Chapter 14
I told myself it was practical.
Nicco knew things I didn't. Who'd sent them, what waited at Iskaeld, what the crown actually wanted from this journey. Information I had no access to unless I stayed close enough to catch it.
Staying near him made sense. It was tactical.
It had nothing to do with the way he'd looked at my face instead of my hands in the dark. I repeated that to myself four times before breakfast was done and almost believed it by the third.
“Why do you look nervous?”
I didn’t hide the fact that he startled me. I turned to look at Sergeant Gralen.
“Why are you sneaking up on me?”
His eyes widened a fraction before he scowled. “Why would I sneak up on you?”
“I don’t know, you just did.” I looked him over coolly. “Don’t do it again.”
I picked up my pack and slung it over my head, angling the strap across my body so it sat between my shoulder blades, and picked up my staff.
I didn’t look to see who else was ready before I set off to find the trail. “Douse that fire well,” I reminded them as I walked away.
“Watching you and Gralen bicker is my source of enjoyment,” Baxley said as he joined me.
He’d also made me jump. Why in the shades was I so jumpy? I never jumped.
“Everyone’s creeping up on me today,” I muttered, holding my strap as I walked.
I felt more than saw Baxley’s eyes on my face, but when I turned to look at him, he was already looking straight ahead.
“Should anyone be able to make you jump?” he asked softly.
I shook my head. “No.” I let out a sigh. “Guess I’m more spooked by Skallfen than I thought I would be.”
It wasn’t a lie, but I also knew it wasn’t the full truth. Nicco. Nicco had unsettled me. I wonder if he even knew it.
I heard the groan from the injured soldier, not a complaint as such, but more of a general protest from his body.
“What is it?” Baxley asked, keeping his voice low.
“He should have been left in Skallfen, him and the horses. But…”
“But we couldn’t leave him,” he said with resignation.
“I bet Nicco would.” It was out before I thought about it. “Um…”
Baxley didn’t look pissed off. In fact, if the lower half of his face wasn’t wrapped, I was sure he’d be smiling. “No doubt.”
I glanced at him one more time. “And you? Would you have made the same choice?”
Light blue eyes met my green ones. “I don’t know. If he slows us down, then it won’t likely matter.”
What did that mean? Only I knew what it meant. I forced myself not to look over my shoulder or at any of the wounded men. Or the two horses, who I knew weren’t going to make it much farther.
Unless…
I shook my head slightly. No. Another detour was not what we needed. We’d detoured to Skallfen after the Hulgrim attack, and it had cost us more than just time wasted.
But Halegrave was a settlement west of here. It was a small place, no more than a dozen houses. They didn’t like strangers, and they really didn’t like soldiers. They were the last settlers in northern Crystallese, and they rarely opened their hearths.
But for the wounded? I glanced over my shoulder and met Nicco’s gaze. I hadn’t realized he was right behind me, and I nearly lost my footing.
I never slipped on ice.
Never.
I wasn’t about to start today.
“What is it?” Baxley asked me, and I shook my head.
“Nothing,” I lied. I ignored the slow rumble of laughter from behind me and forced myself to focus on the trail ahead.
The wind stayed at a mere bluster. It was almost friendly. The sky was the lightest gray we’d been gifted since we started this journey. The snow that fell was soft and gentle.
The first part of the journey passed almost pleasantly.
“Traders would love you,” I suddenly said to Baxley, and I knew he was as surprised as I was that I’d spoken.
“And why’s that?”
“Big, broad, handy with weapons, and you don’t talk. You’d get an extra copper or three for that.”
It had been calm enough that his face wraps were pulled down under his chin, accentuating his sharp jawline.
I saw the smile and the white teeth behind it.
“You’re young.” I was not a talker. Why was I talking? “All three of you are,” I tacked on hurriedly in case he thought I was flirting or anything crazy.
“Not that young,” Baxley corrected me. “Almost thirty summers.”
“Old for a mercenary.”
Oh my gods, where were my manners?
Baxley did laugh at my observation and turned to look over his shoulder. Larana had fallen back to guard the rear, and Nicco was a few paces behind, walking in silence with Captain Marson, no doubt listening to everything I was saying.
“I’m good at my job,” Baxley told me. “We all are.”
I doubted that Nicco and Larana had seen thirty summers, but I didn’t ask anything more.
