His gaze sharpens. “Now tell me what have you seen?”
Options unfold inside me faster than the forest trails. Truth gives him power. Silence gives him suspicion. A shaped answer gives me both.
“A choice ahead,” I say, pressing fingers to my temple until the nausea settles. “One path favors your confidence. It ends badly.”
“Which path?”
“If I tell you now, you’ll choose differently for the wrong reason.”
“That sounds remarkably convenient for you.”
“It should. I worked hard on it.”
He watches me with that mercurial stillness that always feels like the pause before a trap closes. “You enjoy testing limits.”
“I enjoy learning where they are.”
“And what have you learned of mine?”
I lower my hand. “That you hate needing anything you can’t command.”
His eyes hold mine a fraction longer than necessary.
“Careful,” he murmurs. “Insight can become intimacy if mishandled.”
I laugh despite myself, the sound startling birds from nearby branches. “Was that flirtation or a threat?”
“With you, does the distinction matter?”
No, and that is the problem. We resume walking. This time I begin shaping my pace, my pauses, the direction of my attention. When branches scrape the left side of the trail, I glance right first. When birds fall silent ahead, I study the canopy instead of the ground. Small manipulations. Invitationsdisguised as accidents. I want to know whether he follows my cues instinctively or resists them on principle.
He does neither. He notes them. Then chooses according to calculations I cannot fully read. Impressive.
A lesser man would be easier and therefore useless.
The fork arrives near dusk exactly as the vision promised: three narrow trails circling a pool so dark it reflects only fragments of sky. White fungus glows faintly along a fallen log. Gnats drift over the water in a silver haze. The forest around us has gone unnaturally quiet, as though sound itself is waiting.
Vaedros studies the options without speaking. I say nothing.
He kneels beside the rightmost path, touches disturbed leaf litter, then rises and looks at me. “You expected me to favor this one.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps I’m improving.”
He smiles properly this time, brief and dangerous. “Perhaps.”
He takes the center path. Not because I want him to. Because he knows I know he would think that. Layers within layers. I follow, pulse quickening with something far too close to exhilaration.
The center trail bends through hanging moss and narrow stone outcrops where roots knot across the ground like veins beneath skin. No vine trap descends. No hidden archers emerge. Instead we find a carcass of some antlered creature split open and drained, ribs polished clean though flies have not yet discovered it. Fresh.
Vaedros halts immediately, hand going to his blade. From the brush ahead comes a low rustle, then another, circling. My earlier vision did not show this. Uncertainty remains mutual.
He glances back only once. “Stay behind me.”
“Tempting order. Unlikely outcome.”