Chapter 9
“Be nicer to the foliage, it’s your elder.” ~ Syndra
Syndra had always loved the forest. This version of it, however, was trying very hard to end up on her bad side.
The clearing where they’d made camp still glowed with the last embers of their fire, orange light licking low over blackened wood.
Above, the canopy arched high and restless, leaves whispering in a language older than even she wanted to remember.
Dawn hadn’t quite decided whether it was coming or not; the sky beyond the branches hung in a murky blue that felt more like held breath than morning.
Syndra sat with her back against a fallen log, arms draped lazily over her knees, pretending for Oakley’s sake that she was relaxed. Her magic knew better. It hummed under her skin, restless, prickling as if every root and stone in the realm had turned to face them.
Across the extinguished fire, Oakley was failing spectacularly at looking calm.
He poked at the ashes with a long stick like they’d personally offended him.
His jaw worked, his shoulders tight, dark hair mussed from too many times running his fingers through it.
He looked very young in that moment, and very human, despite the faint elven angles that had grown sharper since he’d come fully into the realm.
He was also talking.
Again.
“. . . I’m just saying,” he muttered, stabbing the same piece of charcoal for the third time, “if the trees are going to start talking in riddles, the least they could do is give us a map.”
Tamsin, ever the portrait of stoic patience, stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, gaze tilted up toward the canopy.
The early light turned his pale hair to frost and etched the fine lines at the corners of his eyes a little deeper.
He looked every bit the former king he’d once been, and every bit the male who had not slept.
“The trees do not think in maps,” Tamsin said quietly. “They think in seasons. In tides. In balance.”
Oakley snorted. “Yeah, well, balance told us ‘not you’ and then went radio silent, so forgive me if I’m not feeling charitable toward foliage right now.”
Syndra huffed under her breath despite the knot in her chest. “Be nice to the foliage. It’s your elder.”
Oakley’s eyes flicked to her. “It already insulted me,” he pointed at himself as he said “almost warrior, remember? Pretty sure respect is off the table.” He tried to make it a joke. The problem was, she heard the crack in it.
She remembered. The words had rolled through the ground and up her bones not long before the sky began to pale.
Not the former king. Not the former queen. Not the carefully trained almost-warrior. The daughters. Elora. Cassie. One of dark and one of light.
Syndra swallowed around the dryness in her throat.
She’d lived through wars. Lost friends and kin and an entire way of life.
She’d helped hold the line when darkness had crawled through their realm like a plague.
And held the side of light when that darkness divided them.
But nothing had ever hit her quite like knowing the forest itself had refused her help and pointed a hungry, ancient want directly toward the girls she’d come to love like her own.
Tamsin turned from the trees and joined them, lowering himself to sit beside her. His thigh pressed solidly against hers, warmth seeping through the leathers.
“You’re humming,” she said.
He gave her a sidelong look. “I am not humming.”
“Not with your mouth,” she amended, flicking her fingers toward his chest. “With your magic. It’s loud.”
Oakley’s gaze ping-ponged between them. “Is that a thing? You can hear each other’s . . . magic?”
“Yes,” Syndra and Tamsin said at the same time.
Syndra added, “It’s very romantic. And currently very annoying.”
That earned her the barest curve of Tamsin’s lips.
She leaned her head back, eyes slipping shut for a heartbeat. Images still lurked there when she closed them, flashes of something she hadn’t remembered for centuries. A circle of elders. The taste of ash. Light and shadow braided so tightly it hurt to look at. A door. And pain.
Her temples throbbed in memory. The forest had not been gentle about forcing the images back.
“Tell me again,” Oakley said suddenly. “What exactly did it say? All of it.”
Syndra opened her eyes. “You heard pieces of it,” Syndra said. “Enough to know it wasn’t meant for you, but not enough to understand what it was saying.”
“Yeah, but you heard it in . . . tree,” he said. “I’m working with a translated version here.”
Tamsin’s fingers brushed her wrist, a silent question. Syndra answered it with a small nod. Better to say it aloud than let it fester.
“It called us children of root and crown,” she said slowly, picking through the memory.
It wasn’t a new truth. Just an old one spoken aloud for the first time, and only because the forest had decided memory was no longer optional.
“It recognized us. Then it said the seam grows thin. That we returned when the balance was tipping.”
“Which is tree for ‘you’re in trouble,’” Oakley muttered.
