EIGHTEEN
Tracking the princess took longer than Xylander expected. Perhaps because he was accustomed to tracking beasts in the forest, where there wasn't such a plethora of paths to follow, as there were outside the city gates. If he hadn't brought one of the palace hunting hounds and a pair of the princess's slippers with him, he suspected he would never have found the trail at all.
When her trail left the road to follow a track through the forest, Xylander sent the dog back to the palace and forged on alone.
The princess had evidently urged her horse to move swiftly, not an easy thing in the dense forest. A castle-bred girl who'd spent little time in the woods – if she hadn't wanted to be found, she should have kept to the road, where the steady stream of traffic might have hidden h
