The journey to Morel was uneventful, and Maria parted with the old man who'd offered to let her have a ride. The man went off to speak with some friends in the area, while Maria prepared to send another letter to the Ministry to keep them upraised of her location. She pondered including another letter to Rafael, but knowing her luck it would be opened by some bureaucrat who would get the idea that they were conspiring somehow. Best to leave him uninvolved. Though she should keep an eye on a souvenir he'd like.
Her eventual destination was the border town of Noir, a wretched hive of scum and villainy known for being a wretched hive of scum and villainy containing some of Sorcier's few slums and being near-lawless. It was also a large mercantile hub, both of the legal and illegal kind, bordering as it did La Sable, which had a reputation for being a lawless bed of chaos. However, reading between the lines, Maria was able to gather this as an exaggeration stemming from how visitors from Sorcier were so used to the way things were done in this country. Which was not so say that La Sable wasn't full of crime, but that was due to the destabilization of the government decades ago, which had still not properly recovered. Reading deeper between the lines, Maria suspected the destabilization was the result of a plot by the then-king of Sorcier, the current King's grandfather, which had broken the country into warlords and was only now coming together as a group of independent city states ruling the country behind a puppet king who barely ruled his own capital. Hardly a place that could enforce laws outside of their strongholds, when it was barely a united country anymore.
By her estimate, it should take her the rest of the week to get there, travelling as she was. On the way she hoped to acquire funds and perhaps information on costs. The Academy's libraries, while informative about where certain substances were mined in the country, were less helpful about what they cost or how much would be needed to ship them. Saltpeter was easy enough to acquire at Estus, since the town supplied food to the Academy and had a wide variety of preserved meats, but Sulphur was harder to come by. There wasn't much use for it there besides as an insecticide, which had it already mixed in with other substances, and the pure Sulphur the school used in alchemy had to delivered from somewhere else. The shipping cost for that, which Maria had been able to ask for, had been prohibitive for her project. As she had no money to send someone to do the research for her, she had to do so alone.
She set off from Morel bright and early the day after she arrived, her suitcase on her back by way of some leather straps she'd engineered, her good boots beneath her, and was thankful the country had well-made roads. Her destination was Heidi, not that far away, and where she had been told she'd be able to catch a mail coach towards her destination if she hurried.
Around mid-morning, she was accosted by a ruffian in once-fine clothes brandishing a sword.
It was thankfully not yet noon as she walked into Heidi dragging an unconscious man behind her, her new sword stowed away in her luggage. The place was strangely quiet for that time of day, but fortunately all was revealed when she got to the town square, which was packed with people. A man wearing the chain of office of the local mayor was standing on a platform next to a Ministry official, both looking grim.
"– not to approach the man," the mayor was saying. "He's wanted by the crown for being an accessory to forbidden magic, treason, murder and has already attacked once. Thankfully there was no lasting harm or dishonor, but the girl is still really shook up, even though her brothers arrived in time to stop it. I'd like to ask for some volunteers to form a militia to protect the town until we can be sure he's either moved on or been caught. We have a sketch of him from the capital, which I want everyone to memorize…"
Maria raised a hand. The Mayor paused with a frown at being interrupted. "Yes, what is it?" he demanded gruffly, promising grim tidings if this was a foolish interruption.
Maria bent down and held up her captive. "Is this the man you're looking for?"
Thankfully the coach driver was at the gathering, else Maria would have missed her ride at the delay that followed.
A tearful girl who was younger than Maria identified the man, pointing to the scratches on his face she had made, and one of her brothers corroborated the identification. The man was clapped in irons and thrown into the local jail, to be sent to the capital for his crimes. Thankfully, there was no delay on her being given the bounty for the man, a portion of which she gave to the girl and her family to help her. She also had to demure several offers of drinks at the town pub (she accepted the free meal and milk they offered though, as it had been a long walk dragging him along), and, after asking the ministry official to deliver a letter for her to Ministry updating them on her location, received a hero's farewell as she boarded the stage coach rather than climbing on as luggage as she had assumed she might have to resort to, which the mayor had insisted on paying for.
A day later, someone from Morel arrived, eager to share gossip of the mysterious lady who had come into Montrose, and had Heidi's own story told to him as well…
Sometime later, the Third and Fourth Princes, still in charge of hunting down all those involved in the Marchioness Dieke case, received the notification of the captured man, one of a few who'd managed to evade their net by sheer luck, cowardice or, in one instance, accidentally falling into a river.
The Third Prince read it first over his morning breakfast (the better to get his correspondences and paperwork out of the way so he can get over to Katarina), nearly dropped it into his jam in surprise, then left his breakfast to go bother Alan at his breakfast.