Not long after, I was watching the sky when I heard Larana come alongside us. I knew it was her. She had the lightest footfalls of us all. Even me.
But then she was tall and graceful. She probably killed a man gracefully.
“It holds a certain beauty.”
I turned to look at her. “What does?”
She gestured to the land in front of us. “Your land of winter.” Her voice was husky, but not rough. “It stretches as far as the eye can see, and like this, it’s just a sea of pristine white.”
“It doesn’t stay like this for long,” I reminded her darkly.
She too had pulled her face covering down, and I saw her small smile. Her gaze was on the far west. “Is it true that the mountains at the very edge are pure ice?”
I shook my head. “The ice mountains that sit on the Frozen Waste sea are. It’s said that no blade is sharp enough to slice them. Which when you think about it, is amazing since they are literally on water.”
She glanced at me. “You think they should melt?”
“Everything eventually does, right?”
She made a face that could have said she agreed with me, or not, but she didn’t argue.
“So mountains on land?” she asked me.
“The Frozen Mountains to the west are covered in ice so thick that they look like they are made of glass,” I told her. “But there is rock underneath, just really deep down. I think that’s what you are thinking of.”
“Your capital, Glassfyr, sits within a mountain,” she reminded me.
“Yes, but the ice spires they are so proud of, are more crafted ice than nature wielded.”
“Ah.” I felt her gaze on me again. “The Verei Kahn?”
I nodded. “I believe so.”
“Have you been to Glassfyr?” she asked me.
“No. It’s too south for me. What would a trailfinder do with paths marked and carved into the ground for all to follow?” I looked around at the empty land. “No, this is my home.”
“Icy wilderness, isolated and struggling?” she asked me skeptically.
“How do you know you’re alive if you’re not fighting for survival?” I countered.
Larana laughed. “You don’t need to fight every day, Amarya. Some days you can just sleep in.”
I laughed at the silliness of our conversation. We walked on in companionable silence, and I realized that I liked both her and Baxley’s company. Nicco… meh.
“So what is Darysia like?” I asked her, my eyes scanning the terrain in front and seeing the trail ahead.
“Warm,” Larana instantly replied. “Not as warm as Cinderia.” She glanced at me. “Cinderia is my homeland. Trust me, you’d never cope with the heat.” Her gaze ran over me. “And other things.”
“Other things?” I asked curiously. “What other things?”
“Let me put it this way, Amarya. When was the last time you only wore one layer of clothing?”
My cheeks burned with a blush. “Larana!” I was scandalized. “You don’t ask those kinds of questions.”
Her peal of laughter was loud in the silence. “In Cinderia, in my village, we wore one layer, two items of clothing, and…” She leaned into me. “The fabric is so light, it’s almost transparent.”
I jerked away from her in shock, my eyes wide. “You lie!”
She was grinning, and she turned, her gaze searching. “Nicco, tell the trailfinder how little they wear in Cinderia,” she called.
“I don’t need to. She believes you,” he called back lazily. “I can practically taste her outrage.”
That earned him a scowl from me as Larana scolded him about being nicer.
I didn’t ask any more questions, and Larana dropped back to scout for game with Baxley.
I could have told them they were wasting their time. The game they needed was under the snow, not on it. But the truth was, I was still thinking about wearing only one layer of clothes and how exposed it would feel.
Night fell gently — too gently for this far north — and I should have been more alert, instead of daydreaming about foreign lands with strange customs.
The snowstorm hit us in the middle of the night.
I don’t know who was on watch, but they missed seeing the wall of snow in the blackness all around us.
I would have seen it, but I was sleeping soundly. Another thing I never did on the trail.
The storm decimated the camp within seconds of hitting us, and then it was a mad scramble to gather our stuff, wrap up as best we could, and hunker down together as it battered against us.
The horses were gone. I couldn’t hear them if they were near, and I’d heard one whinny before the storm swallowed the cry.
“What the fuck is this?” Nicco shouted above the howling wind. “Is this normal?”
“It’s a skarveld!” I yelled back. “Hard to predict, worse to see, and we just—”
The wind swallowed my words. When it had lowered its screaming wail enough to be heard, Nicco shouted back at me.
“We just what?” he demanded.
“Survive it!” I screamed back, hoping he heard me.
When it hit, blinding us all, I found them by touch in the whiteout, and when they realized what I needed, they followed almost instinctively.
