Chapter 95 ROYAL SEARCH
Soon, Athalia stopped choosing at random.
After Thomas, she swore she would never take another child who would be missed before sunset. The first time she heard a mother screaming a name through the streets while guards questioned shopkeepers, something inside her twisted so violently she had to duck into an alley and brace her hands against the wall until the wave passed.
So she began to watch longer.
She learned the rhythms of the poorer quarters, where children ran in loose packs that shifted and thinned with each passing day, where some faces appeared once and never again. She learned which doorways were slept in, which corners belonged to those with no one waiting at dusk.
She told herself it mattered.
It didn’t make the choosing easier. It only made it quieter.
She changed tactics, too. No more bright sweets in open squares. She worked at the edges of the city now — near abandoned courtyards, broken shrines, places where people already looked away.
The illusion she wore softened her presence, blurred memory. Those she spoke to later would recall a kind woman, or a passerby, or no one at all.
But the taking was only the first step.
The testing was what mattered.
Each child she brought was placed within a circle drawn in ash and powdered moonstone on the floor of her rented cellar room, far beneath the tavern’s noise. The space smelled of damp earth and candle wax. Runes lined the walls, faintly glowing when she whispered the right words.
She never hurt them.
They slept through it, suspended in a gentle stasis spell she had learned from Oren’s book — one of the few magics he had ever taught her willingly.
Athalia would kneel at the circle’s edge and cut her palm, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the central sigil. Then she would press her hand over her heart and speak her son’s true name — the one whispered to him at birth, never recorded, never spoken beyond the walls of her old chamber.
The air would change.
Sometimes it grew colder, her breath misting faintly. Sometimes the candle flames bent inward as if pulled by a silent wind. Once, the floor itself seemed to hum, a low vibration that rattled her teeth.
She watched for one thing only.
Resonance.
If the child in the circle was bound to her blood — if any fragment of her son’s life still lingered, altered, displaced, twisted by whatever had been done to him — the spell would answer. Light would thread between them. A pulse would echo from her chest to the child’s and back again.
It never did.
Most times, nothing happened at all. The spell dissolved into still air, the drop of her blood drying dark on stone. Those children she returned before dawn, leaving them near bakeries, temple steps, anywhere someone kind might notice them before cold or hunger did.
A few times, the magic reacted — but wrong.
One boy woke screaming as the circle flared sickly green, shadows rippling across his skin like oil on water. Athalia broke the spell at once, heart hammering, and held the child until the trembling stopped. That one she left at a healer’s door with a purse of coin and a charm woven for protection.
Each failure drained her more than the curse ever had.
But she kept going.
Because once — only once — the air had tightened in a way that stole her breath.
The boy had been older, perhaps ten. Thin, wary eyes, the look of someone who trusted nothing freely given. When she spoke her son’s name, the candle flames stretched tall and white. A faint glow traced the veins in the boy’s wrists, pulsing in time with her racing heart.
Athalia had leaned forward, hope crashing through her so violently she nearly broke the circle.
Then the glow flickered and died.
The boy sighed and rolled onto his side, still asleep.
Athalia sat back slowly, hands shaking.
Close, she had thought.
Or the magic had wanted her to think so.
After that, the dreams began.
She walked through a cavern of black stone lit by smokeless torches. Rows of figures stood motionless along the walls — men in ancient armor, eyes closed, skin pale as wax. At the center, on a raised slab, knelt a young man with her husband’s face and eyes too old for his smooth skin.
He opened them when she spoke her son’s name.
And smiled like he knew something she didn’t.
She added another layer to the test.
After the blood spell, she would rest her palm lightly against each child’s brow and whisper a seeking charm — one meant to follow threads of destiny, to glimpse the paths clinging most tightly to a soul.
Most children showed simple things: roads, fields, small homes, brief lives.
But sometimes she saw fire beneath the earth. Stone doors carved with symbols older than the kingdom. A cradle of bone and silver. And a young man standing at the mouth of a cavern, gazing out at a world he did not yet walk in.
Every time, the vision ended the same way.
His head would turn, as if he felt her watching.
And though she knew it was only magic echoing back her own fear and hope, Athalia would pull her hand away, breath shallow, heart breaking all over again.
Still, she continued.
Because if her son had been changed — aged, reshaped, hidden behind spells and stolen years — she could not afford to stop at the first impossible sign.
Somewhere in the city, mothers tucked children into bed.
Somewhere else, no one noticed an empty corner until morning light.
And in a cellar beneath a tavern, a queen without a throne knelt in a circle of fading runes, whispering a baby’s name into the dark, waiting for the world to answer back.
However, the rumors came back.
At first, the stories were harmless.
Some said she died during childbirth, others whispered she was cursed and disappeared into the old forests beyond the hills and no one ever saw her body. Yet,no grave was marked. But when children got missing, stories grew.
“She walks at night,” a baker once said, laughing nervously.
“Perhaps, she searches for something she lost,” said another
Every few weeks, boy children would vanish from his home. Always at night and always between the ages of five and twelve. Doors would be found unlocked, windows open and no signs of struggle.
And then, three days later, the child would be back alive and healthy.
But empty.
They remembered nothing of the time they were gone. Not the place, not the person and not even fear.
And always, without fail, the children would whisper the same words when asked where he had been:
“A lady asked me my name.”
And that was all. Or so they thought.