The Prince's Hidden Legacy Of Avalor

In Avelor, magic had never learned to behave.

Some people were born with enough magic to light a candle. Others could tear stone from the earth, call fire into their hands, or survive wounds that should have killed them. Giant blood still surfaced in old families. Along the distant coasts lived peoples whose ancestors were said to have come from beneath the sea, while other bloodlines carried traits whispered to belong to dragons. Most of Avelor's peoples lived beside one another now, though old borders and older grudges had never disappeared entirely. There were still territories where a human crossing the wrong boundary without invitation was taking a considerably greater risk than getting lost. Humans, after all, had never been the most powerful people sharing the continent.

And beyond the settled borders lived creatures whose magic made even the strongest humans look tame.

Scholars had spent centuries trying to explain it.

They were still arguing.

Most people eventually figured out how to use their magic.

Her Gift was called Echoing. She could borrow traits and abilities from living things, and carry them temporarily as her own. At twenty-three, licensed through the Westreach Guild, she spent more time beyond the settled roads than was probably healthy. Out on the frontier, raw power only carried you so far. You survived because you knew how to read the dirt, how to set a snare before dusk, how to map a storm two days before it broke, and how to recognize a fight you had absolutely no business starting.

She could track, climb, bind a wound, and handle the heavy hunting bow strapped across her back. Magic was an advantage. Knowing what to do when magic wasn't enough was what kept her alive.

She also knew that having common sense and actually using it were two very different things.

Which was how an otherwise ordinary afternoon patrol had left her crouched beneath a low-slung canopy of ancient briars, bleeding from one finger while trying to ease an injured brush-hare. The afternoon light had begun to slant between the giant pines, striping the forest floor in long bars of gold and shadow.

Elena slowly extended one hand toward the injured hare, a loose fall of dark curls tumbling forward past her cheek.

“If you bite me again,” she murmured, “I am officially leaving you to the hawks, or whatever else finds you first.”

The stubborn little creature crouched beneath the branches, its long gray ears flattened against its skull, vibrating hard enough to shake the briars. Dark, wet blood matted the fur around its back left leg—a narrow, ragged tear likely caused by a dry briar during a panicked flight through the towering, shadowed undergrowth of the outer timberlands.

"I'm serious."

She wasn't, and the hare clearly knew it.

Elena dropped lower into the damp, decomposing pine needles and rich, dark earth, easing her fingers beneath the thorns. Field patrols frequently bled past their scheduled hours. Her stomach had been complaining for the better part of an hour, while the dry rations buried at the bottom of her over-heavy pack might as well have been on the other side of the mountain. If she dragged herself back to the Guildhouse after sundown again, her father wouldn't even need to lecture her. He'd just give her that look and ask, very calmly, whether she'd forgotten what the word routine meant.

Instead, she was miles out on the outer ridge of the western wildlands, where human authority ended and the towering, jagged crags of the deep country began.

"Hold still."

Reaching out, she brushed the torn skin of the hare's hind leg. Warmth gathered beneath her fingertips, soothing the pain and slowing the bleeding.

That wasn't Echoing. At least, not according to her. People were supposed to have one Gift. The Guild had spent years insisting the strange sympathetic current that worked on animals was merely an anomaly of hers. It had never worked on Elena herself or another person, and she had never been entirely convinced it belonged to Echoing at all.

She wanted the hare's vibration sense, but taking it would fill her third and final slot. Mountain-cat balance and draft-ox endurance already occupied the other two. Once she chose, there would be no changing her mind for twenty-four hours. After that, she could release the Echo when she chose, but until she did, it remained hers.

She released her grip and shifted her fingers higher, brushing the coarse fur along its flank.

The Echo caught.

There was no physical shock—just a mounting tingle up her wrist, followed by the familiar, phantom snap behind her eyes like the turning of a key inside a lock. Her magic shifted until the strange pulse inside the hare felt almost like her own.

For a heartbeat, she stayed still, letting the three Echoes settle into place. Then the forest didn't just grow louder; it changed state entirely.

Through the brush-hare’s borrowed senses, the wind faded, replaced by the physical sensation of the mountain itself. The ground beneath the ridge began to thrum—a low, rhythmic pulse traveling straight up through the sprawling root systems of the giant pines and into her boots, carrying a relentless mass of footfalls hammering the earth far up the ridge.

