Lady Rosalee is surprised when one of the servants brings her a message from the mayor of Briargate. She sits at her little desk in her room and reads the message. At first, the news doesn’t seem to register, so she reads it again.

  She crumples the third piece of parchment before stopping and putting her head in her hands. It isn’t right. Why can’t I say what I want to say? Need to say?

  Finally, she writes an extremely simple message and leaves her room to find a servant. It feels like it is taking far longer than it normally does before she finds one, but she eventually does.

  “I need you to send this to the mayor of Briargate. Also, where is my father located at the moment?”

  “I believe he is in the northwest study, so he can look over the battlefield.” The servant takes the message, bows, and leaves.

  As the servant leaves, Lady Rosalee quickly makes her way to where she believes her father is located. Of course, he is in the northwest study; he is always in the northwest study since the war began.

  As she nears the door, she slows down and collects herself before knocking. Her father's voice calls out a moment later, and she opens the door.

  “Oh, Rosalee, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Her father, a big, burly man, is leaning over a map on the table. There are all sorts of military markers laid across it. He glances up to see who enters and smiles, seeing his daughter.

  “I need to borrow Elijah.” Not beating around the bush at all, she gets straight to the point.

  “Elijah? What do you need a knight for? You are aware we are in the middle of a war.” Her father pushes back from the map and turns to face her, crossing his arms.

  “The boy who rescued me and Lady Grey has been found, or so the mayor claims. I intend to have Elijah see if it is really him, and if so, bring him here.”

  Scratching his short beard, he grimaces a little both at the bad memory of his daughter being kidnapped and the idea that someone might be trying to take advantage of his family. “And what exactly does this boy want showing up now of all times?”

  “The note did not say. Only that the mayor had found him and taken him in as soon as he realized who he was, and then sent word to us immediately. When questioning the boy, he was told he was looking for a way to contact me or Lady Grey.” Lady Rosalee shrugs lightly, not beginning to guess Max’s motives then or now.

  “He was always a bit of a mystery, just showing up the way he did, claiming to have heard my voice and then vanishing the way he did. He killed five Needleleafs and fought a Corpse Lurker trying to get us to Briargate.” Rosalee pauses before continuing.

  “If the kidnappers hadn’t appeared and struck him with an arrow, he would have escorted us the entire way.” While at the time she had no idea what they had faced in the tunnels, things were quite different now.

  “How will Elijah know if it is really him and not some imposter just trying to gain a reward or our favor?” Baron Braye could not deny that the family owed this strange boy, Max.

  They may never have found where his daughter had been whisked off to, and still had no idea what they had been planning on doing with her. If it really was the boy, he would hear his demands if nothing else.

  “I did think of that, and I believe I know just what to have him ask. I do not think anyone other than Max would be so bold.” Lady Rosalee Smiles remembering Max’s attitude while they were escaping.

  “I will send for Elijah to come speak with you. I cannot spare an escort force at the moment; if it is the boy, Elijah will have to bring him by himself.” The Baron lays his hand on her shoulder before returning to his map on the table. He glances out the window before focusing again on troop placements.

  “That is completely fine. I do not doubt Sir Elijah’s skills; that is why I asked for him.” Smiling Lady Rosalee leaves the study and makes her way toward the teacher's room.

  ? ? ?

  After being kidnapped by Sinclair, Lady Rosalee’s life had drastically changed. Even before she had left Briargate, she began to distance herself from Lady Elizabeth. After the way the blond girl had acted during their imprisonment and in their escape, she just could not continue to coddle her.

  They had first met when Lady Rosalee’s family had sent her to a school for noble children. As with many of the children, this was her first time being away from her parents and her home.

  Before many of them figured out which families and which titles those families the other children had belonged to, they all treated each other with as much respect as possible. Once they pieced together the ranks of where their parents stood in comparison to one another, different groups began to form, usually around the kids of the dukes or marquises.

  Lady Rosalee, being only the child of a baron, was seen as one of the lower-ranking children, but she didn’t mind; ranks didn’t really matter to her. She moved between many of the groups, not really finding her own place until one day she found a blonde girl around her age that seemed to avoid everyone else.

  She saw that they all showed her only the barest modicum of respect, but all spoke horribly about her behind her back. While she did notice that this girl seemed to spend an awful lot of the time crying, she didn’t know why they felt that way.

