The river had taken a lot out of him.
Caelan stood on the bank for a moment, dripping, and looked down on his battered body.
The gash on his forearm had stopped bleeding properly, the cold water having seen to that, but it needed cleaning and wrapping before it got infected. His ribs hurt when he breathed deeply, which he was trying not to do. His face felt tight on the left side where the branch had caught him, and when he touched it his fingers came away with dried blood. His left knee, from where he'd gone down on it during the chase, had stiffened badly.
Everything else was just bruising. He had a lot of bruising.
"Right," he said quietly to himself. "Let's try and get out of here."
He moved.
The woods were different at ground level than from above. Denser, quieter, the canopy doing something complicated with the light that made the afternoon feel further along than it was. He kept the sound of the river behind him and moved roughly northeast, which should have been back away from the ridge and towards Athosea, though the crash landing had taken him far enough from familiar ground so he had to trust the orientation of the sun in the sky.
He kept his pace steady and his eyes moving.
Every so often he doubled back along his own trail, dragged a pine branch across the clearest footprints, stepped on stone where stone was available. He had no way of knowing if the animal from the woods was still tracking him, and he preferred not to find out. Alfor had drilled this into him until it was reflex.
Cover what you leave behind, always, because the thing following you is probably better at following than you are at running. Caelan remembered his master's words well.
He wished Master Alfor was here to tell him that in person. He wished that more than he expected to.
The light through the canopy began to go amber. Then gold. Then the gold started pulling back toward the upper branches and the undergrowth went dim, and Caelan accepted the fact that he was not going to find the edge of the woods before dark and started looking for somewhere to spend the night instead.
He eventually found a clearing by accident, pushing through a stand of close-set pines and stepping out into open air.
It was small and roughly circular, the grass long and pale, scattered through with low wildflowers that had closed for the evening. And at its centre, spreading its branches over most of the space like it owned the clearing, was a willow tree. Old, by the look of it, the trunk wide and deeply grooved, the hanging branches so long they touched the ground in places and formed a kind of curtain around the outer edge of the canopy. In the fading light the whole thing had a quality of stillness that felt almost deliberate, like the clearing had been arranged rather than grown.
Caelan stood at the edge of it and looked at the tree for a moment.
Then he walked to it, found the lowest branch that would take his weight, and climbed.
It cost him more than it should have. His ribs made every upward pull an exercise in controlled breathing, and his knee didn't like the angles, and at one point his cut forearm caught the bark and he had to stop and wait for the sharp flare of it to settle before he could keep going. But he got there, a broad fork in the trunk maybe twelve feet up, where two thick branches spread outward and left a natural seat against the main body of the tree.
He settled into it. Put his back against the trunk, his feet braced on the wider of the two branches, and let out a long breath.
The wildflowers below were pale shapes in the dim light. The willow branches hung around him on all sides, a loose curtain of green. High above, through the gaps in the canopy, the first stars were becoming visible against a sky that had gone a deep, clear blue.
He was alive.
He sat with that thought for a moment, quietly, because it felt like the kind of fact that deserved a moment.
He had been dragged off the ground by a giant eagle and taken over a cliff and through a forest canopy. He had cut himself free with a pocket knife while the bird tried to remove his head. He had been chased through the woods by something large enough that he genuinely hadn't wanted to see it clearly, jumped off a waterfall, fifty feet, give or take, and he chose not to think too carefully about what would have happened if the water had been shallower, and then survived a river that had done its best to break him against every rock it contained.
And here he was. Battered, cold, hungry, stuck in a tree in the middle of the Kelmoran woods at nightfall.
A quiet laugh came out of him, short and genuine, the kind that arrived before you decided to laugh.
Alfor was going to be furious. Not the loud kind of furious, his master rarely did anything loudly, but the quiet, precise kind, the kind delivered in a flat voice with complete sentences, which was worse. He would go through exactly what had happened and exactly where each decision had been suboptimal and Caelan would have to stand there and agree with most of it, because most of it would be correct.
But.
He had handled it. The rope, the fall, the eagle, the chase, the river. None of it had beaten him. He had moved through all of it and come out the other side and the knife was still in his pocket and he was still breathing and that felt, in the quiet of the clearing with the stars coming out above him, like something worth acknowledging.
Not to anyone else. Just to himself, in the dark.
Not bad, he thought. For a day that started by scaling a cliff.
He closed his eyes. Sleep arrived before he finished the thought.
"Who are you?"
The voice came from somewhere between close and far away, soft enough that he wasn't sure, for a moment, whether he had dreamed it. It had a quality he couldn't place.
His eyes opened.
The clearing was still dim, the light early and grey, the wildflowers still closed. He was in the tree. Everything hurt.
He looked around.
The branches hung motionless. The clearing was empty. Nothing moved in the long grass below, nothing moved in the canopy above. He scanned the branches around him, the broad ones near his perch, the thinner ones further out, and found nothing. Just wood and leaves and the pale morning light coming through in thin strips.
But there was something.
