Chapter 5: Arrival of the Hunters
They came at midday on the seventh day—three of them, moving through the trees with the particular silence of predators who have never needed to hide from anything.
Ava sensed them before she saw them: a cold, organized alertness that had nothing of Lex's complexity. These were men with a purpose, reading the forest for information, and whatever they were reading, they were reading her.
She was collecting feverfew near the eastern trail when the first one stepped out of the shadow of a pine.
He was dressed simply—dark clothes, no insignia she recognized—but something about the way he held himself suggested rank. He was looking at her the way a cartographer looks at an unmapped coastline: with interest that had nothing warm in it.
"The herbalist," he said. Not a question.
"Who's asking?" She kept her voice steady. The satchel in her hands gave her something to hold onto.
Two more had materialized at the edges of her vision. She was boxed in without having seen it happen.
"You've been spending time in this forest," the first man said. "We'd like to know why. And with whom."
The instinct that fired through her was immediate and non-negotiable—don't answer, don't confirm, don't give them Lex—and she was still working out how to say nothing convincingly when the air pressure in the clearing changed.
Lex dropped out of the trees.
He landed between Ava and the lead hunter with a weight that shouldn't have been silent but was, and the temperature in the clearing seemed to drop several degrees. He was still. Perfectly, dangerously still. The kind of stillness that preceded something catastrophic.
"You're beyond your jurisdiction," he said.
The lead hunter's eyes widened—a crack in the professional composure. "Your Highness—"
"Don't." The word was flat. Final. "I know why you're here. I know what you've been told to bring back. You're going to go back to the Court and report that you found nothing in this forest."
"That's not possible. She has a spiritual signature that can't—"
Lex moved.
It wasn't a fight. A fight requires two participants operating on something like equal footing. What it was was three hunters suddenly on their backs in the dirt with a Lycan prince standing in the middle of them, not even breathing hard, with a blade out that had appeared from somewhere.
"Tell them," he said softly, "that you found nothing."
They left.
Ava realized her hands were shaking only when Lex turned back to her and she saw his face—pale, jaw tight, eyes a controlled fury that was not, she understood, directed at the hunters.
"They'll report anyway," he said.
She knew what that meant.
"Then we have time," she said.
"Ava—"
"We have time," she said again, with a certainty she didn't quite feel, and watched something tired and resigned move through his expression before he reached out and, for the first and only time, briefly touched her face.
Then the forest exploded with sound, and the world came to an end.
