By the time he got back to the carriage he was sweating and in considerable pain, but kept it to himself, unwilling to give the good doctor the advantage of being right. He was going to Deep Harbor, even if he had to do it lying down on the seat.

“Are you certain this was the spot?” he asked Zella, who was standing with Kordira by the carriage.

“Yes, Baron. It was here.”

“Very well. We’ll go to the bridge next.”

Erian turned the carriage around and they drove to the bridge where Zella had been spotted. Climbing down the bank with Syrel, he found where Zella had lain among the rushes growing there, and her footprints in the grass and mud, leading down from the road, but there the trail grew cold. He backtracked for some distance, casting back and forth along the road for any sign of where she might have crossed it, but there was nothing that he could see. He finally gave up and stood in thought. Zella had been spared in the attack, apart from the shock and bruises, and somehow wandered nearly a mile down the road in daylight without being seen, then lain by the river for a day until Syrel found her. Or had she lain at the site of the ambush and wandered down the road later?

Leaving Syrel to walk back to the estate, Seregil took the seat opposite the women. “I’m not finding much to go on, Lady Zella.”

“That’s hardly her fault,” Kordira said, holding Zella’s hand.

Zella said nothing, and remained quiet as they rolled along the highroad. Clinging to the leather hand strap by the window, she gazed out at the countryside.

“You look very pensive, my lady,” said Seregil.

With a forlorn sigh, Zella replied, “I’m well enough, my lord, but I’m so worried about Princess Klia!”

“I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything else? Perhaps how you were spared when all the others were taken?”

Fear was clear on her face as she turned to him. “I told you, my lord, I don’t know why. By the Four, I’d have taken her place if I could have!”

“Taken her place?”

“Whatever happened, my lord!”

“I see.” Seregil gazed at her until she looked away. “How is it, I wonder, that whoever took Klia in such a dramatic fashion would have left a survivor to tell the tale?”

“My lord?”

“It just seems to me, Lady Zella, that your employers often come to bad ends.”

She burst into tears at that, weeping into her hands. “How can you be so cruel? I—”

“You loved the archduke, I presume.”

“Really, Baron, I think that’s enough!” Kordira exclaimed, even as Zella looked up in astonishment and managed a meek nod.

“And yet both he and Her Highness have run afoul of something unsavory,” Seregil continued.