Chapter 4 The Forest

The treeline swallows us in less than a minute, and the moment the last shaft of open sunlight disappears behind us, the temperature drops so sharply that I feel it against my throat.

The air changes with it... denser here, older, pressing against my skin the way water presses against a hand held under it.

Rhydan is a half step ahead of me. He has not said a word since he handed me the trial map at the base of the north trail.

I count four minutes, then eight, then twelve.

And he walks the way a person who has done this a hundred times walks. His eyes never stop moving, sweeping the trees in a rhythm that looks like breathing rather than effort. Every few minutes he glances back at me, quick, less than a second, verifying I am still there before facing forward again.

He thinks I do not notice. He is wrong.

I notice everything about him actually, and I am not going to examine why.

The way his shoulders move under his coat when he shifts his weight over a root. The certain quiet of his boots on the pine needles, so soft I have to strain to hear them and I still cannot most of the time. The way his hand keeps flexing at his side like he is stopping himself from reaching for something.

"Vermont," he says, without turning around.

The sound of his voice after about fifteen minutes of silence makes something in my stomach do a small unpleasant thing that I refuse to name.

"Sorry?"

"You are from Vermont. Your file says rural supernatural community. Eastern region."

"You read my file?"

"I read everyone's file."

"You are the hockey captain, Rhydan. Not the Headmistress."

"It does not matter, they are essentially the same thing."

"That is genuinely not the same thing... at all."

He glances back at me then, less than a second, and I see the ghost of a smirk at the corner of his mouth before he faces forward again. Then he walks faster after that and I am almost certain he does it to cover whatever just moved in his face.

I do not walk faster after him.

Not because I am tired, but because I want to see how long it takes him to realize the gap between us has grown, and how long after that it takes him to slow down without admitting he is slowing down.

Twenty seconds...

He slows.

He does not turn around. He does not say anything. He simply reduces his pace by exactly the amount required to let me catch up to him, and I understand as I close the distance that Rhydan Valecrest has just told me something about himself without meaning to.

I take note of that.

"So what were you doing in the coffee shop that morning?"

He does not answer for a full pace.

"Reading."

"You do not strike me as a boy who spends his mornings in coffee shops in small Vermont towns reading."

"I do not, usually."

"Then why that morning?"

His jaw shifts... the particular small tightening of a boy who has been asked a question he has not yet answered for himself.

"I do not know."

"You do not know."

"That is what I said, Calladine."

"Calladine now, is it? Progress."

He does not answer that. But I catch the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth, and something in my chest does a small ridiculous thing that I refuse to name either.

Then the forest deepens.

The golden light shifts toward something flatter and greyer. The temperature drops in a way that does not fit the time of day, and I feel the exact cold weight of it settle across the back of my neck before I understand why.

Rhydan stops walking.

I stop behind him.

"That is not weather," I say quietly.

"No, it is not."

Something is moving through the trees to our left, something large and slow and deliberate. The air around it hums with old territorial power, the kind that does not care about first-year assessments or academy rubrics or the two teenagers standing in its forest.

The hair on my arms stands up.

"Territorial shade," Rhydan says. His voice has gone low and quiet. "But they do not usually come this far from the deep forest."

"So what does it want?"

"It wants to establish dominance. Stay behind me and do not show fear. Let me handle it."

He steps in front of me. His arm brushes mine as he moves, and the particular unexpected warmth of him through his coat sleeve is loud in the way small physical things are loud when your whole body is registering danger at the same time.

Then I feel the shift in him happen... his wolf nature rises through his skin like heat through metal, and his presence expands outward in a wave of authority that fills the cold air around us. It is the first time I have felt a shift this close and it is genuinely impressive.

And then something else rises underneath it... something hotter, something that does not belong to any wolf.

His hands curl into fists at his sides. His breathing changes, going shallow and uneven at the edges. When I glance at his forearm, his sleeve has ridden up and the skin there is wrong... dark and iridescent.

Scales are spreading slowly from his wrist toward his elbow, like something underneath his skin is trying to get out.

