Natasha knelt on the floor before the small altar in the private study of the Supplanter. She bowed her head, not looking her master in the eyes – not wanting to look him in the eyes. Those black orbs were hollow, devoid of life or passion, and didn’t stir in her the necessary emotions for the task at hand. Instead, she gazed at the altar and the gemstone that rested on it.

It was a giant ruby, as big as her fists or, more appropriately, as big as her heart. It pulsed with energy in her mind’s eye, yearning for her to be one with its power. This was a natural elemental, a source of power thought to be a myth but recently discovered by the Tallashite Prince. Natasha had spent countless hours meditating on it over the past few months and was finally beginning to see results.

“Yes, my dear. Stare into the stone. Feel it move inside you. Feel it feed your passion, your desire, and your longing to be one with the Elemental, to be one with your master.”

The voice of the Supplanter washed over her with little effect. She had heard it before; she had heard it many times. The hypnotic tone, the soothing voice, and the melodic rhythm were all too familiar to the young woman. No longer did she really hear the words. She felt them inside her. Despite her waking doubts, in the throes of meditation, Natasha’s mind had long ago been broken to the will of her master and shackled to his plans and aspirations. Her body had been promised to him too, and while he had not yet taken use of her, she would not resist when he did. That was because her life was also his, devoted to the Supplanter many years ago, and when consumed in meditation, she was powerless to resist him.

Almost powerless.

Her passion was still her own. That one element of her being that she had meditated upon more than any other. The element that defined her, not only as a prime supplicant but as a human being, as an instrument in the world. She fell into that passion now, the voice of her master an afterthought as it continued to chant the memorized script that would send her into another realm of existence. It was only a background sound now, white noise that aided one in detaching from the world and falling asleep.

Only Natasha did not sleep, but she did dream. With her eyes now closed, she saw the true Supplanter in her mind, the man of her dreams. She took a moment to scoff at the phrase that so many young girls used to define their future lover, but she meant it literally. She had seen his face many times. His body was tall, strong, and powerful. She could feel his presence so near her as if he were standing in the room looking down at her kneeling supplicant form.

But it was his eyes that drew her in. Those deep, penetrating eyes filled with passion and desire. That same passion and desire that drove her. That link to the Elemental power that would eventually complete, consume, and define her existence.

“Good,” the Supplanter said, departing from his script.

Natasha held onto her heart’s desire as she looked up and opened her eyes. The ruby, sitting in an iron cradle, was now on fire. On close examination, she could see that the fire hovered just above the gem, rising and falling with the strength of her trance. This was not new. She had done this before. She had done this dozens of times.

“Now bring it inside you,” her master demanded.

Raising her arms by her sides, Natasha snapped her fingers and opened her palms. A small flame rose from the center of each hand. This was also not new. She could snap a flame to her fingertips with little effort at almost any time. But she knew her master wanted more.

“Make it grow.”

Natasha responded – or tried to. She had read the ancient texts about what should be possible when connecting to the natural elements. She had read the stories about men and women who could hurl fireballs, control rivers, summon windstorms, and shatter stone walls. She knew that type of power was possible. She knew the source of that power was before her now. But she couldn’t make the connection.

Her passion was conflicted. She could feel the power – the desire – flow through her, but as long as the voice of her master summoned that energy, as long as he claimed to be the true target of her longing, she could not bring the potential to completion. She tried anyway, forcing her mind, body, and spirit to obey, but her heart was not in it.

The flame grew suddenly in her palms, rising almost a foot into the air, but it burned her hands, and she cried out in pain. The fire disappeared in a puff of smoke, and Natasha’s hands fell back to her sides, her head hung low.

“Stupid woman!” The Supplanter walked over and slapped her hard across the face. Natasha knew the strike was coming and rolled with it, falling to the floor. He wasn’t that strong, and it didn’t hurt too badly. “Passion is pain!” he shouted at her. “You must endure the agony. You must rise above it to be fully joined to the power.”

