They carried on in silence, the leaves on the trees beginning to take form and shape they were coming so near. No longer a blur but a promise of shelter, of places to hide if the need arose. And likely a stream that was more water than mud, a place to wash and refill their skins before continuing on.
Perspiration was beginning to bead on Penryn’s lip and neck as the sun grew higher. It was nearing noon, he was sure, and he was tired of the heat as well.
He took a step nearer to her, then another, and although she gave him a peculiar look for his closeness, she made no direct enquiry.
He spread his wings and kept them high, a partition between the sun’s punishing rays and their own mortal forms. He would have offered such protection before, but the position was an awkward one, and difficult to maintain for too long. But he could offer it while he could, and there was no mistaking the relief on Penryn’s face. “You do little to support your own point,” Penryn commented instead, “when you act like this.”
No answer seemed a better response than insisting that he was the correct one, so they simply walked on, both anxious to be within the shelter of the trees.
Densely packed and so old that the branches formed a tangle far above their heads, there was something almost menacing about the sudden shadow that took such a wood. A direct contrast to the bright and unyielding day they had walked through for too many days, he was struck with a sudden foreboding now faced with the prospect of entering.
Penryn seemed to have no such misgivings, walking forward easily and only stopping when she realised he had yet to follow.
“Is there a problem?” she asked mildly, although her eyes darted around in an effort to catch whatever danger he might have seen that she had not.
He was being absurd. She was the one attuned to magic and its effects. He might feel tendrils now and again, the tether that kept him so focused and aware of her presence that it was nearly impossible to ignore. But this...
“You do not feel that?” he asked, feeling fairly ridiculous for doing so.
It must have been the sudden drop in temperature, that was all. For his eyes to struggle to adjust to a new setting, shadows seeming to lurk, dots springing about his vision as he tried to scan their surroundings.
Penryn came back to him, her expression worried.
“Drink some water,” she insisted, her eyes roving over his face as thoroughly as they had done the forest at his first reticence.
He was going to protest, as they were not due a ration for another quarter hour at least, but Penryn shook her head, reaching for the flask herself and handing it to him with a firm expression. “Drink,” she ordered, although a hint of worry negated some of the command.
He did, instinct making the pull a slightly longer one than his efforts to ration permitted, and even then it was difficult to pull the skin away. “As you ordered,” he answered archly, and Penryn was so serious that she did not even blush and stammer that such had not been her intention.
“What is it you feel?” she asked instead. “This is the path,” she reminded him, looking back where already the stream had formed an active trickle rather than disappearing into the earth to water hard earth itself rather than dance along a proper bed.
It felt absurd to describe it now. It was only a forest, one that he had hoped to reach for such a long while. And here he was, requiring a coaxing to even enter it.
He released a frustrated breath, far more at himself than at her, and made to move inward.
But a hand caught his arm, her grip tighter than he expected it to be. “Grim,” she tried again. “What is it you feel?”
For the first time he realised that it could be of some importance, and he shifted back, his feet outside the edge of the tree line once more. “A foreboding,” he answered at last. “As if... as if something is going to happen when we enter. Something we will regret.”
Penryn took a breath before nodding. “We cannot go around,” she reminded him. “There is only through.”
Of course there was. He never would have suggested otherwise. He was not going to add weeks to their travels simply to assuage a feeling, justified or otherwise.
“Then we will have to be cautious.”
Penryn gave a heavy sigh. “I did not know we had been so reckless before.”
Hadn’t they? Abandoning the lantern for an illicit flight. Sitting so close he had become her pillow.
Becoming friends.
But through it all, he had been attentive to her physical safety, and that had to count for something.
The feeling of unease was difficult to push away entirely, but the longer they walked through the trees the more he was able to reconcile that they were much like any other wood. The nature of the boughs themselves might have altered, where at home trees were tall, bushy things with rounded edges, these had long arms that reached toward one another, tangling and twining, the leaves more brown than green, with spikes on their edges on their fallen brethren that littered the floor beneath their feet.
He grimaced, already imagining how many would cling to their bedrolls when they inevitably made camp.
Penryn gave him quite the grin when the stream began to pool in earnest, the trickle broadening until it resembled a proper creek rather than the illusive subterranean offering that had eluded them for days.
He would have suggested walking further upstream before filling their flasks, the better for the water to agitate and clean itself from anything nefarious, but Penryn was already filling their flasks, handing it back to him with a pointed look.
Had he been acting so very strangely? He had not thought so. Not really. But
