What It Found Was This
SERAPHAE
Caelan was losing a battle with a yawn.
He had been for the better part of the last hour. Chin resting on his hand, elbow propped against the window frame, eyes heavy like someone who had stayed up too late and was refusing to acknowledge it. The yawn kept trying to come. He kept suppressing it.
He was losing.
I watched him fail at it for the third time and said nothing.
We rose bright and early and headed for the Mourning Wild.
The carriage was too small. It had always been too small, but it felt more so today.
I stuck my head out the window.
When I looked back, I locked eyes with Riven, who was riding behind the carriage.
He had met us at the entrance of the Mourning Wild and delivered the somber news that he had not found anyone selling veil ash.
His dark brown hair was windblown, falling just over thick brows. He didn’t look away.
I narrowed my eyes at him, refusing to look away first.
After a long moment, he stared into the tree line.
A grin broke across my face.
The trees kept thickening until the road became narrow. The light filtered and then thinned before disappearing altogether, as if the forest had swallowed it entirely.
Completely dark. Not Twilight dark, which was familiar now. This was different. Like the trees themselves were producing it.
Maelor said something that I was fairly certain violated several courtly conduct standards.
I went back inside the carriage.
Caelan lifted a hand. A slight gesture, and the lanterns came to life. Warm light filled the interior without effort.
I looked at his hands and gaped at him.
“Raw,” he said before I could ask. He settled back against the seat.
“It doesn't follow nature's laws. Magic has rules.
Things it will and won't do. Mine doesn't recognize the difference.” He turned his hand over and studied it briefly.
“I can light a fire as easily as freeze water. It doesn't care about the difference.”
“That sounds useful.”
“It sounds unpredictable.” He clenched his fist and looked out the window. “There's a distinction.”
If I had magic that could bend into anything, I’d be proud of it.
He didn’t look like he was proud.
I was still watching him when he turned back from the window. His expression changed, genuine curiosity where the amusement usually was.
“Do you have magic?”
“Light,” I flexed my fingers. “Useful in the dark.”
“Show me.”
I summoned a small orb and let it sit in my palm, white and quiet. He watched it quietly.
“Useful,” he said.
“Very,” I agreed.
The carriage jolted.
Not the usual bump of an uneven road. A hard, sudden lurch, the kind that came from something structural deciding it was done with us. I went sideways. His arm came up and caught my shoulder. I slammed into his chest face-first with the grace and dignity of a sack of potatoes.
His arm stayed around me.
I looked up.
He looked down.
I could see the specific shade of turquoise his eyes turned in lantern light, which was information I did not need and was going to have difficulty forgetting.
Heat rose to my face immediately. That had started recently.
I was not a person who blushed. I had never been a person who blushed.
This was physiologically inconvenient, and I did not welcome it.
I shoved him hard enough to be executed for treason. He went back against the carriage wall with a satisfying thud.
“There it is,” he said, entirely composed despite having just been assaulted. “Someone pressed against a wall, as promised.”
“You’re annoying.”
He looked like he was having the best day of his life.
I straightened my skirt and looked at the ceiling.
Caelan leaned out the window. “What happened?”
We got out.
The moment my boots touched the ground, everything stopped.
Not gradually, but all at once. The birds, the wind, and whatever ambient sound a forest produced were completely gone. The silence was not the absence of sound so much as something else wearing silence like a cloak.
I stood very still.
Caelan stopped beside me, looking up at the forest canopy and taking stock.
Maelor was staring at the wheel like a puzzle he had no interest in solving.
Riven had his hand on his blade, eyes staring straight ahead at whatever he could see that we didn’t.
Maelor followed his line of sight.
“Someone there?” he asked Riven.
“No,” Riven replied. “But we’re being watched.”
“You just said there wasn’t anyone there.” My fingers found the dagger on my thigh.
Riven didn’t look away from the trees. “I didn’t say they were people.”
“Great.” I stopped in front of the wheel. “Far better than being watched by actual people.”
The wheel was cracked clean down the middle. The kind of damage that should not have happened to a carriage moving through a forest at a reasonable pace on a road just like any other carriage would have.
A cold shiver moved down my spine.
“Not creepy at all,” I said.
Nobody disagreed.
Maelor stood with his arms crossed next to me in comfortable silence before he decided to open his mouth and ruin it.
