The main tower of the forest watch stood an hour and a half's ride from Oсkhaven, where the road of packed earth gave way to a narrow strip of gravel between two rows of old boundary stones. The forest began three kilometers out, and from it came a different air, dense and cool even at the end of August. The tower was built of dark stone, four stories, with arrow slits on each floor, a black slate roof with a narrow observation platform at the top. Around it lay a small fortified yard with a stable, a storehouse, and a long barracks for the garrison. No flag flew above the tower. Only a hook, from which the flag had apparently been taken down long ago.
The yard gates stood open. Two watchmen froze at the posts when the party rode in, looking straight ahead and not moving.
Sir Aurey dismounted first, his black armor clanking dully as he landed, and he swept the yard with a silent look before stepping aside. Five knights spread out behind him, while Edith dropped from her saddle without help.
Sir Bram Wellard was already waiting for the queen's arrival at the tower entrance.
He was past fifty, and every year of it could be read on him without difficulty, though not as degradation, more as a kind of densening. Broad shoulders under a uniform jacket the color of wet moss, close-cropped grey hair, a face with skin cured by wind and the nearness of the forest. His right hand held his helmet, and the fingers on it did not move. He looked at Edith steadily, without the deference she might have expected from a man receiving a personal visit from his queen.
He bowed briefly, in the military way, a single incline of the head.
"Your Majesty."
Edith crossed the yard and stopped before him.
"I want to see the place."
Bram showed no surprise. His lower jaw shifted slightly, as if he had been about to add something, then thought better of it.
"As you command."
He gestured to one of his men, who shortly brought him a horse.
Once mounted, the royal party and Bram with three watchmen set off toward the borders of the Great Forest, crossing the green plains of Waldruhm.
As they drew near, the first trees along the edge were still ordinary forest, pines and firs as wide around as a grown man's reach, but beyond them, fifty paces into the wood, the ground began to slope downward, and there stood others, colossally large, that the mind could not fit into any familiar category of tree. Trunks ten, twelve meters across rose skyward as vertical walls of grey-brown bark, cracked along their full height by deep longitudinal furrows, each wide enough for a man to lie sideways in and not be seen from six paces away.
The lowest branches began at forty meters, no lower, and from below they were barely distinguishable in the half-dark that the canopy made of the space closed above. Sunlight forced its way in through narrow pale columns, leaving visible clearings between the trunks.
The mat of rotted needles and last year's leaves compressed underfoot with a quiet, soft sound, while roots fanned out from the trunks in wide curved ridges, rising a meter and a half, two meters above the surface, forming between them closed hollows where moss gleamed with moisture and cold pooled. In some of those hollows, Edith noted from the corner of her eye, there would have been room enough to pitch a tent, or lie down with a horse and not be found.
"The watchmen found it toward the evening of the fourth day of the Hunt." — said Bram, moving ahead with confidence.
"My men conducted a search at the end of the Sacred Hunt and… found this."
They came out onto a stretch where the grass was flattened in broad patches and where the earth between the trees had been torn up. The smell here was heavy, rusty, already dried out but not gone.
The bodies had been removed. The traces remained.
Dismounting, Edith walked slowly between the trees and stopped where steel had been driven into the root of an old oak. A fragment of blade, a dozen centimeters, jutted from the tree at an angle, buried in living wood as if in butter. The steel carried runic engraving, visible in the glinting of the inlay.
Bram stood beside her, looking at the same fragment.
"Most likely an Order weapon. Runed steel. Second-grade forging."
A pause.
"Beyond the broken blades, some were either knocked away or remained in hands. But the hands were found separate from the bodies."
Sir Aurey did not stir. His gaze moved across the clearing methodically, left to right, returning to center.
"Show me the tracks" — said Edith.
Bram led them left, across a short slope toward a zone where the soil was softer from a nearby stream. Here he dropped to one knee and pointed to enormous animal tracks.
Six pressure points per movement cycle, arranged in pairs. The print roughly a hundred and twenty centimeters long, seventy wide. The edges pressed deep and evenly, without shifting, without any sign of slipping.
Edith stood over the track for a long moment, not saying a word.
Bram rose from his knee, his voice remaining level.
"I've seen tracks like these before, twice. When I was an apprentice to Master Sennor, and when I first took his post. They were always found at the inner boundary of the forest. At most seventy meters from the very edge."
Edith raised her eyes to him.
"And now?"
Bram straightened fully and looked in the direction of the forest.
"Now…" — He paused for a moment, as if weighing the phrasing.
"A hundred and forty meters past the inner boundary."
A pause.
"There is only one creature that fully matches the description… it was clearly an Urs. He went in and came back out. Judging by the depth, he was carrying something. Or someone."
Aurey glanced at Edith. She did not return the look, continuing to study the track.
She slowly straightened, adjusted her cloak, and took two steps away from the print.
"What changed, Wellard? You've worked this boundary for thirty years. What has changed in recent months? Why did the forest guardian decide to come out?"
Bram met her gaze directly.
"It started with the animals. From the beginning of summer they began leaving the forest toward the tree line, in packs. That's normal with a large predator, except the large predator here has always been singular. Then they simply fell silent. The forest went quiet. Completely."
His jaw shifted slightly.
"People of the forest watch have a rule: if, on patrol along the inner boundaries of the forest, you notice that the forest has gone quiet — the guardian himself is nearby, and you are obliged to leave the area as quickly as possible. But now, even at the outer boundaries, from the western edge to the eastern, the forest seems frozen. I conducted a personal patrol, despite the risk of encountering the guardian, but found no tracks or any other signs of his presence… until this moment."
He looked at the clearing around them.
"This…"
He nodded toward the tracks.
"This is clearly his doing, and yet, it doesn't look like him at all."
"Could anything have angered him?" — Edith asked, wanting to confirm the possible culpability of Kyle's people.
Bram shrugged, not out of ignorance, but rather from an unwillingness to speak of things that could not be confirmed.
"I'm afraid I cannot answer that question, Your Majesty."
A brief pause.
Aurey tensed slightly beside Edith, but said nothing.
Edith nodded slowly.
"I've heard you, Wellard."
Her voice was level, stripped of any intonation of command or justification.
"Increase patrol density along the entire outer boundary."
Bram nodded.
"Already done."
She held her gaze on him a second longer than confirmation required.
"Good."
"I need your written report on every anomalous event at the boundary over the last six months. Everything that seemed insignificant. Animal behavior, disruptions to the terrain, unusual sounds. All of it."
"I'll send it to you as soon as possible."