When he woke, John’s twin was gone and the griffins were back up their tree, probably until nightfall made leaving a safer affair. Waking was good. Waking after a clear delay was less good because… reasons. Reasons like. He was fairly certain a person who stayed down for more than a few minutes had trouble getting back up, and he’d no way of telling how long he’d been down. And. It wasn’t good to be in the Lord of Season’s forest, especially not while he was lying on the ground like free meat. Right?

Right.

He sat up. Took a moment, to appreciate the sharp stab of a headache that had woken up with him. Then found his feet, more or less. Some assistance, the tree next to him, which was very steady. He liked that about trees. Dependable sorts.

The tree was looking at him. Aaron very carefully removed his hand from the leshy. They didn’t stare at each other, but only because Aaron wasn’t sure it had actual eyes for staring. He took a few steps away, and still wasn’t dead, so he steadied himself on a more tree-like tree and just breathed. A bit.

At least one pair of eyes was watching him; the surly griffin was making no particular attempt to hide. It sat on a lower branch, its spotted tail twitching under it like a cat watching birds through a window. Aaron gave a little wave, and turned back to the forest. The forest he’d asked to enter. It was still very much the better option, least of all because no one would be hitting him with his own weapons.

He liked those knives. They’d better take care of them until he got them back.

More pertinently: he needed to find the road and get out of here. Granted that they might just follow him from above and pick him off when he came out, but if he made enough noise when he got to town then maybe he could get a few of their ballistae pointed the right direction before he tried making a break for it. Orin should have noticed he was missing by now, so with any luck, the militia would be extra alert. And hopefully more willing to shoot a feathery sort of enemy than the person who’d already come back from the dead once in the past few days.

If the griffins were in the trees right there, then the road and town should be that way. Not far.

It shouldn’t be far.

…He had definitely walked too far. Which wasn’t a problem; he’d just… gotten turned around, somehow, or been walking at too much of an angle. He’d find the border stones again, and follow them. Which he should have done from the beginning, except his headache was making it a bit hard to focus, and all this light dappling gently between the leaves and straight into his retinas wasn’t helping.

He did not find the border stones again. He stopped in a little clearing, squinting up at the sky, hoping a griffin had followed him and would, through its convenient circling, give away which direction he ought to be going. None did. Nor was he close enough to the ocean for his tragically human nose to pick up on the guiding smell of salt. And though it was too bright a day for his eyes, there were too many clouds for him to see where the sun had gotten itself to, even if he’d known the time well enough to guess whether it was pointing him east or west.

He tried climbing a tree next, but didn’t make it high enough to see anything more than leaves before the spindly branches farther up started bending beneath his weight. He climbed back down, very gingerly. Took a few steps back from the leshy at the tree’s base, also gingerly.

“Is there just the one of you, hopping all over the place?” Aaron asked. “Or is that other one still standing where I came in?”

It did not reply.

“I don’t suppose picking up a stick counts as taking a thing I don’t need?” he asked it. “Because I need some way to defend myself, and bare hands aren’t going to cut it.”

Beavers moved sticks. Birds, too. It wasn’t so unnatural a thing.

The leshy gave no opinion. Aaron carefully picked up the largest fallen branch he could find. And some rocks, which immediately got dirt inside his pocket pantry, but it wasn’t as if he’d food in there anyway. He’d clean his coat when he got out of here.

A few hours later, he had to admit that he might, maybe, not be getting out of here soon. Getting eaten was the biggest concern, and also the one he could do the least about; he didn’t know what hunted here, or how. His own food he could put off for a day or three; his stomach didn’t get a vote here. He didn’t think it would get cold enough overnight to kill him; it wouldn’t be pleasant, but the leaves on the ground were mostly dry, and if he piled enough of them together they’d make a blanket of a sort. A scratchy, buggy blanket. Put like that, it wasn’t so different from other blankets he’d scrounged when he’d been little.

And water; he didn’t know how common water was in here. Maybe the place had lakes and streams in abundance, or maybe its streams liked to disappear under the ground, as they did near Onekin. He had no way of knowing, and no way of carrying any he did find. Which meant when he came across the little creek some ways on, he wasn’t inclined to turn down a drink.

Might just make his head feel better, too.

Leaning down to drink was a vulnerable-feeling thing, even if the clear creek wasn’t deep enough for the kinds of water-dwellers he knew to be wary of. No Minnows here. …There might be nixies, though.

