Kestra moveslike she was born in this forest.
Which, given what I now know of her, is not entirely outside the realm of possibility. I file the observation next to approximately four hundred other things I’ve learned in the last month that I would have found academically fascinating under literally any other circumstances.
I follow three steps behind Ash.
Three steps. Precisely. Not two, which would suggest I’m trying to close distance. Not four, which would suggest I’m trying to create it. Three is the number of a man who has spent three centuries being very good at appearing to have no feelings about anything, and is currently applying that skill to the problem of being twelve feet from the person he’s been thinking about for thirty days straight while the Dark Forest tries to eat us.
The Dark Forest presses close on both sides.
Not the comfortable pressure of trees, the pressure of attention. Something in here is awake and aware and has been since the moment we crossed the tree line. The bioluminescent moss pulses blue-green along the older trunks, just enough lightto navigate by. Just enough to see the shadows moving between the roots in ways shadows shouldn’t move.
The path shifts.
Not dramatically. Just the space between two trees that was walkable a moment ago is now not, and Kestra adjusts without breaking stride, like she expected it. Like she’s been here before.
I file that away and keep moving.
Ash hasn’t looked at me since the castle.
I know this because I’ve been watching. Not in a way that would read as watching—I am, if nothing else, subtle—but in the way of a man cataloguing data he hasn’t decided what to do with yet. The angle of her chin. The exact quality of the silence she’s maintaining. The difference between someone who doesn’t know you’re there and someone working very hard to act like you aren’t.
Ash is working very hard.
Something drops from the canopy.
White. Wrong-limbed. Arms too long, dragging behind a body that moves like water over rocks.
Kestra’s blade is out before I finish flinching. The creature shrieks, a sound like tearing metal, and Ash’s thorns erupt in a wall between us and it, green-black and furious.
The creature recoils. Sniffs the air.
Those beady eyes find Ash and it goes very still. Not attacking. Not retreating. Just watching her with the specific attention of something that recognizes another.
Then it dips its head. Wrong-limbed and awful, but deliberate. Like a bow.
Then it’s gone.
Nobody speaks for a moment.
“Did that thing just—” Tiana starts.
“Yes,” Kestra says.
“Right.” Tiana nods. “Right, okay.”
Ash is already walking. Face forward. Jaw set. The face she uses when something confirms what she already suspects about herself and she’s not ready to deal with it yet.
I’ve catalogued that face. I know every version of it.
I file it and keep moving.
Kestra’s blade doesn’t go back in its sheath.
“They’re testing,” she murmurs. “Smelling what she is. They won’t be the last.”
I watch Ash’s thorns retract slowly. Watch her press her hands flat against her thighs before the tremor in them can register to anyone else.
She learned that from soldiers. The pressing flat. The preemptive containment of anything that might read as weakness. She taught it to herself so young she probably doesn’t remember learning it.