Alan choked on the toast he'd been chewing on when he read it. "Heidi? What in the sun is she doing in Heidi?" he said once he'd coughed it out.
"Being an overindulgent girlfriend and seeing to it that Rafael's vengeance is absolute, apparently," his brother said, reaching for the bacon and nearly setting off a civil war before Alan swiped it away with a glare. "Though I'm surprised we haven't heard from the ministry about how they'd lost track of our only known current Dark Magic wielder. Do you want to come and see who screwed up?"
"After I finish the bacon," Alan said. "It'll be nice to see Nicol and Rafael again."
"Mister Walt," his brother corrected sardonically. "Do you want to get chided for addressing a commoner in a manner unbefitting nobility?"
Alan rolled his eyes. "That girl needs to relax. Seriously, this isn't grandpa's day. You'd think someone that young wouldn't be more old-fashioned than Duchess Claes."
The Ministry, it turned out, knew exactly where their Dark Magic wielder was, and a bit bemused as to what to do about it. The princes asked to be to be kept appraised of the situation, then wandered off to continue fighting the eternal war for Katarina Claes' attention.
The next day, a note came in of her being in Anchorhead (so named because the town founder from centuries ago had been in the navy and had marked the town with his ship's anchor, making it one of the more interestingly-named towns in the country), where she'd saved a boy from a rabid dog and had treated the bite to cleanse him of disease so he wouldn't get infected. She had not given a name, but had hastily identified herself as one versed in Medicinal Magic before running off to put down the dog in question to keep others from being bitten. The report had been tacked on to the notification about her location as a separate letter, and the princes were amused to see they had assumed she was nobility. Well, it was an excusable mistake to make, given she'd used magic.
It was a mistake that was repeated in the next letter, which was from two towns past the last one, where besides her notification there also came a letter that a mysterious lady had rousted a group of bandits that had been plaguing the area for the last few months, dragging them into town behind her horse, where they'd been identified as other escapees of the Dieke matter. The woman had returned the horse to the farmer it had originally been stolen from, even using her magic to heal it of injuries it had acquired from the men's ignorance and ill-treatment, and given a part of the bounty for the men to the people they had stolen from before walking off into the sunset or some such.
"We might actually have to give her a noble title if this keeps up," Alan had joked.
People in the ministry weren't so cavalier. They had set up a map to trace Maria's progress, and from the line of her movement it looked worryingly like she was planning to leave the country, a concern heightened when she eventually listed her intended destination as the border town of Noir.
Hoping to avert some suspicion, the princes had called Rafael, hoping he'd be able to reassure people that his girlfriend wasn't planning to run away.
They had not expected Rafael jumping from his chair and grabbing their royal persons by their royal lapels with a manic look and exclaimed, "You know where Maria is?!"
Thankfully, Nicol had been the only other person in the room, or that would have gotten royally awkward.
In the latter half of the second week of Therendor, a couple of days after Rafael had learned Maria had never gone home, the awkward letter from Maria saying she'd arrived in Noir was received, sent earlier in the week. The Ministry had already dispatched a group to make sure she wouldn't leave, sensible paranoia overriding generous trust. They had been told, however, merely to prevent her if she tried, but to otherwise not to reveal themselves or curtail her freedoms otherwise. The group were informed of this news by the use of a magic tool the Ministry had developed that allowed for long-range communication under certain conditions.
The next day, the Ministry fell into a panic at receiving a letter from Maria informing them that the mansion of a certain noble was completely engulfed in 'the wretched eldritch fires of Dark Magic, of such distasteful strength I could feel it at a distance'. She informed them that she would wait at a certain inn and keep an eye on the place. The Ministry immediately called together an emergency gathering, and the king was informed.
Later on the same day, a rather more distressing letter arrived by way of the afternoon mail that 'several people in the town had been touched by this darkness, including a few ministry and town officials, who were strongly possessed of this eldritch fog'. This sent people scrambling, and they even authorized the use of certain experimental magic tool vehicles to get people there at high speed. Parties of magic wielders and royal guards were deployed, moving as fast as horse and experimental wagons powered by magic and steam could move them, with the princes at the head, along with all the Light Magic wielders they could call up to make the trip. This included Rafael.
That night, as they rested and praised the sun the experimental wagons hadn't exploded yet, a most grim message came over the long range communication magic tool. Maria had spied several children being brought to the mansion in the cover of night in chains. She had apologized that she might have to use Dark Magic without permission and that if she was dead by the time they reached Noir, her notes and the evidence she had gathered could be found hidden at a certain place.
They'd had to tie Rafael up to keep him from stealing a horse and riding ahead.