The square was already full by the time Cassian, Toma, and Yara reached it, torches gathering fast from every direction, voices overlapping in a way that made the alarm bell feel like it was still ringing inside Cassian’s own skull even after it had gone quiet.
"Wren’s gone," someone was shouting. "Her mother woke up and the door was open. She’s gone."
Cassian’s stomach dropped clean through the floor of him.
More voices joined the first, fear spreading through the crowd faster than anyone could contain it. A few people were already pulling on boots half-laced, grabbing whatever weapon sat closest to hand. Somewhere near the well, a child started crying, too young to understand the words but old enough to catch the fear in every adult’s face around them.
Doran arrived within moments, already half-dressed, expression grim in a way that made the whole crowd fall quieter around him. "Where was she last seen?"
"Her room," the mother said, voice cracking apart with every word. She looked wrecked, hollowed out, one hand pressed hard against her mouth like it was the only thing keeping her upright. "I checked on her before I slept. She was there. I swear she was there."
Cassian looked at her and felt something twist uncomfortably in his chest, guilt tangled up with grief he had no real claim to yet. This was the same woman who’d pulled her daughter away from him only hours ago, who’d told him plainly that he hadn’t earned a place here. None of that mattered even slightly now, watching her come apart in the middle of the square. He found he couldn’t hold any of it against her at all.
"Search teams," Doran said, already moving. "Fence line first, then the near trails. Nobody goes past the tree line alone, not tonight, not with everything else we’ve already found."
"Wait." A young watchman pushed forward through the crowd, torch shaking slightly in his grip, his face pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. "I need to say something. I should have said it an hour ago."
Doran turned on him sharply. "Say it now."
"I was on the south stretch, near the old grain store. I saw something move past the fence, low to the ground, quiet. I thought it was a fox, or a dog that got loose. There was a shape behind it too, taller, but the torchlight was bad and I only caught it for a second before it was gone into the trees." The watchman’s voice cracked. "I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t think a person would be walking a child out of the village in the middle of the night. I thought I imagined the second shape entirely."
The square went dead silent.
"You’re certain," Doran said, very quietly, "that there were two."
"I wasn’t certain of anything until just now." The watchman looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world. "But yes. I think so. I think there were two."
Cassian felt something in his chest go cold and very still, the vague dread of a child simply missing hardening all at once into something worse, something with a shape and a direction and a person attached to it. This wasn’t a wandering-off. This wasn’t even a beast dragging prey into the dark. Someone had walked into this village, taken a sleeping child by the hand, and walked back out again without a single dog barking or a single watchman raising the alarm until it was already far too late to matter.
"Then we’re not looking for something lost," Doran said, voice gone hard as flint. "We’re looking for whoever did this, and we’re looking for them now, before they get any further than they already have."
Senna was already organizing hunters into pairs, torches raised, voices tight and clipped with the particular fear that comes from a threat with no clear shape yet. Cassian fell in beside Toma without being asked, both of them moving toward the section of fence nearest Wren’s house.
"You think it’s the tiger," Cassian said, the words coming out low and certain, the fear already curdling into something harder.
"I don’t know what to think." Toma’s jaw was tight, his usual flatness stripped away entirely. "A rank seven beast, this close to the houses, taking a child instead of livestock. It doesn’t fit anything Doran taught us about how they hunt."
"Maybe it doesn’t need to fit."
They searched the fence line near Wren’s house first, torches throwing long, restless shadows across the packed dirt. It was Petra who found the break in the fence, a section where two support posts had been forced apart just enough for something small to slip through, the wood splintered outward rather than in.
"Outward," Corin said, crouching beside it, voice grim. "Whatever went through here, it didn’t force its way in. It forced its way out."
Cassian felt the cold settle deeper into his chest. "You mean she left on her own."
"I mean somebody left through here who didn’t want to be stopped at the gate." Corin’s eyes swept the ground beyond the fence, and Cassian saw it a half second before Corin’s torch confirmed it: small footprints, a child’s, moving steady and deliberate rather than dragged or stumbling, alongside a second set of prints beside them. Larger. Careful. Matching, in shape and tread, the same unfamiliar boots they’d found earlier that night.
"She wasn’t taken from her bed," Petra said quietly. "Someone got her to come outside first."
Doran crouched over the tracks a long moment, torchlight flickering across a face that had lost every trace of its usual calm. "That’s worse," he said. "A beast doesn’t need to convince anything to walk toward it."
They followed the prints in silence after that, deeper into the trees than Cassian had gone since arriving in the valley, the whole search party fanned wide and careful, weapons ready, nobody speaking above a whisper. The forest pressed close around them, torchlight catching on wet leaves and pale roots, every shadow suddenly worth a second look. Cassian kept his eyes moving the way Corin had taught him weeks ago, watching not just what lay ahead but the spaces between the trees, the places something could wait without being seen.
The footprints held steady for nearly a quarter mile before they simply stopped, both sets vanishing at the edge of a small, shallow clearing as though whoever made them had never taken another step past that point.
"That’s not possible," Toma murmured. "Tracks don’t just end."
Yara reached the clearing a moment later, breathing hard from the pace, and went very still the instant her eyes found what Cassian had already noticed carved into the trunk of the widest tree at the clearing’s edge.
A mark. Burned into the bark rather than cut, the edges scorched black and smooth, curling in on itself in a slow, deliberate spiral, two rings nested one inside the other.
Cassian couldn’t move.
He knew that shape. He’d seen it in his own reflection a hundred times, in still water and polished blades and, once, in a mirror he’d stopped looking into afterward. He’d seen it in his father’s eyes, the night everything ended. He’d seen it, glowing sickly green instead of orange and violet, in the last thing Moros Veyr ever looked at before he died.
"Cassian." Toma’s voice sounded very far away. "You’ve gone white. What is it?"
Cassian couldn’t answer right away. His hand had drifted up toward his own face without his permission, fingers pressed just beneath one eye, as if checking that the mark hadn’t somehow crawled off the bark and onto his own skin while he wasn’t looking.
"I don’t know," he said finally, and it was true, and it was also the worst possible answer he could have given, because some small, cold part of him understood exactly why the shape had stopped his heart even without knowing what it meant here, in this clearing, burned into a tree beside a missing child’s tracks that simply ended.
Doran studied the mark for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "Nobody touches it," he said finally. "Nobody. Not until Yara and I have looked at every record this village keeps." He turned to the gathered hunters, his voice hard enough to cut through the fear rippling through the group. "Widen the search. She can’t have vanished into the air. Someone carried her, or something did, and neither of those things leaves no trail at all past this point."
The search continued long past midnight, torches spreading out through the dark in every direction, voices calling Wren’s name into a forest that gave nothing back. Cassian searched until his legs ached and his voice had gone hoarse from shouting her name into the trees alongside everyone else, though some cold, honest part of him already suspected the search wouldn’t find her this way, not with tracks that ended clean at a mark none of them understood.
Cassian stayed near the clearing longer than the others, staring at the spiral burned into the bark until Toma finally pulled him away by the arm.
"You need to sleep," Toma said quietly. "Even a little."
"I’m not going to sleep."
"I know. Come sit somewhere that isn’t this clearing, at least."
He didn’t tell anyone what he’d thought, looking at it. He wasn’t entirely sure himself. But the mark stayed behind his eyes the rest of that night, patient and unexplained, the way certain things from the worst night of his life had never quite stopped doing.