  Lady Rosalee took it upon herself to befriend the girl and spend as much time with her as possible so that she wouldn’t feel like such an outcast as she was. It didn’t take very long for her to see exactly why the other kids treated her as they did. It turned out the little blonde girl was the only child of the Duke of The Terrace, one of the most important places in all of the Ridge Weald. So, it was really no surprise just how spoiled she was.

  Things that the other nobles had or liked, she found cheap and shoddy, far beneath her own. This girl was also quite openly rude to the other children. She knew how important her father was, and compared to the parents of most of these other children, they might as well simply be peasants.

  From the teachers to the students and even any of the people from the city that they ran into, she found the girl was far more likely to insult, be rude to, and look down upon them all, herself included. If the bad attitude wasn’t enough, the blonde girl was also a very bad whiner.

  Nothing was ever to her standard, and it would almost be shocking if she went even a couple of hours without crying or throwing a tantrum about something. The teacher and Lady Rosalee herself took the brunt of it.

  She found herself being something of a surrogate mother to the girl, trying to keep the other kids from being mean. She also spent a fair amount of her time sorting out a lot of the issues the girl seemed to run into.

  By being the go-between for the girl and others, she was able to help filter some of the nastier things out and get people to cooperate far better than the other girl would have been able to. Both students and teachers began to notice that dealing with the child of the Duke was far easier if you simply went through Lady Rosalee and almost started treating her as Lady Elizabeth’s handmaiden.

  Still, Rosalee didn’t mind; she found that if you could get past the crying, whining, and overall spoiled attitude, Lady Elizabeth could be quite nice.

  As she spent more and more time with her, she found Lady Elizabeth actually began to filter a lot of the rudeness that she had previously used toward her. As the rudeness declined, they grew closer and started to spend almost all their time together.

  Lady Elizabeth, whose home was so close that she would leave the school to enter the city proper and go shopping or go to her estate, started dragging Lady Rosalee along with her.

  Lady Rosalee had never minded the way she was treated, and as it declined, she had forgotten all about it. Given that they were basically attached at the hip, her other friends and the students in general avoided her as well. Still, she felt it was worth it, seeing how happy she had made her friend.

  After escaping from the kidnappers, things drastically changed. Rosalee began to remember how bad it had actually been when they had first met. While it had definitely declined, the girl still treated her more as a servant or parent than a true friend.

  The way she treated Max, who was risking life and limb for them, was unacceptable. Even getting to the point where, once he was no longer of use, she suggested simply leaving him behind.

  The longer they traveled through the tunnels, the more Lady Rosalee saw Lady Elizabeth for who she truly was, and was not happy to have given everything up for her any longer. At first, she thought maybe she had been changing her, but clearly that had been something Lady Rosalee only told herself to put up with the Duke's child.

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  Lady Elizabeth had also given up at one point and forced Lady Rosalee to slap her. Seeing that even the slap hadn’t done much, she mentioned the only teacher who actually liked and treated Lady Elizabeth well, doting upon her every time she saw her, as well as mentioning her parents.

  Lady Rosalee knew that she had overstepped her position, but at the moment, she needed to get Lady Elizabeth moving at all costs.

  They had neared Briargate, and Lady Elizabeth actually abandoned her and Max, running ahead. Lady Rosalee couldn’t help but feel as if it was nothing more than the epitome of their relationship.

  After they had safely arrived, before Lady Elizabeth had woken up, Lady Rosalee went to the Man of Letters and gave him a letter she had written for her parents. While the mayor had already sent word, she felt that her message could not wait.

  After everything that had happened with Lady Elizabeth and knowing her attitude, the letter was a warning that the Duke of The Terrace, at the behest of his daughter, might begin to make moves against their family. She did not detail anything that happened, only mentioning that they had a falling out of sorts, and with Lady Elizabeth’s personality, it was a highly likely scenario. She then returned to the mayor’s estate to wait for Lady Elizabeth to wake.

  She must have fallen asleep at some point, for it seemed much later when she opened her eyes. Lady Elizabeth was still in bed but seemed to be awake since she was crying. Lady Rosalee cleared her throat to alert Lady Elizabeth to her presence, unsure if she even knew she was in the room with her.

