Not Remotely Frightened

Forests, I decided somewhere around the fourth pulse, were considerably more unsettling from inside than they’d ever looked from a dormitory window.

Not frightening. I want that specified precisely, since I suspect it’ll matter later. Simply unsettling, in the specific technical sense of a place that hadn’t been asked whether it wanted a witch and two familiars walking through it in the dark, and hadn’t consented to the arrangement either way.

“Again,” I said, and lifted the staff, and opened the seam, and sent the pulse through, and felt it come back an instant later, pointing a little further to the left than the last one had.

We’d worked out the rhythm somewhere around the second attempt: find a clearing wide enough to stand in, open a window anchored to nothing but the ground under my own feet, send a pulse of Kou’s magic through it, tuned to a signature close enough to my own that it would find hers too, and read the angle it came back pointing before the window folded shut, walk toward the angle, wait five minutes for my own mana to stop complaining, and do it again. It was not, strictly, a sophisticated technique. It worked, the only quality I’d ever asked a technique for.

Something moved, off to the left, low to the ground and too big for a squirrel.

I did not flinch. I want that specified precisely too.

“You’re gripping my wrist,” Kou said, from my shoulder, not even bothering to look at what I was gripping it with.

“I’m stabilizing myself. The ground here is uneven.”

“The ground here is flat.”

“It’s flat in a way that’s deceptively uneven.”

Mori, walking a careful half-step behind both of us, didn’t say anything, which I decided to count as tact rather than agreement.

***

The clearing where the signal finally stopped moving was smaller than the others, ringed tightly enough by trees that the sky above it read as a coin instead of a ceiling, and the air inside it sat still in a way that suggested nothing had disturbed it in a long time.

“Here,” I said, and didn’t need Kou to confirm it, because for the first time all night the returning pulse hadn’t pointed anywhere at all. It had simply arrived, immediate and certain, nothing left to triangulate.

“So she’s here,” Mori said. “Near enough that this is the right place to try.”

“Try what, exactly?”

“The actual crossing.” He said it more carefully than the sentence itself required. “I should be the one to go first. I’ve done this before.”

“You’ve done it once, badly, and only because you were already inside a rift when it happened. You don’t know this Kou. You tracked a signature we’re fairly confident belongs to her, not one that belongs to whatever’s standing next to her, which means you have no anchor on the other side at all.” I let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. “And even if you did. You can’t carry either of us. I can carry both of you. So it’s me.”

Kou’s ears angled toward Mori, waiting.

Mori didn’t argue the second half. He looked, for a moment, like he wanted to, and then didn’t.

“All right,” he said instead. “Then you need to know how it actually works, not just that it does.”

***

He didn’t explain it so much as remind me of it, the same theory we’d already worked out together over breakfast that same morning: a physical anchor, a person on the other side to land on, and an emotional one, close enough attunement that the window stopped resisting you. I could have recited it back to him. It turned out that knowing a rule and knowing what it actually felt like from the inside were not, in fact, the same skill.

“The anchor’s the easy half,” Mori said. “You already have it. It’s the second half nobody can hand you in advance. Not really.”

“Then hand me whatever you can.”

He considered that for a moment, the same weighing pause he gave anything that actually mattered to him.

“Imagine a hoop,” he said. “The kind you’d put over your own head, except it isn’t round, and it isn’t the right size, and every time you try to fit through it it changes on you, because it isn’t shaped like you. It’s shaped like the resonance. The closer you match her, the closer the hoop gets to your own shape, until eventually it isn’t a hoop you’re fighting anymore. It’s just a door.”

“And then I widen it.”

“Carefully. Once it already fits you, you can ask it for a little more, and if you’re actually attuned, it gives you a little more. If you’re not, it doesn’t widen. It breaks.”

Breaks.

“I’m aware of the stakes,” I said, out loud, instead. “Get behind me.”

***

The first window came up thin and colorless, a smear of gray with something pink at the center of it that might have been hair or might have been nothing at all, and it lasted less time than it took me to register I was looking at anything.

The second lasted longer, long enough for the pink to resolve into something with an edge to it, before my concentration slipped and the whole thing folded in on itself, gone before I could catch it again.