Hands grabbed cloaks, shoulders pressed together, the soldiers closing ranks with the knowledge that alone in this, they wouldn’t survive.
Someone gripped my arm. I gripped back without looking to see whose hand it was.
I’d formed them into a shape, and they moved easily, backs outward, bodies inward, each person leaning slightly into the center where the combined heat of us made the air a little less deadly.
The wind seemed to come from all directions at once, tearing through the gaps between us and searching for a way in.
I stood with my shoulder pressed against Nicco's arm and my back against one of the soldiers, focusing only on staying upright. The cold wasn't truly cold anymore. It had become a force, something with purpose, reaching into the spaces between our bodies.
The skill was to give it nothing.
We crouched there — eight soldiers, three mercenaries, and one trailfinder — breathing each other's air and sharing the only warmth in the world, waiting for the skarveld to finish with us.
“We can't hold like this without turning,” I said loudly enough to be heard over the wind. “We need to switch with the outside. They’re going to lose feeling in their extremities, and that's when we start losing people.”
Captain Marson turned his head to look at me, and I saw both incredulity and understanding in his expression.
“Rotate,” Marson yelled simply, and without argument, the outer ring began to shift inward, the inner moving out to take the brunt of it. No fuss. Little protest. Just people who trusted the man giving the order enough to follow without question.
I was making my way to the outside when I got shoved back into the center.
“Not you, bunny,” Nicco growled close to my ear. “You’re the one leading us, and you’re also the smallest. Stay there. Don’t die.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Baxley moved, and suddenly, I was inside his cloak.
Like a child.
As I grappled with my indignation, I realized one thing. I was warm, and I resented it. Greatly.
Baxley's cloak was enormous and smelled like woodsmoke and something peppery, and he'd wrapped it around us both without ceremony, his arm a heavy, unapologetic weight across my shoulders.
He said nothing. Made no joke about it. Just held the cloak closed against the wind and stared at the storm like it had personally offended him.
Outside our huddle, the skarveld screamed.
Through the space in the cloak, I could see Nicco on the outer ring through the gap between others’ shoulders.
He had taken the worst position without discussion, the one directly facing the wind, and he stood with his head down and shoulders set like a wall. His face was wrapped, only his eyes exposed, and they were closed as the wind lashed against us.
Snow collected on him in layers. He didn't move or flinch. He just absorbed it, as he seemed to absorb everything, without complaint or acknowledgment, as if suffering were something that happened to other people while he stood in it, waiting for it to be over.
I watched him longer than I should have.
“He does that,” Baxley said quietly, close to my ear.
I didn't ask what he meant. “Does it work?” I asked instead.
Baxley was quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind hit a pitch that made my ears ache. “Hasn't killed him yet.”
That wasn't an answer. Or maybe it was an answer, and I just didn't like what it meant.
I stopped watching Nicco and looked at the snow instead. Identical, both of them. Cold, relentless, and entirely without mercy. But he pushed me back inside. I didn’t linger on that either. Now was not the time to think about Nicco and his actions.
The rotate came not long after. Longer than it should have been, the cold having had its way with everyone's sense of time.
When Nicco entered from the outer ring, he moved past me without looking, taking up a position two bodies away.
Snow chipped off his shoulders as he moved.
His jaw was clenched. His eyes were fixed on nothing.
He didn't shiver.
I filed it away the same way he did — quietly, without deciding what it meant yet.
Larana had rotated without being asked or pushed back into the center like I had. I was trying not to let that annoy me.
She didn't wait for Nicco's order, didn't hesitate when her time was up. She just moved, stepping out into the worst of it with the practiced efficiency of someone who had probably done harder things than this and hadn’t received any acknowledgment for them either.
She took her position directly opposite Nicco.
Not beside him. Not where the wind was slightly less savage.
Across from him, her hood pulled low and her chin tucked against the cold.
She said nothing. He said nothing. They stood there like two people who had survived things together that didn't need naming, and the wind screamed around us and found no purchase.
I watched them for a moment longer than I meant to.
Larana was harder than the cold. I'd known that since the first morning. But there was something in the way she stood there — not enduring it, not fighting it — just existing in it, immovable and completely without complaint, that made me reconsider what I thought I knew about her.
These three mercenaries were more than they appeared to be, and if we survived this storm, I was going to find out what.