The morning of the wedding arrived the way significant mornings always did in the palace — with more noise and more movement and more purposeful urgency than ordinary days, every corridor carrying the specific energy of people who had somewhere important to be and something important to do before they got there.
The bridal quarters had been prepared the night before.
Fresh flowers arranged on every surface, pale cream roses and trailing ivy that filled the room with a sweetness that was almost too much. Candles set and ready to be lit. The ceremonial oils warmed and waiting in their silver dishes on the dressing table. And the dress — the wedding dress chosen by the palace seamstresses and delivered without anyone asking Ava's preference — laid out across the bed in careful, deliberate arrangement, its layers of ivory silk spread wide, its embroidered bodice catching the early light from the window.
It was a beautiful dress.
Ava had not seen it.
Mara, the head of the palace bridal attendants, arrived at the quarters just after the first bell with three of her girls and a cart of cosmetics and accessories that rattled pleasantly as they wheeled it down the corridor.
She was in good spirits. A royal claiming ceremony wedding was the most prestigious assignment her team received and she had spent the previous evening reviewing her preparations with the thoroughness of someone who understood that details were the difference between memorable and extraordinary.
She knocked on the door with the brisk cheerful knock of a woman who expected to be let in immediately.
Silence.
She knocked again, slightly louder. "Good morning. We have a great deal to do before sundown and I'd like to begin with the hair while the oils are still warm."
Silence.
Mara looked at her girls. They looked back at her with the carefully neutral expressions of junior attendants who had learned not to have opinions in front of their supervisor.
She tried the handle. The door swung open.
The room was empty.
Mara stood in the doorway and looked at the empty room for a moment. The dress on the bed. The candles unlit. The silver dishes of oil undisturbed. The pillow on the bed still holding the slight impression of a head that had rested there — when? Last night? This morning?
She looked at the dress.
The dress had not been touched.
"She must be at breakfast," one of her girls offered.
"She must be," Mara agreed.
She sent one of her girls to check the dining hall.
She began setting up her cart.
The girl came back alone.
"She wasn't at breakfast," she said carefully. "The kitchen staff said she didn't come down this morning."
Mara set down the comb she was holding. "The gardens perhaps. Some brides like fresh air before—"
"I checked the gardens too."
The small uncertain note in Mara's chest produced a slightly larger companion.
"Check with her mother," she said. "Quietly. There's no need to make anything of this yet."
Rossana was found in the kitchen, as she was every morning, going about her duties with the calm efficiency that three years of palace service had made habitual. She looked up when Mara's girl appeared in the doorway and the girl relayed her message in the low discreet tones Mara had instructed.
Rossana's expression shifted into something that looked exactly like a mother's puzzled concern. "She wasn't in her quarters? She must have gone to her sister. They were up talking very late last night." She set down her work and wiped her hands on her apron. "I'll find her. Give me a few minutes."
The girl relayed this back to Mara who exhaled with relief and continued setting up her cart.
Hazel's quarters were empty too.
Hazel herself was found in the linen room, folding napkins with the mechanical focus of someone who needed something to do with their hands. She looked up when Rossana appeared and something moved across her face before she controlled it.
"Where is she?" Rossana asked quietly, closing the door behind her.
"I don't know," Hazel said. Her voice was steady. "I haven't seen her since last night."
The two women looked at each other.
"The makeup artists are waiting," Rossana said.
Hazel looked back down at the napkins. "Then she'd better be found."
By the second bell Mara had stopped being discreet.
She had sent her girls in pairs through every corridor of the east wing, checked every room she had access to, questioned every servant she encountered with the increasingly strained patience of a woman watching her carefully prepared schedule dissolve around her.
The answers were all variations of the same answer. No one had seen the bride since the previous evening. No one knew where she was. No one could explain the untouched dress or the undisturbed cosmetics or the cup of water sitting on the windowsill with its ring of condensation and its story of a girl who had been there and was now simply not.
She went to the palace steward.
The palace steward went to the court chamberlain.
The court chamberlain went to the Alpha King's personal guard with a carefully worded message that nonetheless communicated the essential information with complete clarity.
The bride was not where she was supposed to be.
By the third bell the east wing had been searched twice and the north wing once and the palace grounds were being walked by guards who had been given no specific instructions beyond find her which was not particularly useful guidance but was the best available given that no one yet wanted to use the word missing in connection with a prince's bride on her wedding day.
The word was being thought very loudly by everyone.
No one was saying it yet.
The palace moved and searched and questioned and escalated around it and the dress lay there in its careful ivory arrangement and the morning light moved across it slowly the way morning light moved across everything, indifferent to the significance of what it fell on.
By the fourth bell the word missing was being said out loud.
The great hall had filled with the urgent murmuring of a court in crisis. Pack leaders who had stayed for the wedding clustered in careful groups, their conversations low and rapid. Elders moved between them with expressions that communicated concern while carefully withholding judgment. Servants stood in doorways with the wide careful eyes of people absorbing something they would be discussing for years.
Prince Varder stood at the center of it.
He had not moved from the center of the hall in some time. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his face carrying a angry expression, like he would strangle Ava the moment she found for keeping him waiting.
Ryder stood at his shoulder. He had been at his brother's shoulder since the alarm reached the royal quarters and he had said perhaps four words in that time and all four of them had been to Varder in tones too low for anyone nearby to catch.
"She was seen in the east corridor yesterday evening," a guard reported, standing very straight and looking at a point above Varder's left shoulder with the focused attention of a man who had decided that eye contact was not currently advisable. "After that, Your Highness. Nothing."
"The east corridor," Varder said. "Search it again."
"We have, Your Highness. Three times."
"Search it again."
The guard went.
Gamma Cole was not still.
He was near the entrance to the hall and he was being eaten alive by it. The controlled precision that had survived the demotion and the disgrace and three years of watching his family diminished was failing him now in small visible ways — the jaw that wouldn't quite set, the hands that wouldn't quite stay still at his sides, the eyes that kept moving to the door and back with the compulsive rhythm of a man waiting for something he was becoming increasingly afraid wasn't coming. He had been through every room he was permitted to enter. He had asked every question available to him. He had done everything a man in his position could do and it had produced nothing and the nothing was doing something to his face that twenty years of soldier's discipline couldn't fully contain because he knew the implication of what this meant. Treason.
He looked, for the first time since the demotion, like a father who was frightened.
The search parties went out and came back and went out again. The hall filled with reports that were all the same report dressed in different words.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The fifth bell rang through the palace and its sound moved through the corridors and into the storage room at the end of the east corridor and through the canvas of the dark travelling bag where it reached Ava as a muffled distant toll that she counted carefully in the dark.
Five bells.
Her mother was coming. The van was coming. Everything was going according to plan.
She focused on breathing slowly.
She was good at waiting.
Rossana's face was everything it needed to be. Troubled. Reluctant. The face of a mother carrying something heavy that she wished with everything in her she didn't have to put down here, in this room, in front of all these people. Her eyes found Prince Varder's and held them with the steady direct gaze of a woman with nothing to hide and everything to offer.
Hazel stopped a respectful distance from Varder and dipped into a low bow that she held for a moment before straightening. When she looked up her eyes were bright with what appeared to be unshed tears.
"Your Highness," she said. Her voice was steady but carried just enough of a tremor to be believable. "I need to speak with you."
Varder looked at her. His expression didn't change. "Speak."
Hazel's hands tightened against each other. She looked briefly at the floor and then back up at him with the expression of someone gathering courage. "I know where my sister is."