Rosalind Brightwood knelt in the wet leaves and dug where the thieves had dropped their torch. The crown was gone. Six men had taken it three nights ago, and with it the only proof that her exiled bloodline once ruled these lands. She was short, blonde, and half their size. She had not stopped them. Now she followed a trail that was already going cold. The trouble was simple. She had fled her homeland as a child, decades ago. The forests she remembered had changed. She had no map. She knew the crown moved west, toward the mountains, but she did not know which valleys were passable, which rivers had bridges, which roads led nowhere. One wrong turn would cost her days. Days she did not have. A road forked ahead. She stopped and stared at both paths. Both looked the same. Both climbed into gray hills. She could guess, or she could ask, and the only living thing nearby was crouched under a stone overhang, gnawing a fish bone. The troll was called Josh. She had heard bad things about him at the last village. He cheated travelers. He frightened children. His green fists could crush a wagon wheel. He looked up with yellow eyes and bared one broken tusk. "Lost, little elf?" he said. "You smell lost." "I need the road west," Rosalind said. "To the mountains. Which fork?" Josh laughed, low and wet. "Roads west all look easy. Two of them drown you in spring floods. I know which one doesn't." He tapped his gray temple. "Whole country's up here. Every bridge. Every trap." Rosalind's chest tightened. He was awful, and he was exactly what she needed. "Then tell me," she said. "Please." "Please," he mocked. He held out one huge palm. "Trolls don't work for please. What've you got?" She had almost nothing. A knife. A cloak. A silver ring from her mother, the last thing she owned from home. Her fingers closed around it. Losing it would hurt worse than any wrong turn. But a wrong turn would lose her the crown, and the crown was everything. She pulled the ring off and set it in his palm. Josh held it to the light. His grin widened. "Now that's manners." He pointed one thick finger at the left fork. "That one. Follow the river three days. There's a stone crossing where the water bends. Take it. The right fork drops into a bog. Men went that way this morning, hauling something bright." Rosalind's heart jumped. "Six men?" "Could be six. Could be more." He shrugged and pocketed the ring. "They're in the bog now. Sinking, most like. You'll catch them if the mud does its work." She stood. She had a direction at last, and a real lead on the crown. But the thieves were already trapped in a bog she now had to enter, and she had paid her last piece of home to a troll who might have lied. Rosalind turned toward the left fork and started walking.