Page 95 of Keldori By Daybreak

“Forest?” The way my thoughts swirled just out of reach, the single word was all I could manage through the mental tether with Ciarán.

“Don’t worry.” Ciarán’s voice slid through the mess in my head, slippery and tinny, as if he were speaking from far away. “The Opal Forest of Willow’s Grave isn’t your typical woods.”

He took Jonquil and helped me back onto Una. I slumped back into my position against her neck.

“Already?” Orla asked. “Wren needs rest.”

“You were all too easy to track,” Ciarán grunted. “If Ferrin survived the flood, or if he had Caitria waiting nearby, they’ll be regrouping and following us soon. We’ll be safer in Willow’s Grave.”

“Caitria?” Tiernan repeated his sister’s name.

“She wasn’t with Ferrin,” Ciarán said darkly.

Orla looked up at me, but I nodded sloppily back at her.

“I’ll be fine,” I slurred.

“There’s healers at the citadel, I hope,” she mumbled.

We were finally out of the mountains, and the rest of Skalterra stretched ahead of us, visible from the grassy slope we descended. The strange forest glittered beneath us and extended to a faraway hill upon which the largest willow tree I’d ever seen spread against the horizon.

The tree trunks remained resolute as we approached the forest, and I caught another glimpse of a dazzling flash as the sun shifted between clouds. Curtains of willow-like branches hung in our path, their vines stirring in the breeze.

Ciarán pushed vines out of the way and Una passed through into the grassy shade of the trees.

I watched their trunks pass in a sleep daze. While the bark grain was still visible in every tree, all of the wood of the forest had been turned to white stone. Strips of bark flaked away in places to reveal glittering, iridescent slabs of gemstone underneath. Creeping vines wove their up the trunks and across stone branches to decorate the dead forest in a false canopy.

“What do you think?” Ciarán asked in my head. He walked alongside Una with a hand on my shoulder to make sure I stayed in place.

“Can’t think,” I admitted, still struggling to communicate through the bond.

“Are you scared of the trees?”

I watched the flashes of the sun that filtered through the canopy play with the color of his dark hair. It reminded me of the way the trees kept showing off flashes of gemstone.

“No,” I replied.

“Because it isn’t a real forest?”

“Maybe.”

“They aren’t trees,” he explained. “They’re rocks.”

“Petrified,” I confirmed, blinking slowly at the nearest passing trunk. “With opal.”

“You like rocks.”

I tried to confirm, but was distracted watching Ciarán’s hair again.

The forest shadows lengthened with the passing day, and the exposed opal of the forest burned red in the light of the sunset. I drifted back to sleep at some point, but was woken up after nightfall when Ciarán pulled me into his arms from Una’s back.

“You’ll draw too much attention in the city. I’m sorry,” he murmured to the onchú.

I rolled my head into his chest, trying to dispel the pounding in my temples.

“She’s burning up.” Ciarán’s voice reverberated into my ear through his chest. “Come on, Wren. Stay with us.”

“I knew we should’ve rested,” Orla fretted nearby.