Niccola was quite sure that if not for her extensive self-training to rise with the sun each morning, she would not have woken before noon on the day after the ball. At least the same could be said of every other member of the household. Niccola hauled herself out of bed with a groan. She had made preparations for today's breakfast last night, so she would be able to leave the house in time to make it to the palace by ten. But she still had to actually cook the porridge and make the tea.

Even Lady Selah did not arise before Niccola laid out breakfast, swept the last corners of the house, and donned her coat. She threw a glance over the trees as she stepped outside, for any sign of her crow friend. The bird was nowhere to be seen. It had been this way for a week now, and the faintest tinge of worry crept into Niccola's chest. The crow had grown attached to her over the last three moons, but her absence was more than a loss of companionship. Something might have happened to her, and Niccola would never know.

Niccola shook off that thought with a shiver. The morning air was chill today. Mornings always fell to autumn first, their dew-soaked air cooling long before daytime temperatures fell far enough to hint at the turning season. Perhaps it was the night that told the trees to don their autumn costumes for their last dance before winter. The chill dispelled Niccola's tiredness as she walked briskly down the manor road. Her feet ached from last night's dancing, together with her trek to reach the palace, the Talakova, and the Bel Ilan manor once again. With errands to run and a prince to meet, she would go that far again today.

Traffic in the lowlands was sleepy for the time of morning. Most women of Calis had no doubt been at the ball until unearthly hours the night before, and those who were not sleeping moved slowly about the streets. Niccola slowed her walk. Her hair was down today, a cloud of black curls drawn back under a kerchief that kept them out of her face. She had taken care to differentiate her appearance from who she'd been at the ball, but she still twitched whenever eyes lingered on her for just a little too long.

She knew, logically, that there would be little way for the people here to identify her. Everyone at the ball had been masked, and she had fallen into her most regal gait the moment she's walked in the door. Her dress now, of course, was a far cry from the black-satin gown. Yet the worry nagged at her sufficiently that before she reached the market, she reached down and slipped a small stone into her shoe. It broke the gait she kept trying to fall back into, an echo of the pride and power she had felt at the ball. Maybe dancing with the prince for so long had been a mistake. Every prince-interested woman in the realm would be on the lookout for her now.

Thank the sky, nobody seemed to recognize her as she crossed the remainder of the lowlands and entered the market square. Niccola slowed. The place was nearly empty, and the low hum of the crowd told her something was wrong. Shoppers skirted stalls and hurried away with furtive glances. Further down the road, a steady trickle of people drained off the market's southern end towards something. Niccola followed them. She had errands to run and places to be, but anything near the Talakova's edge was of interest to her, whether related to her mission or not.

The people clustered at the bottom of the street, where the land gave way to the underbrush of the Talakova. Niccola was halfway down to it when the crowd parted. Two wayfinders emerged from the forest with a makeshift stretcher between them. They moved quickly, and people's gasps and cries at their passage were audible from all the way up the street. One of the bearers snapped at the crowd. People scattered. Niccola stopped at the street's edge with a tendril of dread creeping up through her as the two drew closer. When they finally passed by, one locked eyes with her.

"Get inside," he said, "and tell any family and friends you have to do the same. We're being hunted."

On the stretcher was a body, unidentifiable. Every part of its seemed collapsed in on itself, shrunken or wrinkled like all its blood had been drained. Its face was a skull cloaked in bare skin: lips gone, nose shrunken. Niccola's eyes followed it in horrified fascination. There was no sign of wounds, and no blood dripped below the stretcher. One of the body's arms rested beside it, thin as a branch, but the other was crossed over its chest, skeletal fingers clutching something that glinted in the sun. It was an unusual tool, like a four-sided birdhook, but too thick to be for birds. A fishhook, then. The tips of it were stained with blood. Before Niccola could get a better look, however, the stretcher-bearers broke into a nervous canter and whisked their burden away.

When they were gone, Niccola fixed the looming edge of the Talakova with a narrowed gaze. Human blood could be used as a sacrifice for magic-deals, but the Talaks never accepted less than the largest offering they ever received from a barrower. Over time, with each slip of the knife, each mistake with the cut, a mouse's worth of blood became a bird's worth, became a rabbit's worth, until even a small power maintained that way could come to cost a life.

The crows that shifted in the Talakova's branches looked like songbirds from Niccola's standpoint, so high up the trees, they might as well have found leaves to perch on. This was the behavior of Talak fear, but that death was not common for a Talak. Even a rogue one. The forest's wild spirits preferred live prey. Preferred it so strongly that magic-deals founded on anything else were anecdotal at best, myths at worst. No registered magic-line maintained itself with anything other than whole animals.

Had she misjudged the crows' behavior? She couldn't have; she had never seen them respond this way to a beast or even human intervention, and then there was the interaction she'd had with the crow up by the palace on the night of the ball. The crows of the Talakova called few things their enemy. Talaks were the only one she knew.

The streets had emptied. Niccola returned to the market, pausing only to shake the rock from her shoe. Vendors in the marketplace were packing up shop. Weaving between them, Niccola heard murmurs about moving away from the Talakova, a first in all the time she had lived here. The people of the lowlands might fear the great forest at their backs, but they were fiercely proud of their culture and where it was rooted. Never had she heard a person here speak even half-seriously about leaving that behind.

Either way, there would be no running errands today. She would have to leave a note for Lady Selah when she passed the manor again, pretending that her continued absence was an attempt to finish her shopping. This went smoothly, in the end. Lady Selah was up, but upstairs, and her daughters were still abed. Niccola scribbled the note and ducked out again before she came face to face with any of them. Then she was striding up the manor road towards the palace.

News of the death at the Talakova's edge would beat her to the palace. That would give Niccola an edge in the conversation she intended to have with the prince: deaths and disappearances were a more pressing topic now than they'd been even a morning ago, and she was more likely now to get away with blaming a member of the Calisian royal family. The prince was cornered. He would have to consider unsavory options.

Niccola cast a glance around her to ensure she was alone, then slipped her notebook from her bag and opened it to the sketch of the woman she was looking for. The woman's eyes pierced her, somehow animate even in their inanimacy. If the disappearances were connected, then a person associated with one would have a hand in the others. The prospect chilled Niccola deeper than the morning air had. If Calis had produced another necromantic, the horrors her great-grandmothers had nearly lost Varna to could play out again.

The sound of wingbeats approached. Niccola shut her notebook as a crow winged swiftly overhead, towards the palace. The news.

At last, the final manors gave way to open meadowlands. Niccola turned down a side street and began to wend her way towards the forest that butted up against the palace walls ahead. Even the thought of being watched here was enough to make the back of her neck prickle. In servant's clothes, she was both camouflaged and conspicuous. Her path towards an extension of the Talakova would be suspicious to anyone who lived in these homes. If only her family's magic-line was the ability to shapeshift into crows, rather than simply to speak with them.

When the messenger-crow was out of sight, Niccola opened her notebook again. She would need to present this sketch to the prince somehow, and ask him... the thought died half-formed. Isaiah could not see. She could not show him the sketch, and he would not recognize it even if she could: he had no way to know people by their faces. Niccola snapped the notebook shut with a cuss. If she wanted to identify this woman, then, she would have to find her herself. In person, or at very least a portrait like those that Varna commissioned of its own royal families and hung on its palace walls. That, in turn, would require getting close enough with the prince to either tour his palace or meet his family. Her guise as a crow-keep would not be sufficient. She needed an alliance instead.