She lay humbly on the floor, not looking up at him, accepting the rebuke. The Supplanter stared down at her prostrate form, desire rising in him now. He could have her right here if he wanted, as he had with the others, but he knew he should not. As much as he berated her, she showed the most promise of the four. He would keep her unspoiled until the ceremony. Instead, to satisfy his rising desire, he would summon another.

“Get out of my sight!” he finally shouted.

Natasha responded immediately, wanting nothing more than to be back in her room so she could cast thoughts of this Supplanter as far from her mind and heart as possible.

Sir Jenkins and Quarton found the abandoned campsite on the morning of their second day out of Garashire. They rode horses bred for traveling in the hills and made much better time than Sera and Ethan. Dismounting once his horse came to a rest, Quarton walked gingerly around the area, careful not to step on any footprints or signs they would need to track their prey. Since he was no longer a paladin and didn’t spend (or waste) time in prayer, meditation, or study, he had lots of free time to learn other essential skills that would be useful to an enforcer in the employment of a paladin order. One of those skills was tracking.

The rain that had fallen over 24 hours ago wiped out any tracks left the previous days, but the footprints left during and after the rain were painfully obvious. Yesterday’s strong spring sunshine had baked the deep, muddy tracks, and it would take another significant rainstorm to wipe them away.

Quarton identified Ethan’s long strides quickly and then Sera’s much smaller, lighter footprints. The bloodhounds had been barefoot, and their clawed toes also left easily identifiable marks. Plus, the bodies of the canine creatures were everywhere. The tracks were too muddled to make anything out where there had been combat but leading to and from those congested areas were plain.

“The two youths were here,” Quarton said after several minutes. Jenkins had waited on his horse for the report. He was old enough that he only got up and down from his saddle when necessary. “They fought against a good number of bloodhounds. Hard to say how many.” He could count the bodies of the creatures, but he knew some of them might have fled. “Also, it looks like a third person joined them.”

Yori’s tracks were a bit mysterious. Quarton saw where the archer approached the fight, but his tracks never got muddled with the bloodhounds or the human couple, and they then turned around and retraced a path back up the hill, but now accompanied by Sera and Ethan. Finding a particularly deep set of prints by this third visitor, where he had apparently stayed stationary for some time, Quarton squinted into the direction the toes pointed. He saw a disturbed rock pile on the opposite side of the camp and jogged over to it. The dead bloodhounds with arrows in them confirmed the enforcer’s guess.

Larken’s remains were well on their way toward decomposition after the bloodhounds had eaten what they could, and yesterday’s sun had baked them for a dozen hours. Still, there was a little skin left. “An islander,” Quarton muttered to himself. The head was missing, so he couldn’t confirm the hair color, but the clothing also marked him as coming from the far south. The men from the islands off the southeast coast of Talla were infamous warriors, having spent centuries battling among themselves before establishing a unified island nation. Now they usually worked as mercenaries for neighboring kingdoms, particularly Talla, whose men were not known for fighting.

Sir Jenkins had allowed Quarton to read the scroll they had recovered from the assassin who had failed in his attack against the paladin in Red Valley. From the communication with the thieves, they knew they didn’t know each other, and there was no reason to believe that the Supplanter would have hired four people from the same guild. In fact, it made sense that he would have commissioned at least two different factions to go after the Elementals: two assassins and at least one island warrior.

Looking closer at the arrows protruding from the dead bodies at his feet, Quarton recognized the fletching as belonging to birds common to the southern islands. So there had been two islanders hired. This dead one had been killed somehow, maybe by the bloodhounds? No. He was partially buried under the rocks. A human had done that, and it looked like the bloodhounds had attacked after he had been buried.

Quarton jogged over to the cold fire pit. He found several partially burned bones from different kinds of animals. Someone had eaten more than one meal here. “The Supplanter hired two Islanders,” Quarton spoke up, confident in his deductions. “It looks like they were both successful in their thefts, or, at least, they both returned here to the rendezvous point.” They had the map from the first assassin who had failed, so they knew the thieves were supposed to return here after a successful mission. It was only reasonable to assume both had been successful, or they wouldn’t have returned.

