed off the souls of the living. Innocent people will die an everlasting death.
I walk the width of the riverbed, then back again several times, scanning any area where the bone flute could have fallen. I turn over rocks and kick the loose earth where I buried Ailesse’s grace bones. It’s no use. The bone flute isn’t anywhere. The lie I told Odiva must be true—Ailesse’s captors took it. I have to find them.
I race up the riverbank, but stop short when I see an elder Leurress peek out from the forest, using a different trail than mine. “Sabine,” Damiana calls quietly. Her wolf fang bracelet glints in the sunlight as she motions me closer with a rapid wave of her hand.
I rush over to her. “Where are the others?” I glance around for the six elders she set off with last night. “Have you found Ailesse?” Desperate hope fills my chest.
She steals a look at Beau Palais over the wall of Dovré and pulls me off the road, under the cover of the trees. “We’re still searching for her. We followed her captors’ trail for six miles, but they kept changing paths.” Her deep-set brown eyes lower. “We eventually lost their tracks where they merged into a stream.”
I give her hand a comforting squeeze. Damiana tried her best, but I hope the other elders didn’t give up so easily. “Didn’t anyone pursue them down the stream?”
She nods and rubs her wrinkled olive brow. Damiana is almost sixty years old. I can’t imagine she’ll ferry much longer—or spend many more nights joining search parties for the matrone’s missing daughter. “The stream soon met a wide river, you see. Pernelle, Chantae, and Nadine are still there, doing what they can, but when I left, Nadine still hadn’t picked up Ailesse’s scent.” Damiana shakes her head. “Her sense of smell is powerful, too.”
I nod, picturing Nadine’s eel skull hair comb. “What about Milicent, Roxane, and Dolssa?”
“They set off in separate directions in a blind search for Ailesse. Meanwhile, I traced the captors’ trail back here to make sure we didn’t miss any clues as to where they