Chapter 224: Squirrels
Elys rode her horse like she was being chased by the devil himself. Eventually, she reached a portion of the kingdom which was almost unpassable riding her horse. The clear land turned into a dense forest.
"My queen," Aleksander called her out for the nth time, "slow down! You must not jump immediately -"
Even before the vampire king could even finish his sentence, another explosion erupted just a few meters to their left. He whipped his head at exactly the right time that he saw movement into the trees.
Elys stopped in her tracks as she finally deduced it was already impossible to pass riding her horse. She swung her legs out of her saddle, and swiftly jumped off of the horse in mere seconds.
She stood still and listened in to her surroundings, trying to estimate the exact distance with which the explosion took place, and generally just observing her surroundings.
Aleksander quickly followed his wife down from his horse. He tied the beast near a tree and then walked towards Elys. The dense canopy of the forest was enough to shade the rising sun’s rays that he did not even really need to use his cloak and mask.
Armors clinked as after a minute of interval, the knights that had accompanied Elys and Aleksander from the palace followed them by foot.
"Your majesty, your command," one of the more senior knights spoke to Aleksander.
The young king’s eyes turned into calculating slits as he looked at his surroundings with several glances in different directions. Once he was able to take into heart the terrain, he signaled the knights to go around the perimeter and check for any bomb traps.
"Be mindful not to trigger anything," Aleksander reminded them, "we don’t know what these explosions are or how they were triggered at all. Hell, we don’t even know if they are bombs or just something that made an extremely loud noise and blasting several trees into splinters."
Aleksander turned to the most senior knight with them and added briefly, "Be covert with this, we don’t want whoever it is that is attacking our kingdom to ambush us."