Chapter 18
“Your faith in us is underwhelming,” Baxley murmured as he drew his sword.
“You let her go?” I hissed at him.
“They were holding her against her will.”
“She was traded,” I corrected him with a fierce growl. “You don’t interfere with the system when they outnumber us, and they could have traps and lookouts all around us!”
“Their system is flawed.” Baxley looked me over from head to foot. “You condone what they do?”
I pushed the hood of my cloak back to glare at him. “Of course not, but I know when to pick a fight and when to walk away.”
Baxley shrugged. “Haven’t learned that yet.”
The soldiers also had their weapons drawn, and I had no idea how to get them out of this bloodbath.
“You let her go with no resources, no means of transport other than her feet, and I assume in the clothes she was wearing?” I asked Baxley. When he nodded, I tilted my head back and looked at the sky. “She’s already dead.”
Baxley scowled at me.
“She was a merchant’s wife, Baxley. They’re not usually adept at navigating the wilds of Crystallese. It’s unlikely the merchant was from here, so she would have been both a foreigner and ignorant of our conditions, and have absolutely no idea where the next town is.”
The snow cloud was drawing closer. There was no point in running. They’d only chase us and pick us off one by one.
“Flatten the snow around you,” I ordered the others. “Give yourself sure footing. I won’t be able to talk you out of this.” I shot a glare at Baxley.
“I wouldn’t object if you wanted to try,” one of the soldiers told me.
“I can’t,” I told him flatly. “My word has been broken. I told Vorn I wouldn’t interfere. A trailfinder’s worth is measured by the weight of their word. The moment he released her, my worth became nothing.”
Baxley glanced at me, and seeing the truth in my stare, he had the decency to look guilty.
“You three better be worth your word on how good you can fight,” I said, standing apart from them. “No stranger’s life is worth the death that is coming.”
They came at us the same way they'd appeared before: bold, unafraid, and sure they were right.
In this, they might have been.
I counted to eight before I stopped counting and started moving backward. This was the mercenaries' fight. If I had my way, Captain Marson and his men would be standing back as well.
“Tight formation.” Captain Marson didn’t shout it. He just said it in the tone that he expected to be obeyed. “Now.”
To their credit, the soldiers responded faster than I expected. Captain Marson had them closing ranks before the first of Vorn's men had covered half the distance between us.
Vorn was not among them. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that, as I suspected, they weren't moving like men who wanted to talk.
The first blade came from the left, fast and low, aimed at the nearest soldier's legs. He got his sword up in time, deflecting rather than blocking, and even from here, I could see the impact jarred all the way to his shoulders.
“Left flank,” Marson snapped.
Nicco was already there.
He moved the way I knew he would, without announcement, without wasted effort, with the economy of someone who had done this so many times it no longer required thought.
He put himself between the advancing men and the soldiers' left flank, and the first man to reach him was stopped abruptly and didn't get up again.
Larana was on the right, moving quietly and with purpose. Her blade was drawn, and she fought the way she watched, with deliberate intent, as if she'd already decided exactly what she was going to do before the fight even began.
Baxley said nothing. He simply stepped forward, and the two men coming at him adjusted their approach, as people do when they realize the obstacle in their path is larger and more dangerous than it had first appeared.
I stayed at the back, where I was most useful and least likely to be accidentally killed by one of my own companions. I used my staff and my sword on anyone who got past the others, which wasn't many, but it wasn't none either.
A man charged at me low and fast, aiming for my knees, but I sidestepped and brought my sword down flat across his back.
He fell face-first into the snow, and I stepped back from him.
He wasn’t wounded, and when he looked up at me, I held his gaze, hoping he understood my non-attack for what it was. A wish not to draw blood.
The soldiers were holding. Barely, but they were holding.
It was over quickly. It felt like it wasn't.
Then one of Vorn's men — an older, broader guy who had been shouting out orders — raised his fist, and the attack halted as suddenly as it began.
The silence that followed was the silence of people catching their breath and counting their injuries and trying to work out who'd won.
Nobody had won. That was the answer.
Each side still had men remaining. They had simply survived it, and nobody wanted to admit how close it had been.
“Enough,” the older man said. His eyes moved across our group and settled on me. “Where is she?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I lied.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Nicco.
Nicco looked back at him with the expression of a man who had nothing to apologize for and knew it wouldn't help.
“You had no right,” the man said to him.
“Did you?” Nicco asked, his tone easy and almost pleasant, like they were discussing the weather. “She wasn’t yours either.”
The honesty of it seemed to make it worse, and I held back my groan. Why couldn’t he at least try to be reasonable?
“Vorn wants her back.”
“Do you see her?” I snapped, stepping forward. “She left of her own accord. We didn't take her. If she got out, she made her own choice to leave.”
“In this?” He gestured at the landscape around us, at the open snow, the gray sky, the nothingness in every direction. “She’ll die.”
I held his stare. “That was her choice to make.” I didn’t look at any of them with him. “If she chose to leave your camp, knowing she’d die out here… well, I think that tells you enough, don’t you?”
The older man looked at me for a long time. Something moved through his expression that wasn't anger, something older and more tired than anger.
“Vorn gave you shelter,” he said finally.
