What It Found Was This #2
“Why are they looking at me like that?” Maelor's voice had dropped to something between a whisper and a threat.
“The better question is why they're following you.”
He pulled his horse as close to ours as the road allowed. “Elder Briladin used to carve cat figurines and give them to Caelan just so he could spite me with them.”
I thought of the cat figurines on the library windowsill.
“Those were for you?” I laughed and then flinched when something in the tree line moved.
“I used to put them in his boots,” Caelan confessed, entirely unapologetic, proud of what he had done.
My laugh stalled when I thought of how Maelor’s fear was cats and the forest had given him an army of them. Then Riven’s fear of the dark and how the forest swallowed the light.
The thought assembled itself slowly and then all at once.
The forest was reaching into us and retrieving our fears.
Which meant—
The rustling came from everywhere simultaneously. From different distances, at different heights in the trees.
Then a sound that had no place in nature.
The whisper of a blade slicing through the air.
Caelan grabbed my arm and pulled me left. Pain flared bright and sharp across the skin.
I pressed my hand to my right arm. The salt from my sweating palms burned the shallow cut.
“It actually cut me,” I said to no one in particular.
This wasn’t just an illusion. The forest was manifesting our fears into something real. Real enough to cause actual harm.
My biggest fear had always been exactly one thing.
“It's our fears,” I said. “The forest is making them real.”
Maelor looked at his cats and unsheathed his sword. “What's yours?”
“Assassins,” I said, rolling sideways as another blade sang past my ear. “My syndicate.”
“Fantastic.” Maelor parried a blade, sending it flying into a tree trunk. “Mine are cats. Riven's is moderately inconvenient. Yours is actively trying to kill all of us.”
They came from every direction at once, coordinated the way the Obsidian Hand was coordinated. I threw my orb upward for light the same moment a cloaked figure lunged.
Caelan pulled me back, his hand closing over mine on my dagger’s hilt.
Heat poured through my hand at the contact, humming, alive in a way that had nothing to do with me.
He raised my arm. The dagger glowed brightly as small bursts of lightning crackled from the blade.
Steel met steel when we parried. We got off the horse together, moving as one, my back still against his chest. His hand stayed on mine against the dagger, his other arm around my waist. He stepped a foot between my legs and pressed my right boot against his, forcing my balance to shift.
The movement pivoted us just as the figure lunged again.
His body guided mine out of the strike, and then we slashed.
It became smoke.
Shadow and nothing, dissolving upward into the dark.
Behind us, steel rang and then went quiet. By the time I turned, orb back in my hand, there was only silence again.
Maelor sheathed his blade with a long exhale.
Riven crouched down in the middle of a forest where we had been attacked by ghastly figures just to tie his boot. Slowly, like he had all the time in the world.
The cats, I noticed, were gone. The darkness bled away between the trunks, retreating until only the wonderful gold of the afternoon light remained.
“Well,” Maelor said. “That was annoying.”
I turned to Caelan. His hand was still at my waist. He looked at me for a moment and nodded once. Then dropped both hands and stepped back.
The warmth went with him. I noticed the absence before I could decide not to.
For a moment, I thought it was over.
Except there were four of us, and the forest had only shown us three nightmares.
The air got cold. A chill that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with something else entirely. My breath appeared as mist against the light of my orb. Every muscle in my body contracted at once. A sense of doom raised every goosebump along my skin.
I turned to Caelan slowly.
He had gone completely still. Face drained. Eyes glassed over. Every line of him rigid in a way I had never seen. Not even when five assassins came through the windows. Every version of Caelan I had encountered had been composed, controlled, and effortless.
This was none of those things.
“Caelan,” I said carefully, “what is your biggest fear?”
He looked at me. The man I saw looking back might have looked this way at eight years old. When the magic came and his mother went down, and there was nothing left to hide behind.
“Me,” he said.
I did not ask what he meant. Did not have time to.
In the clearing ahead, a shadow gathered itself into a shape.
The only features visible at first were the eyes.
Vivid blue, glowing from within like something unnatural.
Like his. Then a smile that wore Caelan's mouth wrong, too wide, too certain, the kind of smile that had never been on his face in all the time I had known him.
Lightning crackled in its hands.
At its feet, shadows that looked like black smoke swept across the ground toward us like something breathing. The trees curled inward. Branches frosted over, with ice spreading down the bark in patterns that moved too fast and too deliberately to be natural.
The forest had reached into him.
And what it had found was this.