“And then,” Syndra continued, ignoring him, “it said: Not the former king. Not the former queen. Not the carefully trained almost-warrior. The daughters. Elora. Cassie. One of dark and one of light.”
Oakley’s throat worked. He stared into the cooling embers. “Right.”
Syndra heard the dejection in his voice.
The forest hadn’t spoken to him. It had spoken around him, close enough to feel, never close enough to claim.
The almost warrior. Those words had obviously bothered him, as had hearing Elora’s name again, that she was an active player in whatever was happening. The forest hadn’t bothered to soften.
Silence pressed in, thick as the mist hanging low over the moss.
“They’re not meant to be anywhere near this,” he said after a moment. “You know that, right? Cassie and Elora. They’ve already done their saving-the-world bit. They’re supposed to be . . . arguing with their mates and eating too much dessert, not walking into ancient magical nonsense.”
“We know,” Tamsin said softly.
“Then why,” Oakley demanded, “do I feel like the whole realm is conspiring to shove them into it anyway?”
Because it is, Syndra thought. Out loud she said, “Because when balance is attempting to be restored, it’s rarely polite.”
He shot her a look that was a little too much like Elora’s when she was unimpressed. “That’s not comforting, Your Former Majestyness.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m not here to comfort you. I’m here to tell you the truth.” She pushed herself to her feet with a flick of her wrist. “And the truth is, sitting in this clearing wringing our hands about destiny isn’t getting us any closer to the girls.”
Oakley stood, too, the stick still in his grip. “So what, we just . . . walk until the forest decides to cooperate?”
“Yes,” Tamsin said.
Syndra blinked at him. “Just like that?”
“We know what it wants,” he replied. “It wants them. It wants Cassie and Elora. It does not want us.”
“Again,” Oakley said, “not comforting.”
Tamsin’s gaze sharpened. “But it does not get to decide whether we sit still. We are not its children to be herded. We are its stewards. It remembers that, even if it prefers to sulk about it.”
Syndra huffed. “Listen to you, lecturing the trees. I’m sure they’ve missed you.”
He glanced at her, a hint of ruefulness in his eyes. “They have not. They are merely out of practice at being defied.”
Oakley looked between them like they were mildly insane. “So we’re what, going to defy the forest? The forest that can literally move paths and most likely wrap us up in its roots and strangle us in our sleep?”
“Yes,” Syndra said briskly. “Get your pack.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. “Okay, but if it swallows us, I reserve the right to say I told you so.”
“Duly noted,” she said.
They stamped out the last of the fire and gathered what little they’d unpacked. The clearing seemed to lean in around them, shadows thickening at the edges as if the woods themselves were listening.
Syndra stepped to the tree line and laid her palm against the nearest trunk. The bark was cool and damp, rough under her fingers.
“We’re not your enemies,” she murmured in the forest tongue. “We’re trying to keep the seam from tearing open.”
A thrum of response vibrated under her skin–not words, exactly. More like a feeling. Already thin, it seemed to say. She swallowed. “Then let us pass. Let us reach them before your precious balance destroys them.”
The tree did not move. Trees rarely did on command. But the magic running through its veins shifted. The resistance eased by a fraction, like a door chain loosening but not yet removed.
Oakley came to stand at her shoulder. “You’re certain?”
“Of what?” she asked.
“That we are not walking straight into a snare we cannot see.”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “But if we stay here, we definitely won’t reach them, and I like that option even less.”
He inclined his head. “Then we walk.”
They stepped beneath the trees together, Syndra first, then Oakley, Tamsin bringing up the rear.
The light dimmed immediately, the canopy swallowing the weak dawn.
The air was cooler here, heavy with moss and loam and the sharp tang of old magic.
As Syndra’s eyes roamed over the ancient woods, she felt as if time simply stood still, though their feet moved forward.
After a while, Oakley cleared his throat. “Does anyone else feel like we’ve been walking for an hour and gone absolutely nowhere?”
Syndra glanced around.
The trees did look . . . familiar.
Too familiar.
Same bent branch. Same cluster of mushrooms at the base of a stump. Same fallen log marked with a spiral of pale fungus.
She stopped. “Well. That’s rude.”
Tamsin came to a halt beside her, eyes narrowing. “It’s looping us.”
Oakley spun, pointing accusingly at a tree. “I knew it. We’re being forested.”
“That is not a word,” Syndra said absently.