“You’re forcing the shape,” Mori said, after the fourth. “You’re trying to make it fit instead of trying to fit it.”

“I don’t currently know the difference between those two things in a way I can act on.”

“Then stop thinking about the shape. Think about her.”

By the sixth attempt the window held long enough that I could see, properly, a clearing that wasn’t mine: firelight, low and steady, catching moss and old roots, and a girl with pink hair cropped shorter than mine sitting against a fallen log with a book open in her lap and a staff propped beside her, entirely unbothered by anything, turning a page with the unhurried patience of someone who had absolutely nowhere else to be.

She looked, more than anything, bored.

I did not, generally, have a great deal of practice being bored. I tried anyway, reaching for whatever flat, patient, unhurried thing she was feeling, and the window guttered and went out before I’d gotten anywhere close.

“Again,” I said, and it failed again, in almost exactly the same way, boredom apparently being a state I could recognize with total clarity and not remotely produce on command.

***

The ninth attempt held long enough that I heard something before I saw it: wings, small and fast, cutting through the leaves somewhere close on the other side of the window, and then a shape dropping into the clearing I was watching, no bigger than Kou, scaled and dark and entirely unlike anything I’d expected to see keeping a girl with a book company.

The girl looked up. Not startled exactly, but caught, the book slipping half-closed in her lap, and whatever she’d been feeling a second ago wasn’t boredom anymore.

The dragon’s head swung toward the window. Toward me. One long, deliberate motion, and then it did something I had no framework at all for a dragon doing: it nudged her shoulder with its snout, and tipped its head, unmistakably, toward exactly where I was standing.

She turned to look. Her whole face did something complicated and fast, closer to my own face doing it than I strictly wanted to think about right now.

I felt it arrive before I understood what it was: a flare of surprise, sharp and unguarded, close enough to my own that for one full second I couldn’t have said whose it was.

There.

The window stopped being a window.

***

It reshaped around the sensation, tightening to fit me exactly, and for one clean, treacherous second it would have let me through alone, no resistance at all, my own shape and nothing else’s.

I didn’t take it.

“Wider,” I said, out loud, mostly to hear myself commit to it before I could reconsider. “Both of you. Now.”

Kou hit my side first, wings folded flat, pressed hard enough against me that I could feel his heartbeat going faster than mine. Mori came a half-second after, careful even now, right up against my other side, neither of them leaving room for anything except exactly this. It was more contact than I generally allowed anyone.

I didn’t do anything about it.

I leaned into it harder instead of pushing, the same motion I’d used on every seam since Wenzel’s, and the window widened to meet me instead of resisting.

***

We went through all at once, no ceremony to it, and landed hard enough on the other side that the staff jarred out of my hand and I stayed down for several seconds longer than pride generally allowed, lungs working, every part of me damp with effort I hadn’t fully registered paying.

Whatever mana I’d had left, I didn’t have anymore, not a scrap of it, and my body seemed to have decided the honest way to tell me that was to make it feel like I’d just run for an hour instead of standing still and leaning on the air. The crystal in my staff, lying where it had rolled, had gone as dull as a pebble. Sweat-soaked hair stuck flat to my face; my clothes clung the same way, disheveled enough that a stranger walking up on the three of us right then would have read it, correctly, as three people who’d lost a fight, not won one.

Kou didn’t move either. Neither did Mori. The three of us lay there, unglamorous and thoroughly wrung out, on grass that smelled the same as the grass we’d just left.

Something dark folded in at the edges of my vision, patient about it, in no hurry at all to see whether I’d let it in.

Not here.

I can’t fall asleep in front of an audience, I told myself, and held onto that with both hands and pulled until the dark let go.

I got my fist up first, into the air, not because there was anything worth celebrating yet, but because it was the one thing left in me that still knew how to refuse.

Above me, low enough to block out what little sky the trees allowed, a face leaned into view: pink hair, my own eyes down to the amber flecks, and an expression that hadn’t decided yet whether to be alarmed.

“Huh,” she said, tilting her head at exactly the angle her dragon had. “That’s new.”