“If this is anyone’s home, please pardon my hands. And the blood,” he added, with a wince. Then he drank his fill, and washed the dried blood off the back of his head as best as he could without soaking himself. He picked up a sharp-edged rock from the streambed, and used it to saw through the stitches on his highest coat button; the one by his neck that he didn’t like the feel of. He set the little gold dragon under the water, next to a pile of particularly shiny stones. Then he started following the water’s flow, because it was as good a direction as any, and he seemed to remember something about most water leading to the ocean if one followed it far enough. Hopefully this one didn’t take its time.

A few steps later he remembered he shouldn’t leave anything unwanted here, but he couldn’t find where he’d left the button again.

A few steps past that, something came crashing rather directly towards him. Aaron readied his stick, which did not quite merit the dignity of being called a staff, and got ready.

What blundered from the trees was a reindeer calf. The white one; maybe the same as he’d seen the last time he’d been in this forest. It saw him, and ran past him, which was in no way a good sign—

The thing that followed after it wasn’t an overgrown bear, at least. Just a wolf. This didn’t inspire the sort of fear in Aaron that would be healthy, given that he’d spent a not insignificant amount of his life visualizing how best to off a certain wolf doppel with the tools on hand, which left him strangely prepared to see a wild wolf charging at him and just sort of… hit it over the head.

Not as hard as Aaron himself had been hit, given that it didn’t stay down.

And there were three more coming, who’d all been interested in a nice tender reindeer calf going into this, but he certainly had their attention now. He took a step back. His foot landed on an algae-slick rock, which tilted to the side, and then his ankle was going down with it.

The first wolf took the invitation. It lunged—

And the streambed rose to meet it. Water weeds and mud and particularly shiny stones wrapped about its body, catching it mid-leap, the stream itself coiling around it as its water continued along with the same pleasant burble, leaving the ground Aaron had landed on quite dry. Just a bare depression, where this part of the stream had been.

There were trees growing down the ridge of the wolf’s spine, little miniature ones like some uptowners kept in pots. The water constricted, and the wolf yelped, and their trunks cracked one by one. They were swept along by the current, circling its body before they were carried off to where the creek rejoined the ground.

They floated past a little tadpole-tailed nixie. She’d poked her weed-tangled head up out of the water to grin at Aaron, a golden dragon button glittering between her needle teeth.

…Well. He didn’t leave something unwanted, at least.

She took the button out when she started eating. She started with the wolf’s throat, which was kind of her, he supposed.

Aaron very delicately scooted out of her streambed. He found his stick, and started walking. Kept following the creek, even. Because she was probably full now, and possibly still friendly.

The white reindeer calf shook itself from nose to tail tip, and trotted after him. Which was… certainly a choice. It looked rather worse for wear.

“I don’t suppose your mother’s around?” he asked it.

It kept trailing him, a safe distance behind. It seemed thinner than he’d last seen it, with claw marks raked down its flank that had turned to thick scabs and a limp to match.

“Didn’t think so,” Aaron said. And since he was pretty sure reindeer were strictly herbivores, even in this forest, he tried not to mind it behind him.

He hadn’t found the coastal road by dusk, but he did find a patch of toothwort growing near the nixie’s creek. He’d only seen it dried before. But the smell was the same, and anyways, the old racoon’s books had pictures. Rubbing a leaf between his fingers left them nicely numbed, so probably he wasn’t about to poison himself.

The reindeer calf had watched him plucking leaves and decided to take a nip itself from the patch’s far side. It was now working its mouth strangely, looking a bit betrayed.

“It’s best for toothaches,” Aaron explained, as he gingerly rolled a few crushed leaves over the back of his skull. It wouldn’t do anything for the pain inside his head, but he’d take what he could get. “Works well enough on skin, though. I don’t suppose I can convince you to stand still while I get some of this on you, can I?”

The calf balked, its legs braced for running, but it held still enough as he approached. Aaron was definitely not going to underestimate how smart things were in this forest. There was a reason Rose had sent the Fox’s people here.

“How did you even recognize me without the cloak?” he asked, as he worked around the edges of the claw marks, trying to rub hard enough to get through the fur but gentle enough not to get kicked. “If you even did. You’re not just following me because you think you’d be faster if something else comes to eat us, are you?”

The calf wiggled its tail, and watched him work, and did not reply in any way Aaron could understand.

