Chapter 65: Strange Feeling

Azura’s POV

I woke up with my cheek against his shoulder.

I moved before I was fully awake. Sat up. Put space between us before my eyes had even adjusted to the pale morning light coming through the branches.

Rhydor was already awake, back straight against the silver trunk, eyes forward, like he had been sitting there for hours and had no intention of acknowledging that I had spent part of the night pressed against his side.

I picked up his jacket from my lap and held it out.

He took it without looking at me.

Right. Fine. That was fine.

I stood up and walked back to camp and did not think about the warmth his shoulder had left against my cheek or the way his hand had rested at my arm like something that could not decide if it wanted to be there. I did not think about any of it. There was nothing to think about.

Liona looked up from the burnt woods the moment she saw me coming. Her eyes went from my face to the direction I had come from and back to my face again and I watched her put the whole thing together in about two seconds.

"Don’t," I said.

She pressed her lips together, and looked back at the ashes.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were about to."

"I really wasn’t."

She absolutely was.

The camp was packing up around us, warriors moving with the quiet efficiency this place had taught them. Corvin was being untied slightly, hands and legs given a little more room than yesterday, enough to ride comfortably but not enough to wander.

A warrior fell into step beside him without being asked. Corvin did not notice. He was somewhere else entirely, eating dried meat with the slow, careful movements of a man who believed he was sitting at his own table at home.

I looked away from him.

Silas called us to move and we mounted up.

Rhydor came to the horse without a word. I settled at the front of the saddle and he mounted behind me, his arms coming around either side as he took the reins. His chest was a steady warmth at my back. I sat straight and looked ahead and said absolutely nothing about it.

Neither did he.

Silas and Axel rode just ahead of us. Behind us, the column moved in the careful quiet the forest required. Torin and Liona rode beside us, Liona at the front, Torin behind her with the reins easy in his hands. He caught me looking and gave me a small nod that meant nothing in particular and somehow meant everything.

The forest got heavier the deeper we went.

The trees pressed closer together, their silver bark pale in the thin light. The flowers started appearing more often now, growing in clusters at the roots of trees and along the edges of the path, soft and luminous and far too beautiful for a place this dangerous.

I kept my eyes forward.

We rode for a long time without stopping. Nobody spoke much. The Wraithfen had a way of making conversation feel like an intrusion, like the forest was listening and did not appreciate the noise.

Then Silas raised his fist and we stopped.

He pulled out the map, spreading it across his saddle, his brow pulling together the way it did when something was not adding up. Axel leaned over to look. Rhydor shifted behind me to see past them and I felt the movement of his chest against my back as he assessed the situation.

I looked toward Liona.

She was not looking at the map.

She was not looking at the path or the warriors or the trees ahead. She was turned slightly in the saddle, her eyes fixed on a cluster of pale flowers growing at the base of the nearest silver tree. Her whole body had gone soft. Her hands lay loose in her lap. She looked like someone listening to music only she could hear.

Behind her, Torin went very still.

He did not say anything. He just quietly shifted the reins and turned the horse away from the flowers, smooth and easy, like he was simply adjusting their position. No announcement. No alarm.

Liona blinked and looked around.

"Why did you turn us?"

"Better footing this side," Torin said.

She accepted that and looked forward.

I looked at Rhydor, and he seemed to understand me and moved the horse closer.

"You were looking at the flowers," I said.

Liona turned to me with an expression of complete genuine offense.

"I was not."

"Liona. Your whole body was turned toward them."

"I was just sitting here." She looked between Torin and me like we were both being dramatic. "I was not looking at any flowers. Why would I be looking at the flowers? I don’t know what they do."

"That’s what I’m worried about," I said.

"I wasn’t looking at them." A small pause. Something flickered across her face. "Was I?"

Torin kept his eyes forward.

"You were definitely looking at them," he said pleasantly.

Liona opened her mouth, but closed it. Looked at the flowers now that she was turned away from them and then looked back at me with an expression that was trying to be annoyed and was not quite making it all the way there.

"I don’t remember looking at them," she said quietly.

"I know," I said.

That was the part that sat wrong. Not that she had looked. That she had no memory of doing it.

Torin met my eyes over her shoulder. I held his gaze and blinked slowly. He nodded once. An understanding reached without a single word. He was going to keep watching her. I was going to let him.

Silas rolled the map and the column moved again.

I stayed close.

****

The light was going amber when Rhydor gave the signal to stop for the night.

The clearing was wider than the ones before, the silver trees standing back enough to breathe, the ground clear of flowers. It was the best the forest had offered us and everyone recognized it without needing to be told.

The Warriors set up camp fast and without conversation. Bedrolls. Fire from the wood they had carried in because nothing on this ground was safe to burn. Watch positions claimed with nods and no words.

Then the settling quiet arrived and brought the hunger with it.

No food. There had been nothing to hunt, nothing safe to forage. Warriors who could ride through a wound without complaint sat a little too still around the fire and stared at the flames a little too long.

Torin looked around the group and then looked at the empty space where dinner should have been.

"Wonderful," he said. "Another evening of eating nothing. I’m starting to feel like the forest itself."

"The forest doesn’t complain," Axel said without looking up.

"The forest also tried to eat Corvin’s memories so I’m not sure that’s the standard we want to hold ourselves to."

A warrior across the fire made a sound that might have been a laugh. Silas did not look up from his blade but something in his expression shifted slightly.

It was a small thing. But it loosened the tightness in the air just enough to breathe.

Liona settled beside me after that, pulling her bedroll close to mine the way she always did. I watched the fire and listened to the forest make its sounds around us and tried to let my shoulders come down from where they had been sitting since morning.

Then it started.

Not pain, sound, or a vision. Just a feeling sitting in the center of my chest that had not been there a moment ago. Heavy and wrong and impossible to name. Like something pressing in from the outside of the air itself.

I sat up.

Looked around the camp. The warriors. Silas. Axel. Torin. And Rhydor, who sat apart from the group with his elbows on his knees, looking at the flames.

And yet.

"Do you feel that?"

Liona looked at me. "Feel what?"

"Something." I pressed my hand flat against my chest, against the pendant. The metal was warm. Too warm. "This spot. Something is wrong with this specific spot."

Liona was quiet for a moment. Looking around the way I had. Then she shook her head slowly.

"I don’t feel anything."

Silas looked up. "What kind of wrong?"

"I can’t name it." The pendant burned steadily against my palm. "I just know something is off. Something is awake here that wasn’t awake before."

Silas scanned the clearing with the careful eyes of a man who had spent his whole life reading environments. Then he looked back at me.

"I don’t see anything."

"Neither do I," I said. "That’s not what I mean."

He looked at Rhydor.

Rhydor was already looking at me.

He had been since the moment I first spoke. He said nothing. He did not dismiss it and he did not confirm it. He just held my gaze for a moment and then looked slowly around the camp, taking in each treeline, each shadow, each place where the firelight ended and the darkness began.

He looked back at the fire.

But he did not lie down.

The camp went quiet after that. Real quiet. The kind that comes when people have run out of things to say and the night is too heavy for anything more anyway. Liona’s breathing evened out beside me. Torin went still. Silas lay down though I did not think he slept.

I lay on my back and looked up through the gaps in the branches.

The feeling in my chest did not leave.

It sat there, patient and certain, pressing in from some direction I could not locate, and the forest sat around us in its too-perfect quiet, and the fire burned lower, and I lay still and told myself I was imagining it.

I was not imagining it.

Something was awake in this part of the forest.

And it knew we were here.