7. Aeryn
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 wet leaves, 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?”
Again, way too much.
I wrench away harder than necessary and stagger upright. The movement sends a wave of dizziness through me. Trees lean inward, then correct themselves.
“Something useful, I hope,” he adds.
“There are futures where I let you walk into a ravine.”
“There are present moments where you answer directly.”
I wipe blood from my mouth with my hand. “You appear in too many versions.”
He rises slowly, gaze fixed on me with a concentration that feels almost tactile. “A flattering complaint.”
“It wasn’t one.”
“No,” he says softly. “You reserve those for when you mean them.”
The ease with which he speaks while I am unraveling should anger me.
Instead I register the line of his throat where his collar sits open from travel, the elegant severity of his features sharpened by green light, the way beauty becomes dangerous when paired with intelligence.
His brothers wear violence openly. Vaedros carries it under silk and wit, polished until people mistake fascination for safety.
That may be worse.
We continue because standing still in this part of the forest feels like volunteering for an experiment.
I walk half a pace ahead to avoid looking at him more than necessary and fail repeatedly whenever the trail narrows enough to bring his shoulder near mine.
He moves through the undergrowth with predatory grace, every step chosen, every glance collecting information.
There is no waste in him. Even his silence seems curated.
Trusting any version of such a man would require madness. The problem is that distrusting him entirely now feels equally foolish.
An hour later the path divides around a cluster of standing stones veined with pale quartz. Water runs somewhere nearby, unseen but loud enough to suggest depth. Ferns tremble though no wind reaches them.
I know what I should do. Give the clearest guidance available. Preserve our progress. Preserve myself. Instead I decide to test him. My turn now.
“Left,” I say, studying the stones.
He does not move.
After three breaths I add, “Unless the stream has shifted. Then right.”
Still he waits.
“The center opens later,” I continue. “Or it used to.”
He turns his head slightly toward me. “Are you finished composing possibilities, or should I sit down?”
I fold my arms. “You asked for direction.”
“I asked for yours.”
“You assume I possess one.”
“I assume you possess several and are enjoying the distribution.”
Annoyingly accurate.
He walks to the left path, kneels, touches the soil, then stands and crosses to the right without comment.
There he studies bent reeds, a patch of scraped bark, the angle of stones under moss.
Finally he takes neither route and steps directly between the standing stones where thorn branches appear too dense to permit passage.
I blink.
“There is no trail there.”
“There wasn’t,” he says, parting the branches to reveal narrow ground hidden behind them. “Someone made one recently.”
He glances back over his shoulder, amusement barely visible. “Your performance distracts from the obvious.”
I follow through the opening with more irritation than the moment deserves. “You enjoy being insufferable.”
“I enjoy adaptation.”
“That sounded rehearsed.”
“Like I can’t think of something smart on the spot.”
The concealed trail descends toward the water I heard earlier, ending at a stream clear enough to expose black stones beneath the current.
The sound of it soothes something frayed in my skull.
I kneel and rinse the dried blood from my face while Vaedros fills skins and scans the opposite bank for movement.
“You changed your approach,” I say.
“I have several.”
“You used to challenge my answers directly.”
“You used to think that was my only method.”
I look up. He stands framed by cedar trunks and silver water, dark hair immaculate despite the miles, features composed in that infuriating way of men who seem born understanding angles and consequence.
Beauty should feel softer than this. With him it resembles a polished blade—beautiful because it was made to cut cleanly.
“You’re studying me,” I say.
“I was under the impression that it had become mutual.”
The stream covers many sounds, though not the one my pulse makes when he says things like that.
I rise too quickly and nearly slip on wet stone. His hand closes around my waist before gravity finishes its argument, drawing me against him for one startling instant. Heat meets cold through layers of damp fabric. His grip is firm, controlled, entirely capable of becoming something else.
I steady myself and step back at once.
“Careful,” he says.
“Concern doesn’t suit you.”
“Neither does clumsiness, yet here we are.”
I should insult him. Instead I hear myself ask, “Which version of you is this one?”
His gaze sharpens. “How many did you see?”
“Enough to know certainty is a luxury.”
“And in those futures, did any of me earn your trust?”
I think of knives, fire, warmth, chains, rain, blood, impossible tenderness.
“I haven’t decided whether trust is the relevant measure.”
Something unreadable passes through his expression. Then he releases the waterskin stopper and hands it to me as though we have discussed weather.
We move on.
By late afternoon the forest grows stranger still.
Mushrooms pulse faint blue beneath fallen logs.
A deer with antlers twisted into spirals watches us from ten paces away and vanishes when I blink.
Once I hear voices ahead speaking in tones I recognize as my own, though no one stands there when we arrive.
Vaedros hears nothing, or claims not to.
At the next split in the trail, I offer three contradictory instructions simply to see what he does.
“The slope ahead collapses if we take the ridge.”
“The hollow floods if we descend.”
“The old path circles safely if the old path still exists.”
He inspected me for a moment that feels longer than it is. Then he hands me the lead rope.
“You choose.”
I stare at it. “You’re surrendering control?”
“I’m relocating responsibility.”
“That sounds like surrender dressed for court.”
“That sounds like fear dressed as wit.”
I take the rope because refusing would concede more than accepting. After a brief pause meant entirely for his benefit, I choose the hollow.
He follows without protest. No suspicion voiced. No demand for certainty. No visible concern that I may be leading us badly on purpose. The absence unsettles me more than pressure would have.
Halfway down the slope he speaks from behind me.
“You expected argument.”
“I expected intelligence, Vaedros.”
He laughs quietly, and the sound does something inconvenient to the air between us.
The hollow does not flood. Instead it opens into a sheltered grove where the ground remains dry beneath broad-leafed branches and fallen logs form natural walls around a patch of level earth ideal for camp. My choice, however motivated, has worked.
Vaedros begins unloading packs. “You can stop trying to force me into one shape, Aeryn.”
I turn. “What shape is that?”
“The one easiest to predict.”
The truth of it lands unpleasantly. I have been measuring him through visions, through tests, through assumptions built from men who resemble him only in title and blood.
Meanwhile he has been learning the present version of me one answer, one pause, one lie of omission at a time.
I am not the only observer here.
He glances up from the fire kit. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking loudly.”
I hate that he can tell.
I hate more that part of me admires it.
He strikes steel to flint. Sparks bloom. Flame takes the tinder in a soft rush, painting azure across his eyes until they look almost liquid.
Beautiful, intelligent, dangerous, impossible to sort cleanly into enemy or ally. The forest is not the only place where paths divide.
As dusk settles through the branches, I realize something far more troublesome than any vision.
I have started looking forward to finding out which version of him is real. And he has already begun asking the same question of me.