  She told her that when their families’ guards arrived, that she wouldn’t be returning to The Terrace. She had yet to receive word of this, but knew that her guard would escort her back to Ashbury to see her parents first, at least.

  Once she got the chance to talk to them and tell them everything in detail that had happened, she knew that they wouldn’t send her back. Even if they tried, she would request otherwise, and she could see no reason they would deny her request.

  She stayed a while and talked with Lady Elizabeth, wanting to stay at the minimum cordial with her. When she finally left Lady Elizabeth’s room, she knew that, except for in passing, that she would probably never see Lady Elizabeth again.

  The following day, when she woke, she began to make plans for her future and the things she thought she needed to learn, much like Max did upon returning to his world. First, she asked the steward of the mayor’s estate if the mayor had a library on the premises.

  To her surprise, he did, and the steward escorted her and the guards the mayor had provided until the ones her family sent could arrive. She glossed over several of the books in the library and took a few of them back to her room. His library was small, and of only books that he had been interested in, so there was very little of what she was looking for.

  Instead of starting the books, she asked her guards to take her to where the local hunters would gather, for every town had someplace like that. The guards were slightly surprised by what she wanted with the hunters, unsure of what her goal was. They led her to the hunting area, and she started asking the hunters about different things in the area.

  Her main objective in questioning was twofold. First, she wanted to know if any of them knew of the entrance or entrances to the Dark nearby where they had escaped from. If they did know about it, she wanted to know all that they could tell.

  Second, she was very curious about the creature that Max had described that stalked the tunnels. She had never encountered or heard of any such beast and felt it was her duty to know. It wasn’t limited just to this beast; she wanted to know about all of the ones in this area and around Ashbury as well.

  Whatever the reason she was kidnapped, there was no reason to assume that the people wouldn’t try again. Knowing what sorts of dangers and horrors were out there would greatly help if she needed to try to escape again.

  By the time her family’s men had arrived, she believed she had picked both the mayor’s library and the town clean of all its knowledge regarding the Dark and the local creatures. She only saw Lady Elizabeth at dinners, and even then, they barely spoke. She had no idea what the other girl had been doing during this time, but she hadn’t seen her.

  She was thankful that Lady Elizabeth wasn’t making this harder than it needed to be. It seemed as if she, too, felt that their relationship had come to an end. She didn’t know if Lady Elizabeth’s men had arrived yet or if they had departed already; in the end, it really didn’t matter.

  After speaking with the envoy of the party, she made sure they had a spare horse for her and got ready to leave. The envoy was slightly confused; they had, of course, brought a carriage for her, but readied a horse as well just in case the young Lady had plans he was unaware of.

  The trip back to her family and their land went smoothly. The five knights rode alongside Lady Rosalee at all times, even when she regularly moved through the soldiers as they rode. She didn’t spend much time in the carriage; she didn’t have a lot of opportunities to talk with the soldiers of her house since it wasn’t a thing a Lady of her age should do.

  On the road, though, she had this chance, so she made the most of it. She spoke to them about the things that they had fought and asked about any unusual creatures that she might be unaware of that wandered her family's lands.

  Another one of the topics she took an interest in was how both the soldiers and knights dealt with the various creatures of both the Braye lands and the ones she heard about from the hunters. The knights, of course, were not spared such questions either.

  It turned out that the local hunters had far fewer dealings with hostile creatures, and their methods seemed plain. While the soldiers, and knights in particular, seemed to have dealt with a far larger number and variety of things. They had special tactics or tools for dealing with most of the different beasts to make clearing them out far simpler and safer.

  The soldiers and knights did not mind such questions, and it helped them all pass the time. Although they were unsure just why the young Lady had an interest in such things.

  When they reached Ashbury, the soldiers dispersed back to their various posts, and the knights went with her to the Baron. Her father was finally able to relax once he saw his daughter and that she was fine. As soon as Lady Rosalee saw her father, she ran to him, throwing her arms around him.

  “My little Rose, are you okay?”

  “Yes, father, I am fine.” She hugged him tighter. It wasn’t until just this moment that she realized how much she missed him. “There is much I must tell you.”