Not an earthquake. Not settling rock.

Footfalls. Hundreds of them.

Her stomach dropped, a cold, heavy sensation tightening her chest as she processed the sheer rhythm of the panic vibrating through the soles of her boots. She blinked hard, staring into the dense timber as if she could somehow see through the ridge itself.

“What is that...?” she breathed, the hair on her arms lifting.

She quieted the vibration sense just enough to stop it from flooding her senses, though the Echo remained anchored deep inside her.

She stayed crouched there for another second, staring uphill through the shadows. A herd migration, maybe. There were creatures deep in the wildlands that moved in masses heavy enough to shake the earth like that, but not out here. Not on this ridge.

Whatever was causing it, crouching beneath the briars wasn't going to tell her anything. She needed to move.

She rose quickly, her hand dropping to the horn handle of her heavy hunting knife as the bow shifted against her back.

A dry branch snapped twenty paces down the trail.

She dropped into a balanced crouch, the blade clearing leather just as a stag tore through the thicket. Its antlers carved low through the ferns, white showing wide around dark eyes.

She threw her weight aside.

Too slow. Its flank clipped her side hard enough to spin her half around, but she dug her heels into the root-knotted slope before it could sweep her legs out from under her. The stag vanished downhill, leaving behind a crushed sapling and rising pine dust.

She stumbled back a step, one hand clamping over her side as she dragged in a short breath. The stag was already disappearing downhill by the time she found enough air to speak.

"Well. Good afternoon to you too."

The words came out a little more breathless than she'd intended.

A hot, stinging ache throbbed beneath her ribs where the stag had clipped her. She pressed a hand against the sore spot and drew a careful breath. Unlike the hare, she couldn't heal herself.

She'd just have to carry the bruise.

She didn't have time to dwell on it, not while the ground beneath her was practically humming.

Above her, the forest canopy shuddered. Dust and shredded moss boiled through the branches as the low thrum shifted into a physical vibration rattling straight up through her bones.

She didn't hesitate. She moved.

The brush-hare’s Echo was still anchored deep inside her, feeding every distant hoofbeat into the soles of her boots. Three distinct Echoes moved through her at once, each one demanding a different kind of awareness. Balance. Endurance. Vibration. Keeping them straight took concentration, but right now, information was survival.

She sprang onto a slanted shelf of granite, boots finding absolute purchase where loose rock should have sent her sliding. A fallen pine blocked the narrow ascent; she planted a hand against the bark, vaulted clean over, and hit the dirt running.

Below her, the brush exploded.

A timber wolf broke cover, driving hard alongside a wild boar and a panicked doe.

Elena nearly missed a step. Predator and prey were running shoulder to shoulder, neither paying the slightest attention to the other.

“Are you kidding me?”

Wolves didn't run beside deer. Boars didn't ignore easy prey. Whatever was driving them down the mountain had rendered hunger and territory entirely irrelevant.

Another sharp crack split the timber higher on the ridge.

She scrambled up the steepening slope, sucking in the thin mountain air, her chest burning from the sudden, grueling pace.

She reached the high ridge just as the mountain opened up below her.

Elk, wolves, deer, and boars poured down the gorge in a churning, desperate wall of muscle, snapping branches and tearing the earth apart.

She flattened against the stone as the main wave thundered past, the brush-hare’s vibration sense hammering every impact straight into her soles.

It was too many.

Way too many.

And every single one was fleeing from the exact same direction.

Up toward the basin. Where she was heading.

Common sense made one final, quiet argument, whispering that walking into whatever terrified a whole mountain was an exceptional way to die. She stared up into the gray-green gloom of the upper ridge, her throat tightening as she weighed the odds.

"Guess I'm about to find out how bad it really is," she muttered.

Every sensible instinct she possessed told her to turn around and report what she'd found. Instead, she turned uphill and picked her way over the broken stone toward the basin.

Apparently, common sense had lost the argument.

When she finally crested the rise and dropped into a shallow basin where a stream cut through a grove of pale aspens, Elena stopped in her tracks.

For a moment, she could only stare.