"Rhydan..."

"Stay behind me, Calladine."

"Rhydan, your arm..."

He looks down.

And I see the exact moment he registers what is happening to his own body. His whole face changes. Not fear, it is something worse. It is the exact tight horror of a boy who has been holding something inside himself for a long time and is watching it start to escape in front of the wrong witness.

Then the shade shifts in the trees, reacting to the spike of uncontrolled energy and the whole forest goes tighter around us. I can feel the pressure building in the air, in the ground, in Rhydan's body a foot away from mine.

He is going to lose control of it and I do not think about what I do next.

I just step up beside him and I put my hand on his arm, flat over the scales.

His whole body goes rigid instantly.

Not the rigid of a shift... it is the rigid of a boy who has just been touched by a girl he has been trying very hard not to want to be touched by, in the middle of losing control of a supernatural nature he has never let anyone see.

Something moves through my palm the moment I make contact, something warm and electric and certain in a way I have no framework for. It is not something I am doing. It is something that is happening to me, and to him, and to the particular narrow space of skin between my hand and his arm.

And under my palm, the scales stop spreading.

Then they begin to recede.

I feel it happen through my skin... the rough edges of them softening, sinking back into his arm, the dark iridescence fading until the skin under my hand is warm and human and smooth.

Rhydan's breath comes out in a single sharp exhale.

His head has tipped forward slightly. His eyes are closed. His hand, the one at his side, has uncurled from a fist and is trembling almost imperceptibly.

I do not lift my hand from his arm.

I should. I know I should. He has not asked me to keep it there. But my hand does not want to move, and I am not sure his body wants me to move it either, because I can feel through my palm the particular slow thing his frequency is doing in response to mine, and it is not something I have vocabulary for yet.

Even the shade in the trees has gone completely still.

Then it retreats, slow and deliberate, back into the deeper dark between the trunks until the hum of its presence fades entirely and the forest goes quiet around us.

Neither of us moves.

Rhydan finally opens his eyes. He looks down at his arm, at my hand still resting there. Then up at my face, slowly, and what I find in his expression cracks something open in my chest because it is nothing like anything I have seen from him before.

Not the bored cruelty from the coffee shop and definitely not the cold assessment from the dining hall.

This is someone stripped completely bare, raw and frightened, and furious about being both things at once, staring at me like I am something he does not have a category for and the absence of the category terrifies him.

He steps back.

My hand falls away from his arm, and I feel the loss of contact in a way I refuse to name.

"You tell no one," he says. His voice comes out rough, scraped thinner than usual.

"Rhydan..."

"No one." His voice is holding itself together with both hands. "I mean it, Calladine."

I look at him for a long moment. I look at this boy who said cruel things to me in a coffee shop a week ago, who read my file, who put his name next to mine on a board list he had no real authority over, and who is standing in front of me right now with every wall he owns completely down and nowhere to put them.

"Okay."

"Why okay?"

"Because you asked. And because whatever that is, it is yours. It is not mine to share."

Something crosses his face, quick and unguarded, there and gone before I can name it. He looks away into the trees and swallows once.

"We should keep moving."

We walk back toward the academy side by side. The distance between us is small enough that his arm brushes mine three times, and neither of us closes that last inch and neither of us pulls away from it either.

The whole walk back, every few minutes, he looks at my hand.

Not at me, at my hand.

At the edge of the treeline, just before we step back into the sun, he stops.

"Calladine..."

"Yes?"

"What you just did back there... has that ever happened before?"

I open my mouth to say no, because the honest answer is that nothing has ever happened to me magically in my entire eighteen years. But something in the way he is watching me stops the word before it leaves my mouth.

He already knows the answer.

He is not asking me, he is checking whether I know something.

"Rhydan."

"Yes?"

"What do you know that I do not?"

He does not answer.

He turns and walks out of the treeline into the sun, and I follow him, and the heavy silence between us on the walk back to the main gates is not the silence of two strangers who took a walk together...

It is the silence of two people who have just started something that neither of them can stop.