I should refuse, but I don’t. Because refusing now gains me nothing. Because giving him something, just enough, gives me far more.
The vision comes when I let it. I allow the edge of it to surface, the shape of the path without the depth of it, the direction without the consequence, and it unfolds in fragments behind my eyes, overlapping images that blur and sharpen in uneven rhythm.
Trees. Dense. Shifting. A path that does not remain where it should. A clearing that appears only under certain conditions?—
Pain spikes through my skull, sharp and immediate, and I grip the bed to steady myself, forcing the vision to stop before it goes deeper, before it shows me what I do not want to see.
Enough. I lift my gaze back to him.
“North,” I say.
“But not directly. The path curves. You won’t see it unless you’re already on it.”
He watches me carefully.
“And what happens if we miss it?”
“You won’t.”
A partial truth. The best kind. Something flickers in his expression again, subtle, controlled. He knows. Not what I’ve hidden. But that I have hidden something.
Good. Let him. Let him question. Let him try to find the gaps. It keeps him focused on the wrong problem.
He is watching me, as though mapping the space between what I said and what I didn’t, and I can almost feel the calculations forming behind his eyes, the patterns he’s trying to build, the way he’s already adjusting his approach based on information I chose to give him.
He’s learning me. Faster than I would like. That makes him dangerous in a way the others are not. But it also makes him predictable. Because men like him cannot tolerate uncertainty. They have to understand. They have to control. And if they cannot…They adapt. Which means I can shape how he adapts.
The second vision hits instantly.
Violent.
Uncontrolled.
The room fractures around me, splitting into overlapping paths that collide and contradict, and suddenly I am standing in the forest?—
No.
I am standing in several forests at once. In one, the path is clear, leading us deeper without resistance. In another, it vanishes entirely, swallowed by shifting ground that opensbeneath our feet. In another, Vaedros is ahead of me. He is bleeding, but still standing. In another?—
He turns.
And there is something in his expression that I cannot read before the vision tears itself apart, collapsing inward with a force that drags me back into the present so abruptly that I gasp, my fingers tightening against the fabric beneath me as the pain settles in waves behind my eyes.
I close my eyes briefly, forcing the fragments away, forcing myself back into control before he can see too much, before anything slips through that I cannot take back.
When I look at him again, he is watching me even more closely than before.
He misses nothing.
“Unstable,” he says.
Not a question.
“No,” I reply.
A lie. A necessary one. His gaze sharpens slightly.
“Then explain.”