Atticus, as you might well imagine, was not terribly pleased.

He interrogated every knight, every handmaid, every cook, everyone who had so much as breathed the same air as the princess that day. And for a while, the stories lined up.

In the morning, Tiffany had come down for breakfast. She had dressed, she had gone riding, she had returned her horse to the stable, she had eaten lunch.

And then, inexplicably, she had vanished.

Plenty of the staff had seen her at lunch. But after that? Not a trace. Not a whisper. She was simply… gone.

Her horse? Stabled.

Her wedding dress? Untouched.

Her fiancé? On the hunt.

Atticus didn’t think he’d ever been so frustrated in his life. Admittedly, that is most likely because he really hadn’t been, but the point is, he was extremely frustrated. He may not have yet become her husband, but this woman had been his responsibility, and it felt to him as though he had been the one to lose her.

It was Atticus himself who called the meeting of the knights, as King Douglas had elected to take a nap several hours ago and had not yet awoken, nor did anybody think to rouse him. In only minutes, every knight of the Valley had gathered, and Atticus Fletcher stood at their head.

“Men,” he said, “we have a problem.”

(Actually, there were four female knights in the room. Unfortunately, Atticus was not the type of person to care.)

“If any of you have information relating to the whereabouts of my betrothed,” he said, “speak up now.”

Nobody said anything, and so Atticus moved forward.

“If not, then we are going to find her. Now. And none of you—I mean none of you—return to this castle until she is found.”

He spoke as if he had faith in these people. Let me tell you, with absolute certainty, that this was not the case. Oh, he hoped, naturally, but deep down he knew that if anything even remotely serious had happened to the princess, it was he, Atticus himself, who would be responsible for her rescue. However, he was reasonably confident that wouldn’t prove too much of a problem.

(I hope you know, I laughed as I wrote that last sentence. Oh, what a fool he was.)

And so the search began. The knights fanned out, together covering the entire Valley in their search. The Valley was not a large place. If Tiffany was within its boundaries, it would not take long for one of the knights to locate her.

Unfortunately for them, Tiffany was well outside the boundaries of the Valley. But of course we can’t blame the knights for trying.

After the third go-around, what little confidence Atticus had in the other knights had depleted entirely. Three full searches across the kingdom, and still his bride-to-be had yet to be sighted. He called for a break, hoping that perhaps a bit of food and rest would improve the searchers’ performance, and readied himself for yet another search. It was sometime between the third and fourth searches, during that brief respite, that Reuben the steward finally thought to wake the king, who thundered inelegantly down the stairs in his bedclothes immediately upon receiving the news.

Well… ‘bedclothes’ is overstating it a tad. King Douglas considered himself to be, by nature, a hot-blooded creature, and disliked the heat of his blankets. He had once tried simply sleeping without them, but as we have mentioned, he was quite the cowardly fellow, and found that his blankets provided essential protection from the imagined beasts beneath his bed.

I apologize for the long-winded explanation, but I feel it is necessary to explain why King Douglas thundered down the stairs on this day wearing only a tight pair of shorts cut off above the knees—and nothing more.

“Atticus!” Douglas bellowed.

Atticus was there to meet him, calm and collected, a counterweight to the king’s panic. “Yes, my lord?”

“My daughter. They told me she’s—”

“Yes, my lord, she’s gone missing. I have had the Valley searched three times already.”

“And there’s no sign of her?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then search it again!”

“Yes, of course,” Atticus said. “I have ordered the men to take a break, so that the next search may be a more thorough one.”

Douglas promptly clapped him on the back, a touch Atticus barely felt due to the weakness of the king’s arm. “A splendid idea, my son! You will let me know, if…”

“I promise, my lord,” Atticus said, “you will be the first I tell.”

He decided then that the knights’ break was over, and absently shoved a serving woman into the wall as he went to gather the search party again.

The fourth search very nearly ended as fruitlessly as the other three. But Atticus Fletcher, I suppose, was just too good for another failure.

Looking back on this moment, I honestly have no idea how he found it. I cannot fathom how it came to be that Atticus kicked the precise patch of leaves that he did. Good luck was a pattern in Atticus’s life that would likely have irritated the other knights to no end, had they not been so busy drooling all over his gauntlets.

(I regret to say that is not entirely a joke. Atticus Fletcher has cleaned another knight’s drool off of his gauntlets. Nasty stuff. Thank goodness it only happened once.)

Atticus’s incredible good fortune did not strike until near the end of the search. He was, once again, sweeping the area between the castle and the nearest stretch of border fence, and still had found neither hide nor hair of the missing princess.

Was he worried about her? No. Not in the slightest.

Was he annoyed? Yes. Very much so, I’m afraid.

By the time he made his way to the fence he was practically seething, irritation swelling within him and spilling out in streams that quickly became waterfalls. Never before had he gone through anything so inconvenient.

In his annoyance, Atticus kicked the fence. He kicked a bush. He kicked some leaves. Essentially, think of a small child melting down into a tantrum, and apply the behavior instead to a tall, strong, manly man. Not a pretty sight—fortunately for him, nobody was near enough to see it. Not as far as I know, at least. I suppose a castle staff member might have looked through a window or something.

This tantrum, however, worked out in Atticus’s favor. You see, when he kicked the fence, his toe hurt. When he kicked the bush, sticks became tangled in his armor. But when he kicked the leaves, he saw something in the mud underneath.

An indent, none too deep—but there nonetheless. Crouching, tantrum forgotten, Atticus moved the rest of the leaves aside to reveal a small, singular footprint.

He sucked in a breath. Based on the size, the print likely belonged to a woman, and if the print belonged to a woman, he could draw the conclusion that…

Atticus looked at the fence, then back at the footprint in the mud. A bit of mud had found its way onto the fence, somehow, almost as if somebody had stepped in it before climbing across the boundary. And beyond the fence… yes, there were more footprints! A trail of them, fading as they went on and the mud wore off of their owner’s foot, but they were there. And they led deeper into the woods, and up into the mountains beyond.

But there was one other thing that drew his attention. One other detail, small, but vital.

The person who made those footprints had—almost certainly—been running.



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Tune in next Friday, September 27 for episode three…