The scent of dried blood wafted from the large rock by the stream. It was not the blood of her quarry, but that of the Bound he had killed.

  To a normal ear, the forest was silent, save for the peaceful buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds. To Bella, it was a cacophony. She could hear the friction of sap rising in the elms and the clicking of spiders weaving their webs. Fifty yards away, the heartbeat of a mole thrummed against the earth. She heard it leap, then she heard the wet crunch of a dragonfly’s carapace shattering between its teeth.

  Bella grimaced. It was too much. It was always too much.

  But she was no longer the scared little girl being dragged to the Crucible to be reforged. She was one of the sharpest trackers in the Dominion, blessed by Krovos himself. With a practiced clench of will, she forced the noise away, dulling the world until only what was relevant to her search remained. Her gaze locked on the disturbance of soil that marked a human stride.

  The assignment annoyed her. This was merely an Unbound who had killed two Singler weaklings. It was of no consequence. It was beneath her station as a Tripler. But she had her orders, and she would carry them out.

  Her annoyance deepened the farther she followed the trail. The Unbound had gone straight into Echo territory. She sighed. Her mark had surely perished, making her endeavor an even greater waste of time.

  She crouched near the desiccated corpse of a man, clearly killed by an Echo. For a moment, she felt a sense of relief. Her quarry was dead, and her task was done.

  But that wasn’t the case. It was difficult to tell exactly when the man had died, having been reduced to a withered husk of dry skin and brittle bone. But he smelled wrong. And traditionally, Echoes did not strip their victims.

  No, this man had died some time before the fugitive had arrived. The corpse had been scavenged. She picked up a torn strip of gray wool and brought it close to her face, examining it. It was a piece of the dead man’s cloak.

  One didn’t need to be an expert tracker to recognize the violence that had taken place here. The earth was churned by the claws of the beast. Branches had been snapped and bushes trampled. Blood, and this time it was the blood of her mark, had seeped into the soil in a dozen different spots. The blood of the Echo, of course, had vanished along with its corpse the moment it was slain.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  For the first time, she felt a sliver of respect for the stray. He had killed two Singlers. He had faced an Echo and survived.

  No, not just survived. She traced the chaotic patterns in the dirt, reconstructing the battle in her mind. The Unbound had emerged victorious.

  But that victory also puzzled her. She looked around, peeling back the layers of the forest a hundred yards in every direction. The Unbound had killed the beast, but it had come at a great cost. He had lost too much blood to have walked out of this clearing alive.

  Yet, he was nowhere to be seen.

  As she followed the trail out of the Echoes’ territory, her confusion deepened. The footsteps of her mark were still easy to track, but the blood had simply disappeared. He had stopped bleeding.

  Was he truly Unbound? Or was he something else? Perhaps a Resistance spy, Attuned to the spheres, but not Bound by the Valyr.

  She dismissed the thought. Bella had traveled to Ardan, the sheep-shit smeared town the man had grown up in. She had stood in the temple that held the Augur Stone.

  The records were clear. He had touched it every year from his ninth to his sixteenth. And every year, the stone had remained cold.

  He was just a regular man.

  The contradiction made her smile. She loved a mystery, and that made her search far more tolerable.

  The Unbound was learning, too. The tracks showed he had started sleeping up in the trees after his battle with the Echo. That was smart. Looking at the waning light of the sun, she knew she would soon have to do the same.

  She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had been on this trail for two days already.

  It took another day to find the clearing by the road.

  Bella nudged the blackened stone of the fire pit with her boot. Ash flaked away. She squatted and examined the impressions in the ground. Five men. Two horses. A cart.

  Her quarry had spent the night with a band of traveling merchants.

  She looked south, where the deep ruts of the cart wheels disappeared down the road. He had continued north, his tracks avoiding the open path to vanish into the woods.

  A lesser tracker would chase the men and interrogate them. But they had long since left, and even with her speed, catching them would take at least another day.

  And besides, it was unnecessary.

  “Estoril,” she whispered, tasting the word on her tongue.

  The city was still twenty miles away, but she would make it before nightfall. She cracked her neck and began to run. Not the sprint of a desperate man, but the steady pace of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to go.