“Caelan told me what you did,” he said with a tone that I wasn’t used to. “How you took out the assassins.”
His brown eyes held mine, a softness moving through them that I hadn’t expected.
“I still don’t trust you,” he said. “But Caelan does. The man has terrible taste but he’s almost never wrong.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I turned back to the wheel instead.
“We leave the carriage,” Caelan suggested as he approached. He scanned the dark between the trees. “We keep moving on horseback.”
I gestured at the wheel, split neatly in two. “We're not going to question what happened to the wheel?”
All three of them looked at me. Each with an expression varying degrees of asking whether I actually wanted the answer to that question.
I considered it.
“Never mind,” I said under my breath.
Maelor and Riven mounted their horses. The remaining horse, the one that had been pulling the carriage, was singular.
One horse.
Two of us.
Caelan looked at me and grinned despite everything that was happening.
I rolled my eyes.
He helped me up into the saddle. It was practical.
Faster to accept the help than to manage it alone, which I was perfectly capable of doing.
But efficiency was a virtue, and I had nothing to prove.
His arms came around me to take the reins, and I did not note the way his chest felt against my back.
I also did not register the warmth of it.
I was doing very well.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“No.”
“Excellent.”
His lip brushed my ear when the horse started moving. It was completely unnecessary, and I was not going to think about it.
I thought about it for approximately thirty minutes as we rode deeper into the forest. The trees leaned in closer than trees should, and the shadows moved at angles that shadows had no reason to move at.
I told myself I was glad to be sharing a horse with him because if the forest decided to stab me in the back, it would have to go through him first. This was tactical thinking. Threat assessment from an experienced assassin.
The first sign that things were going wrong was that the lantern went out.
Caelan lit it again with a gesture.
It went out.
He lit it.
It went out again, and this time he let it stay dark, which told me more than I wanted to know about what he thought of our situation.
I tensed and told myself that ghosts were not real.
“Riven,” Caelan said in the dark.
“I'm fine.” From somewhere behind us.
I registered the unsteadiness of his voice immediately. Riven, who delivered information about imminent threats with a completely straight face, sounded unsteady.
I opened my palm and let my magic unfold. A ball of light formed, illuminating the immediate space around us.
Maelor rode closer and squinted at it. “You had power this whole time.”
“I didn't need it until now.”
He leaned forward and poked the orb. It flickered. “Can it get bigger?”
“No.”
He looked at me. “So that's it.”
“It's useful.”
“Very.” He straightened. “Next time we need lighting, we'll hang you from a rafter.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I will stab you.”
“Forgive me, Your Radiance, but I thought human magic was more impressive.” He waved a hand at the orb. “You're a mildly aggressive candle at most.”
Caelan exhaled a laugh behind me. I nudged him with my elbow. He did not react.
Riven moved his horse closer to the light. His grip on the reins was white-knuckled. His jaw tightened imperceptibly.
“Are you afraid of the dark?” I observed.
Riven looked at me but said nothing.
Maelor and Caelan neither confirmed nor denied it.
We rode on in silence.
“Do we know where we're going?” I asked eventually.
“It won't matter,” Caelan said. “The forest changes shape. We'll be out when it decides it's done with us.”
“Reassuring.”
“Think of it as a nice little bonding exper—“
Someone screamed.
High-pitched and loud. The kind of scream that vibrated in your chest.
I grabbed the hilt of my dagger. Caelan’s arms tightened around me. Riven said words I had never heard him say before and did not think he knew.
I spun and shone the orb toward the scream.
Maelor.
He was standing in his stirrups, face pale, staring at the middle of the road.
At a cat.
It sat in the dirt as if it had been there since before the forest existed and intended to remain. Staring directly at Maelor.
“That,” Maelor said, “is fucking creepy.”
We rode around it, but it only watched him.
Then there was another. Then another. Until a dozen of them materialized from the dark in ones and twos and arranged themselves in a loose procession behind his horse, keeping perfect pace.
Only watching Maelor.
Caelan's chest vibrated against my back with a laugh he was only partially containing. I would not admit that the sound of it was not unpleasant.
“Maelor,” he said, “is afraid of cats.”
Unfortunate.
I had considered picking one up and bringing it with us.
“Terrified,” Riven confirmed, with the flatness of someone who had known this for years and stored it carefully.