“One got here first by a day or two,” the enforcer continued. “Then Sir Gerhold’s friends came. They ended up fighting, and the islander was killed.”

“Any indication why they fought?” Jenkins asked. As far as they knew, Ethan and Sera were supposed to pose as assassins.

Quarton only shrugged. “They are young and probably did not properly play the parts of assassins. It is irrelevant. We should assume the first islander had one of the weapons with him, and now Ethan and Sera have it.”

“It is probably the axe,” Jenkins reasoned. He had not told Quarton where the other weapons were hidden or even what they were. But the axe had been kept in Arrow’s landing, which was much closer to this site than Arrow’s Point, where the fourth weapon, a spear, was guarded. “Sera would probably be carrying it as Ethan would feel uncomfortable around it, with the heart Elemental inside him.”

“Very well,” Quarton responded, understanding that Jenkins was still keeping much of the lore around these weapons from him. They weren’t paying him to understand the mystical nature of the Elementals, only to hunt and kill. “Then bloodhounds attacked. It looks like our prey did very well. Based on the girl’s description that Gerhold gave us, I would not have expected her to hold her own against bloodhounds.” They had found the dead crawners yesterday.

Quarton could easily identify the wounds handed out by Ethan’s long sword, and he had noticed with interest the precise cuts from Sera’s smaller blade when examining the crawner bodies. He didn’t see those types of wounds now. He saw several dead bloodhounds with injuries that looked like they came from an axe swung with tremendous force. He knew Sir Jenkins would be able to make the same deduction if he got off his horse for a closer look, but the elderly knight kept his distance. What little Quarton knew about the weapons and the Elementals inside them included that if you killed someone with the weapon, the spent life would transfer the Elemental inside you.

He didn’t know if killing a bloodhound would qualify, but the dead islander on the hillside was missing his head. If Sera now had the body Elemental inside her, it would explain the force with which the axe wounds were made. Quarton thought about bringing this up but decided he could have his secrets too.

“Gerhold said that these youths were his best students,” Jenkins offered, trying to explain Quarton’s confusion about how the two could have killed so many bloodhounds.

“Indeed,” Quarton replied, leaving it at that. He continued with his breakdown of the scene. “Toward the end of the fight against the bloodhounds, another islander approached. He had a bow and killed a few of the creatures. Then the three of them left in that direction.” Quarton pointed to the northeast.

“They were able to convince this second thief that they were legitimate,” Jenkins said, thinking out loud.

“Now they had two weapons, one for each of them,” Quarton continued the reasoning. “It would have been confusing to the first islander why two people were bringing only one weapon. Now it would have made more sense. Plus, based on Gerhold’s description of Sera, she could easily pass as an islander. They have a few warrior women known as Sisters of the Blade.”

“Also,” Jenkins continued. “This second islander would have just seen them fight and might not be as quick to question their legitimacy.”

The enforcer nodded and the sound reasoning. He returned to his horse and swung up into the saddle. “Either way, they went this way, and we should too.” Jenkins nodded and fell in line after the tracker.

A few minutes later, they came to a cave, where a day-old campsite had been. The tracks left the cave toward the southeast. Because they had the scroll from the first assassin, they knew that time had expired, and the thieves were instructed to head back to the temple. The map showed the location of the Supplanter’s temple in the Border Mountains. Quarton took a few minutes to see if he could learn anything else from the empty cave, and then the two men started to the east. The temple was about two days away by foot. With the day head start the three had on the men, they would probably get there first. The horses would make good time crossing the valley to the south of Storm Lake, but the foothills of the Border Mountains would slow them down.

Jenkins didn’t think the Supplanter would try to unite himself to the Elementals until he had all four, but he didn’t want to take the chance and tried to set a brisk pace.