Rhys fixed his attention on a fallen tree branch a short distance off the road and reached for the same sense, deliberately this time, trying to feel not just the rule governing a blade's momentum or a wolf's footing, but something further out, quieter, the rule that let the branch simply sit there obeying gravity without a second thought.
'If I understand why it's staying still',he thought,'should be able to feel why it would fall.'
He pushed.
For one triumphant half-second, the branch trembled, and Rhys felt a surge of something close to real pride, the first deliberate success he'd managed since the wolves, proof that this wasn't just blind panic given form.
Then the ground underneath his own feet trembled too.
He hadn't meant to reach that far. He hadn't understood, until it was already happening, that he had no real sense yet of how to contain what he was doing, no edges to the working beyond the blunt limits of his own exhaustion, and by the time he realized the rule he'd disturbed wasn't isolated to one small branch but tangled into the ground around it, it was already unraveling faster than he could pull back.
The world lurched sideways.
Rhys went down hard, knees buckling, both hands flying to his temples as the cost hit far harder than anything before it, a white, tearing pain that swallowed the morning whole for several long seconds. When his vision cleared, blood was dripping steadily from his nose onto the dirt beneath him, and his right hand, the one he'd used to point at the branch without even meaning to, had gone entirely numb, fingers refusing to answer when he tried to flex them.
"Rhys!" Seraphine was at his side almost before he registered falling, gripping his shoulder, her earlier hardness cracking into something closer to alarm. "What did you do?"
"Tried something." His voice came out slurred at the edges, the words harder to find than they should have been. "Overreached."
"You what?" The alarm sharpened fast into something closer to anger. "We don't have time for you to be reckless, Rhys, not today, not with everything else already—" She caught herself, visibly, and pressed her lips into a thin line before continuing, quieter but no less sharp. "You could have collapsed the ground beneath both of us. You don't know the limits of what you're doing. You can't keep testing it like this isn't dangerous."
"I know it's dangerous." Anger flared up through the pain, quick and familiar, the same old heat that always rose when someone talked to him like he hadn't already paid for every mistake he'd made. "I'm trying to get better at it before it kills me on its own terms instead of mine."
"Then get better at it somewhere that isn't the middle of open road, with my House already looking for both of us!"
The words hung sharp in the cold morning air, the first real crack between them since the checkpoint, neither one backing down, both too raw from their own separate mornings to soften it.
Rhys forced himself upright, wiping blood from his lip with the back of his still-numb hand, and didn't have a response that wouldn't have made it worse, so he said nothing at all, and the silence that followed was nothing like the companionable quiet from the road the day before.
It was Seraphine who went still first, her whole body snapping to alert in a way that cut through the argument entirely.
"Rhys." Low, urgent, all trace of anger gone from her voice, replaced by something colder. "Don't move."
"What—"
"Something's coming." She was already reaching for her blade, eyes fixed on the treeline ahead, and Rhys, still dizzy, still bleeding, his right hand still refusing to close into a fist, felt the last of his strength drain out of him at exactly the wrong moment to need it.
"How many?"
Her silence, this time, was the worst answer she could have given him.
...
Four riders emerged from the treeline in Duvall blue-gray, moving with the unhurried precision of soldiers who expected no resistance, and Rhys understood, watching them approach through blurred, aching vision, that whatever strength he had left wasn't going to be enough if this went wrong.
He tried to stand anyway. Seraphine's hand on his shoulder pressed him firmly back down.
"Stay there," she murmured, not looking at him, all her attention fixed on the approaching riders. "Let me handle this."
The lead rider reined in a short distance off, an older woman with the same pale coloring as Seraphine, though her face carried none of Seraphine's careful warmth, all hard, practiced authority instead.
"Lady Seraphine." The woman's tone was courteous in the exact way Bosk's had been the night before, respectful on the surface with something colder underneath. "Lady Isolde sends her regards, and her concern. Word reached her of a checkpoint incident involving a young man matching a description she takes very seriously."
"Then Lady Isolde has excellent couriers." Seraphine's voice had gone flat, formal, every trace of the woman who'd shared bread by a fire the night before folded away completely. "Tell my sister I have the situation well in hand, and that her concern, while appreciated, is unnecessary."
"Lady Isolde was quite specific in her instructions." The woman's gaze flicked, briefly, to Rhys, still pale and bloodied on the ground, and something in her expression shifted, not quite pity, closer to professional assessment. "The young man is to be brought to her directly, for evaluation. She was equally specific that this was not a request open to negotiation."
"He's under my authority, on an assignment I volunteered for and hold full jurisdiction over." Something hard and unyielding had entered Seraphine's voice, a version of her Rhys hadn't heard yet. "If Isolde wishes to override that authority, she's welcome to do so herself, in person, rather than sending riders to do it for her."
The lead rider's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "Lady Seraphine—"
"I am aware of exactly what my sister is capable of ordering, and exactly what she isn't." Seraphine took one deliberate step forward, placing herself fully between the riders and Rhys, her hand resting, unhurried but unmistakable, on the hilt of her blade. "I am also aware that four riders sent to intercept a fellow member of this House, on a public road, without written authorization from the House council, is a decision my sister made alone, and one she would very much prefer didn't become a matter of record. Am I wrong?"