He couldn't have said exactly what. More of an impression than a sight. A shape that didn't quite resolve when he looked at it directly, something in the branch directly across from him that his eyes kept sliding off of.
He had his knife out. He didn't remember deciding to draw it.
"Hello?" he said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.
Nothing answered.
He stared at the branch opposite. The not-quite-shape sat there, or didn't sit there, in that maddening way. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up and he was fairly certain that wasn't from the cold.
"Caelan!"
He turned so fast he lost his balance.
He had just enough time to register that he was falling before he fell, the branch dropping away beneath him, the clearing rotating ninety degrees, and then the ground arrived and hit him across the back and shoulder with a flat, total impact that drove the air out completely and left him lying in the long grass staring up at the canopy.
The pain was extraordinary.
"Caelan!"
Alfor's voice. From outside the clearing, coming closer.
He got himself to sitting, which took longer than it should have, and then to standing, which took longer still. He was still holding the knife. He looked back up at the branch across from his perch.
Empty. Obviously empty. Just a branch.
I'm way too tired.
He put the knife away.
"Here," he called, and pushed through the willow curtain into the open. "I'm here."
Alfor came through the trees at the clearing's edge first, moving fast, and for one brief moment his face did something it very rarely did, it showed what it was thinking. Relief, clean and unguarded, there and then replaced almost immediately by the expression Caelan knew much better.
Merida was two steps behind him and did not bother hiding anything. She crossed the clearing at something close to a run and stopped just short of him, looking him over with hazel eyes that moved quickly from his face to his arm to his side.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you." he smirked.
"I mean genuinely bad. Like you lost a fight with a river."
"I'll have you know that I won, technically."
She shook her head, "You're covered in blood."
"Some of it's dried." he said as he looked down at himself.
Faris came through last, and said nothing for a moment. He looked at Caelan the way he sometimes looked at things he was working out how to respond to. Then: "The eagle dropped you into the treeline. We saw it from the plateau."
"Yes that's happened," Caelan nodded.
"And then it came back without you," Faris added.
"I'm sure it did yes," he chuckled.
A pause. "How far into the woods did you come down?"
"Decently far by the looks of things," Caelan said.
Alfor had reached him by then and stood close, looking at him with the thorough attention of someone checking something important off a list. He took Caelan's chin without asking, turned his face to examine the cut across the cheekbone, dropped his gaze to the forearm, noted the way Caelan was holding his right side.
"Ribs," Caelan said. "I don't think they're broken. Just uh, unhappy."
"Unhappy," Alfor repeated, in a tone that suggested he found the word choice inadequate. He released him and stepped back. "Your father," he said, "is, as you know, a man of significant accomplishment and considerable authority, and if I had returned to Athosea having allowed his son and heir to be killed by a training exercise, he would have had me court-martialled."
"What happened wasn't technically part of the training exercise," Caelan shrugged.
"Things must be accounted for. We never know what can happen when we are out in the wild, and you know it." He held Caelan's gaze for a moment. "You're in one piece."
"Mostly."
Something moved through Alfor's expression that was not quite relief and not quite pride and was probably both of them, wearing the disguise of neutrality. He turned away before Caelan could look at it too long.
"Sit down before you fall down," Merida said, already moving. She had a cloth out from somewhere, and her waterskin.
Caelan sat.
Faris sat beside him, looking out at the clearing. Then, quietly said: "We came down off the plateau as soon as the eagle cleared the tree-line. Spent most of the night searching."
"Most of the night?" Caelan raised a brow.
"It's almost dawn." Faris looked up to the sky.
Caelan followed his gaze. The light was early, thin, the blue not yet fully resolved. He had slept longer than he'd thought.
"Sorry," he said.
Faris glanced at him sideways. "Don't be. It will be a good story to tell when we're with everyone." A pause. "How was the river?"
"Unpleasant."
"You jumped off the waterfall?" Merida asked, still focused on Caelan's wounds.
Caelan looked at her. "How do you know about the waterfall?"
"We found the bank. Saw the edge," She answered, "There were claw marks in the mud at the top."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Merida had started on his forearm, cleaning it efficiently, and it hurt enough that it gave him something to focus on instead. Alfor stood a few feet away, his back to the group, looking at the willow tree with his hands clasped behind him.
"We'll patch you up properly here," he said, without turning around. "Then we move. I want to be back in Athosea before nightfall." He paused. "And we are going to have a very thorough conversation on the road about rope management."
"Looking forward to it," Caelan mumbled.
Merida pressed down on the forearm and he winced.
"Stop moving," she snapped.
He gave her an annoyed look.
The clearing was light now, the pale gold of proper early morning coming through the canopy and touching the wildflowers that were beginning to open. It was a good clearing. He was glad he had found it.
He glanced back at the willow tree. At the branch across from where he'd slept, the one his eyes had kept sliding off of in the grey before-dawn light.
Empty. Just a branch, in an old tree, in a clearing in the woods.
Caelan was sure he had heard a voice and seen something, but he knew he was tired.
He looked away.