The invitation to hunt came from the King himself, which was how Damian knew, before he’d even finished reading it, that Darius was behind it.
His father had never once, in ten months, asked for Damian’s presence at anything.
Not a feast, not a court session, not the smallest ceremonial nothing that legitimate children were dragged to twice a week.
King Aldric Vorn, as far as Damian could tell, had spent an entire decade successfully pretending his eighteenth child simply didn’t require thought.
So an invitation bearing the royal seal, summoning “Prince Damian” to the autumn hunt in Whisperwood’s outer treeline — the exact stretch of forest that bordered, on the game’s map, the first dungeon he’d recognized from his own bedroom window ten months ago — had Darius’s fingerprints on it even before Damian noticed whose handwriting had filled in the details underneath the seal.
He brought it to Kael that afternoon, and for once neither of them bothered with the idle register they’d used for four months before finally dropping it.
“He’s not going to try anything in front of the King,” Kael said, reading it twice.
“That would be suicide. Regicide-adjacent suicide, even for a crown prince.”
“He doesn’t need to try anything in front of the King,” Damian said.
“He needs to get me into a forest with real weapons, real horses, and forty acres of terrain where a hunting accident is the single most plausible explanation for a dead child that exists in this entire kingdom.”
“You’re not going,” Kael said.
It wasn’t a question.
“I have to go,” Damian said.
“Declining a royal summons — my father’s seal, not Darius’s — would be the first time in ten months I’ve done anything visible enough for the whole court to notice. I’d be trading one kind of danger for a worse one. At least the hunt is a danger I can prepare for.”
He spent the four days before the hunt doing the only kind of preparation that had ever actually worked for him: gathering everything he could, as quietly as he could, from everyone who owed him something.
Borin, first — found in the same isolated service corridor near the kitchens, at the same hour, because some patterns were worth keeping even after the debt they’d been built on had technically been paid.
“You’re not on the hunt roster,” Damian said.
“But you know who is.”
“I know the roster,” Borin agreed, arms crossed, wary in the specific way he’d been wary ever since a set of stairs three months ago.
“I’m asking you to find out which of his guards will be closest to me during the hunt,” Damian said.
“There’s a difference. I don’t need to know Darius’s plan. I need to know who’s positioned to execute it.”
Borin was quiet for a long moment.
“You know I can’t be there. Not officially assigned to the hunt, I’ve got no reason to be anywhere near that treeline.”
“I know,” Damian said.
“That’s not what I’m asking for this time.”
Mira Holt, second — found not by accident this time, but by simply going to the old chapel wing at the hour he now knew, with more confidence than he had any right to feel, that she’d be there.
“You’re not going to ask me to protect you,” she said, before he could speak, amusement threaded carefully under the words.
“I’m a laundry maid with a family obligation to a hole in the ground. I have exactly no standing to prevent a crown prince from having an unfortunate hunting accident.”
“I know,” Damian said.
“I’m asking whether the circle can tell you anything useful. About timing. About whether something changes if I die before the eighth mark.”
Something in Mira’s expression shifted — not surprise this time, but the specific stillness of someone recalculating how much a question was actually worth answering.
“The circle doesn’t know who you are,” she said, finally.
“It knows what you are. If you die tomorrow in a forest, in a way that has nothing to do with the category the circle watches, I don’t believe it changes anything about what’s coming. The mark doesn’t unmark itself because one candidate for whatever it’s counting toward gets removed from the board.” A pause.
“Which is either reassuring, because it means Darius killing you tomorrow wouldn’t matter to something far larger and far older than either of you. Or it’s the least reassuring thing I’ve said to you yet, because it means the thing counting toward eight doesn’t actually need you specifically to still exist.”
“That’s not reassuring,” Damian agreed.
“No,” Mira said.
“It wasn’t meant to be. But it does mean I have no particular reason to let a Custodian’s family obligation include watching a hunting accident happen to a boy who might, eventually, be useful to figure out what any of this actually means.” She held his gaze.
“I’ll be in the treeline tomorrow. Not officially. Not visibly. That’s the only promise I’m willing to make.”
Kael, third — and last, because what Kael offered wasn’t information gathered from someone else’s debts, but something Damian hadn’t thought to ask for until the conversation was already halfway through.
“I can’t be in the forest either,” Kael said.
“Not without it looking exactly as suspicious as Borin standing somewhere he has no business standing. But I’ve read every account of Whisperwood’s outer treeline that survives in any of the palace’s histories, going back three centuries, and there’s a pattern in the terrain nobody currently living seems to have noticed, because it only shows up if you read four separate unrelated texts against each other instead of any single one on its own.”
“There’s a dry riverbed,” Kael said, pulling a rough sketch from between the pages of a book he’d clearly prepared for exactly this conversation, “that every hunting account treats as an obstacle to route around. Nobody’s ever asked why it’s there, because it’s just terrain. But cross-referenced against the mining surveys from a hundred and forty years ago, it isn’t a riverbed at all. It’s a collapsed tunnel — old enough, and forgotten enough, that whoever’s planning tomorrow almost certainly doesn’t know it exists, because it predates every map currently in circulation.”
Damian looked at the sketch for a long moment, feeling something settle into place that felt less like a plan and more like the first real advantage he’d had since the invitation arrived.
“A place to disappear,” he said slowly, “if the hunt goes exactly as badly as I’m expecting it to.”
“A place to disappear,” Kael agreed, “that nobody chasing you will think to check, because as far as every map either of us has ever seen is concerned, it isn’t there.”
The hunt began at dawn, cold and gray, the kind of autumn morning Damian recognized from the game’s own loading screens — atmospheric, deliberately moody, the sort of environmental detail a designer spent real budget on because it made players feel like something was about to happen.
Something was.
He rode near the back of the party, exactly where a bastard prince was expected to ride, flanked at a distance by two of Darius’s household guards whose names he’d learned from Borin four days earlier and whose loyalty percentages he’d spent one of his three daily Analyses confirming that same morning, in the stable, before anyone else was awake enough to notice him doing it.
GUARD — SER TALON REEVES Loyalty: Darius (94%) Threat assessed: High — Active Assignment
Ninety-four percent.
Not a man being used as a disposable tool the way Roderick had been.
A man who’d chosen this, deliberately, for reasons of his own that Damian didn’t have time to unpack before the hunt began in earnest.
They rode for two hours before the party thinned the way Kael had predicted it would, the terrain narrowing around the dry riverbed until it was no longer difficult to fall behind a hunting line without anyone noticing exactly when it happened.
Damian felt it before he understood it — the particular quality of silence that meant two men were positioning themselves rather than hunting, the way Talon Reeves’s horse drifted, unhurried, into the gap between Damian and the rest of the party.
Now.
He didn’t run toward the riverbed immediately.
Running immediately would have told Reeves exactly what Damian knew, and exactly how much preparation had gone into knowing it.
Instead, he let his own horse slow, let the gap widen the way Reeves clearly wanted it to widen, and waited — counting seconds the way he’d counted steps in a chamber under the Hall of Blades ten months earlier — for the exact moment the second guard’s hand moved toward something that wasn’t a hunting bow.
Then he kicked his horse hard toward the collapsed tunnel that no map currently in circulation knew existed, and didn’t look back to see how long it took them to realize where he’d gone.
Days until the Players Arrive: 10,802