“Yeah,” Aaron said, “I wouldn’t have answered that, either.”

To be fair, having the thing near him was a decent reassurance: it was his concussion versus the calf’s limp, and Aaron didn’t intend to be the slower of them.

“Don’t suppose you know how to keep safe during the night, around here,” he said when he was done, and the calf was getting its nose numbed as it poked at its newly tended side.

It limped less as it led him off away from the stream, and into the sort of little grove the stag cloak would have approved of. The calf scuffed the ground with its hooves, then curled up in a ball. Aaron scraped together his leaf blanket next to it, and settled down with his back to its warmth.

“You take the first watch?” he said. The reindeer snorted, and tucked its head up next to its side. Through the branches above, Aaron stared up at the clouds breaking up, and the moon and stars behind them. There was probably some way to navigate by them, but he didn’t know it.

Neither of them slept much.

In the morning, he woke to find his back cold, and the calf’s hooves up on the tree nearest them as it broke its fast on lichen. Could humans eat lichen? He was pretty sure they could, but wasn’t so sure whether he could do so raw. It wasn’t a thing he should try until he was hungry enough to risk it; both for reasons of possible poisoning, and because he definitely didn’t need to eat yet. Just because a leshy hadn’t started hovering around this tree the moment Aaron looked at it didn’t mean one wouldn’t appear if he started eating the local flora.

Yesterday’s clouds were mostly gone. Aaron could see the sun today, and he was pretty certain that the sun rose in the east, which meant if he walked towards it long enough he’d find the road. Until it stopped pointing east and started pointing west, or whatever direction it switched to in-between. But for the morning, at least, he’d a compass.

“Just so we’re clear,” Aaron said, as the calf once more started following him, “if you think I’m going to do for you whatever it was your mother failed at, you’re wrong. I’m probably going to give you a shove over if something tries to eat us.”

The calf blinked huge brown eyes at him. There were nubs on its head; little hints of branches, poking out where antlers would be if it survived long enough to get older. He didn’t recall it having them yesterday. It tore another bit of lichen off a tree, and continued eating in front of him.

“Rude,” Aaron said, and kept walking. The calf took a few more bites, then caught back up; it was walking just behind him, today.

He didn’t have much of a sense of smell without borrowing a wolf’s or a stag’s or a griffin’s. He saw the reindeer lifting its own head to sniff at something, but it didn’t seem alarmed, so he didn’t change their direction.

And it wasn’t a danger, not really. It was just… a thing that had happened, and was done with already, long before they got there. Just a rabbit nest, dug shallow in the ground by their mother. Clawed open with unnecessary force by something else. There were wilting blossoms scattered around it, and he didn’t know which had come from the kits and which from the ground. The little blood spots on the petals had dried. The ground was still a bit muddy from the rest of it, though.

It had already happened, but not long enough ago for comfort. The Lord of Seasons had been here within the last few hours.

At least Aaron knew which of them the bear would focus on, if it found them. And he had to keep going east regardless.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to eat those,” came a rather practical voice, from above them.

Aaron found that he and the calf shared an instinct for bolting.

Griffins and mountain lions, unfortunately, shared an instinct for pouncing.

Aaron went down, a rather considerable weight on his back, and stopped scrabbling to throw it off when claws pricked against the back of his neck.

“Do you know how hard it is,” the kaibyou said, her whiskers tickling his cheek, “figuring out what one is allowed to kill in this forest? And where, and how often. But things something else kills are safe enough to steal. And things from outside the forest are always safe to hunt.”

“The rabbits are all yours,” Aaron graciously allowed, under her claws.

She sat up, and those pinpricks moved to his shoulder blades. His nice red coat did very little to stop them, without the leather armor underneath.

“You’re the one who was with that girl, at the village,” she said.

“Princess Rose.”

“That one.” Her split tail twitched against his back, heavier than he’d expected. “Did she know what this place was like?”

“As much as she could from books, I imagine,” he said, trying to shift his weight enough to get the stick out from under his own body. He’d not been fool enough to let it go when he got pounced, but it wasn’t doing him any good where it was at, either.

“Hm,” she said. And, “You’ve been stumbling around. I can lead you out of here.”

“...Can you.”

“You’re going the right way now, more or less. But you won’t make it before nightfall. Could you use a little help, human?”

“From the goodness of your heart?” he asked.

“Hardly.” She chuffed. “I need to borrow your hands.”