We break camp in near silence, though it is the charged kind rather than the empty kind. I secure the packs while she checks the beasts for burrs and hidden cuts with unexpected gentleness. When we resume the trail, I do not order pace or direction immediately.
She notices.
“You’re adapting,” she says.
“I’m gathering evidence.”
“Is that what you call fascination?”
I grab the lead rope and begin walking. “Careful, Aeryn. Vanity is most dangerous when fed too early.”
She falls into step beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly brush when the trail narrows between stones slick with morning dew.
“And denial,” she says softly, “is most obvious when elegantly phrased.”
The forest deepens ahead, layered in shadow and possibility. Behind us lies the test she ruined. Beside me walks the first person in years who makes failure instructive.
That may become a problem. I continue forward anyway.
7
AERYN
The forest stops pretending sometime after midday. Until then it has behaved like difficult wilderness, dense and watchful, full of roots that rise where no root should, thorns that catch fabric with suspicious accuracy, and paths that curve according to motives older than roads, yet still recognizable as a place one might survive through caution and endurance.
Then we cross an invisible threshold and every familiar rule loosens at once. Sound travels unevenly. Light arrives from directions the sun does not occupy. Distance folds strangely, turning near trunks far and far movement immediate. Even the air changes character, thicker on the tongue, carrying wet loam, bruised leaves, cold stone, and a sweetness so rich it borders on decay.
I feel it before I understand it. Pressure gathers behind my eyes with a violence that steals breath in the middle of a step. The world tilts. Needles of light drive through my skull. My vision brightens from within until the trees become silhouettes cut from gold.
“Wait,” I manage.
Vaedros turns at once, but it’s too late. The future tears open.
I am standing in the forest and in six forests and in none of them at all. Branches split into branching outcomes. Every shadow contains another road. Time loses sequence and arrives in shards.
In one path, I stumble over a hidden root while something hunts us through the undergrowth. Vaedros reaches me before the creature’s jaws close, blade flashing once, his body between mine and death, blood on his cheek that is not his own.
In another, I kneel bound at the foot of a cedar while he watches with those mercurial eyes emptied of all warmth, one hand lifted in a gesture so slight it barely qualifies as movement, and soldiers drag me toward a pit lined with silver chains.
In another, rain lashes black leaves while he presses my bleeding hands against his chest to warm them, speaking words I cannot hear because thunder swallows every sound.
In another, he drives a knife beneath my ribs with exquisite precision and catches me before I fall, as though courtesy remains important even then.
In another, we stand side by side above a ruined gate while fire consumes the horizon and something like trust passes between us too quickly to hold.
The visions collide, overlap, replace one another before consequence can settle. His face repeats through all of them, altered each time by choice, circumstance, hunger, grief, cruelty, devotion, calculation. Every version looks possible. Every version feels true.
Pain follows with brutal certainty. I fold forward, hands against the damp earth, and blood spills warm over my lip onto moss bright as emerald glass. The smell of iron cuts through everything. My eyes burn so fiercely I cannot close them.
Arms catch my shoulders. Reality returns in pieces. Vaedros kneels beside me, one knee in the mud, cloak darkened by wetleaves, silver runes visible where his sleeve has shifted. His hand steadies my neck while the other presses cloth to my face.
“Breathe,” he says.
I almost laugh at the absurdity of instruction delivered to someone who can barely remember having lungs. His voice reaches me through pounding pain. Calm, measured, threaded with command so naturally he probably speaks to storms the same way.
I drag air into myself in ragged pulls. It tastes of soil and cedar and the faint spice carried in the fabric he holds beneath my nose.
“What was your vision?”