  Her father hugged her back just as tightly and nodded. He thanked the knights for their service and sent them back to their assignments. He and his daughter made their way through the fort to one of the studies, and he sat facing his daughter. “So, tell me everything that happened.”

  Rosalee took a deep breath before telling her father about how she and Lady Elizabeth were set on by four men in The Terrace as they were leaving an eatery and heading to go shopping. She apologized for leaving the school, as the students were not usually allowed such privileges. They would only visit the town as a group once in a very long while, but Lady Elizabeth’s position and their friendship had allowed her to leave on many such trips regularly.

  She spoke of how they had been knocked unconscious and taken by horse and carriage a long way before entering the tunnels into the Dark. She spoke of how she tried to remember the best she could the path that they had taken, and then how she tried to keep Lady Elizabeth calm as they sat in the cage.

  Her father listened intently, grabbing her hand, lightly giving it a squeeze when she apologized. He shook his head and interrupted to tell her it wasn’t her fault and that he was glad she had made such a good friend. As she continued the tale, his expression grew darker as he tried to guess who the culprit could be.

  He had just been about to interrupt again and ask this time how they could have possibly gotten out of the cage when she finally got to the meat of the story.

  Lady Rosalee spoke of three needleleafs who wandered in on the second day of their stay in the cage. The people who took them did not appear after they had put them in the cage, and the beasts tried to get into the cage for some time. A crash had come from a tunnel they hadn’t been taken down, and a soaking wet boy emerged.

  She told him of how brutal he was, bashing the beast's skulls apart with a torch, and then how he had gone off to where the kidnappers had gone and returned covered in more blood, carrying the keys. As she continued, she mentioned his bravery and determination to keep them safe.

  She also told of Lady Elizabeth's cowardice, how she had given up and even wanted to abandon the person trying to save them.

  She mentioned how Max had stayed back and fought what she now knew to be a Corpse Lurker and how he barely managed to survive and joined them in fleeing. She finished the tale with how the arrow had come out of nowhere, and even in his bad state, how Max had told them to go on ahead while staying behind to try and buy them time.

  “Where did this young Max end up? Did the men who took you kill him?” This boy interested her father; it was no small feat to be as brave as he had been and, with close to no weapons, manage the creatures that they faced.

  Lady Rosalee shook her head. “I do not know. The Briargate guards found the torch he used as a walking stick, the bandage from his wounded arm, and the arrow that had pierced his shoulder. They found traces that a man had approached him, but did not know from where he came or where he left. All they could say was that they did not find his body, nor was there enough blood to assume he had been slain.”

  Her father nodded and looked lost in thought, considering the possibilities. “If he lives, one day he might be found. Now, as for this Lady Grey business, you were right to warn us. Even here, we have heard tales of the way she treats the teachers and even some of the guests at The Terrace.”

  “We have begun preparations as well. I know you and her might have been friends and that your studies are not complete, but I think that it is best that you now stay in Ashbury until we find out who these men are and why they were after you. I will bring a teacher in for you.”

  “I know, being a noble Lady of the Ridge Weald, it might be frowned upon, but I would also like to study how to fight.” Lady Rosalee knew that this was something unusual and that her father would most likely argue against it. Even she was apprehensive about what learning to fight might entail.

  “You wish to learn how to fight?” Her father leaned back and rubbed his chin. While he would never allow his daughter on a battlefield, it wasn’t unheard of for women to fight in his lands.

  “Yes, I very much do. While I know I should be safe here in Ashbury and that you will always protect me, as you yourself have said, the men who took me are unknown and might try again. I do not wish to wait for a strange savage boy to rescue me again, but to be able to rescue myself.”

  “Very well. I will set about finding you a proper instructor and a teacher.”

  From that day forward, Lady Rosalee trained regularly with an instructor on how to use sword and shield while continuing the lessons she learned at The Terrace. In her free time, she gathered knowledge about the different forces at odds with Ashbury and the Ridge Weald while never stopping her pursuit of knowledge about the ever-looming threat of monsters.

  The years passed, and nothing much changed for her other than that once again her family had been drawn into a conflict with the neighboring kingdom and one of the forces that was trying to rule over it. Ashbury became busier and a bit more tense, but that was all. They had fought many times before and won against this foe, so no one was too worried. She had all but forgotten about Max until a servant brought her a message from the mayor of Briargate.