“You should sleep, flame lord,” he says this without turning around.
“You should stop talking.”
“If I stop talking the silence gets in.” He bobs left around something invisible. “The silence in the Dark Forest is not friendly silence. It’s the kind that has teeth.”
“Everything in this forest has teeth.”
“Yes but this silence has many teeth.” He holds up his fingers to indicate quantity. “Small ones. Like a comb. Very unpleasant.”
I step over a root the size of my torso.
Miss it.
I go down hard on one knee, hand catching on bark, skin scraping. The almost-bond at my wrist pulses, warm, distant, alive, like it’s checking on me. Like she felt that somehow through three hundred miles of Dark Forest and Unseelie warding and everything between us.
I’m fine, I think at it, which is insane, because it’s a magical thread not a telephone, and also because I’m not fine, and also because the Cauldron is gone and without it I can’t even tell if she receives anything.
I get up and brush the bark off my palm.
“Graceful,” Kieran says from behind me. Not breaking stride. Not offering a hand.
“Thank you.” I fall back into step. “I’ve been working on it.”
“Clearly.”
Ahead of us Whispen has taken his adult form, the one that is still deeply unsettling but at least eye level. He navigates with the particular confidence of something that cannot physically trip and has strong opinions about those who do.
“How much farther?” I ask.
“Farther than before,” Whispen supplies. “Closer than eventually.”
“Fantastic.” I look at Kieran. “Did you catch that? Closer than eventually. Extremely actionable intelligence.”
“Mm.” Kieran steps over the same root I failed. Effortlessly. Without looking down.
I watch him do it.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Move like that. Through the forest. You don’t watch your feet.”
A pause. “Shadow-walking. Even without the paths I can feel where the ground shifts.” He glances sideways. “You could try watching where you’re going.”
“I watch where I’m going.”
“You walked into a tree yesterday.”
“That tree moved.”
Kieran makes a sound. It takes me three full seconds to identify it as something approaching amusement. Low. Controlled. Gone almost before it arrives.
I file it away. Evidence of something I haven’t named yet.
We walk.
The forest breathes around us. Something calls from the high branches, starts as birdsong and deteriorates into something with too many notes, like a song that forgot what it was halfway through. We both track it without speaking. It moves east. We let it.