“He did,” I said. “And I'm sorry for what happened. That wasn't agreed to. It wasn't my call to make or anyone else’s right in this group.” I didn't look at Baxley. “But she's gone, and that's done, and there's no undoing it.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“If she dies out there,” the man said, “that's on you.”
“No,” I said quietly. “It's on the man who took her from her caravan in the first place. It’s on the husband who traded her for passage.”
He glared at me, and I didn’t waver my gaze. “Vorn wants you back.”
“Vorn can want.” I tightened my grip on my sword.
“You broke the agreement.”
I nodded. I took responsibility for Baxley’s actions as my own. “While it was done in ignorance on my part, I concede it was done. But I will not go back with you.” I gestured to the men and Larana, who listened intently. “They have tasked me with a trailfind. I am obligated to them.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Vorn said—”
“Vorn can go fuck himself.”
My eyes closed briefly before I turned my head and glared at Nicco. “Can you just… not.”
Nicco sniffed, spat to the side, and ignored me. “If you come for her again, I’ll kill you all. Go back and tell Vorn that.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe past my fury as Nicco made his declaration. I looked at Vorn’s men, sure they would attack. I wasn't sure if that was Nicco's doing or luck when they didn’t.
The stranger held my gaze for three more seconds. Then he turned and walked back toward the settlement, and his men followed, gathering their dead. The snow swallowed them the same way it swallowed everything, completely and without ceremony, as if they'd never been there at all.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then I turned to Nicco. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you trying to get us all killed?”
He pulled his face wraps up. “Daylight is wasting. Let’s deal with the injured, and we can move on.”
Move on. I couldn’t even fight with him because he was already cataloging injuries and assessing the others with Captain Marson’s help, and I really, really wanted to fight with him.
I turned to Baxley.
He was already watching me, steady and entirely unrepentant.
“She'd have died in there,” he said simply, wiping blood from his sword.
“She’s dead out here,” I reminded him sharply.
“Maybe,” he said. “But she got to choose her death.”
I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him that “maybe” was cold comfort in Crystallese, that “maybe” was just another word for hope, and hope was a liability we couldn’t afford in this country.
I wanted to tell him he'd made enemies of the only people north of Skallfen, that my word was worthless now, that anything waiting between here and Iskaeld we'd be facing without the possibility of shelter or aid.
I said none of it.
Because the part I couldn't get past — the part that sat wrong and cold in my chest — was that I understood exactly why he'd done it.
And I hadn't.
I turned away from him before I said something I couldn't take back.
The soldiers were redistributing, checking injuries, tightening straps, and handling the quiet administrative work of people who had just been in a fight and needed to convince themselves they were fine. Two of them had cuts. Nothing serious. Nothing that would slow us down.
Captain Marson spoke to Gralen in the low, clipped tones of men assessing damage and finding it manageable. I caught the word “rations,” then stopped listening.
Nicco stood apart from all of it.
He watched the snow where Vorn's men had disappeared, arms crossed, expression doing the thing it always did, revealing nothing while clearly processing everything. He hadn't moved since the older man walked away. Hadn't checked on anyone. Hadn't said a word.
I crossed to him, berating myself for doing so, knowing he was only going to piss me off even more.
“You knew what he did?” I asked.
He didn't look at me. “I suspected.”
“That's not a different thing.”
“It is, actually.” He turned his head then, just enough to look at me sideways. “Knowing requires certainty. Suspecting requires judgment. I made a judgment call.”
“To say nothing.”
“To say nothing,” he agreed, entirely without apology.
I felt the anger climb my throat and swallowed it back down. “So did I.”
“Yes.” He looked back at the tundra. “You did.”
The silence between us felt uneasy, which was expected. It had a unique quality: two people standing amid the ruins of a shared choice, realizing they couldn't blame each other without also blaming themselves.
“Did you try to stop him?” It was important that I knew this, but I didn’t know why.
“No.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
A pause. Fractionally too long. “No.”
I stared at him. “And you were okay to risk us all?”
He turned to look at me properly then. His face was cold, not with anger, just with the flatness of someone who was being honest and knew it wouldn't be received well. “What would you have had me do, Amarya? Tie him up in the tent like she was?”
She was tied up? I pushed the thought aside.
“You could have told me.”
“So you could do what?” His voice was even.
“Talk him out of it? You couldn't have. If you'd tried, he'd have done it anyway, and you'd have lost his trust in the process.” He held my gaze.
“At least this way, you're only responsible for not knowing. Keep up the disapproval, and you’ll lose his respect entirely.”
I felt the ground shift slightly under me. Not physically, just the realization of someone who understands they've been handed their ass with no apology.
“You think that my ignorance of his actions is my protection?” I asked carefully. “And the declaration of killing everyone who comes after me? What was that?”
His expression shifted slightly, too fast to read, before becoming the cold mask again. “A deterrent. Nothing more.”
He walked away before I could respond, moving to the front of the group with the easy authority of someone who had never once questioned his right to be there.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then I felt it. The cold, and beneath the cold, something else. That low hum in my chest that I spent considerable energy ignoring. My magic had been there since the confrontation started, pressing up against the inside of my ribs, waiting to be used for something useful.
I pressed my fingers against my sternum briefly, firmly. Not now.
It subsided. Reluctantly.
I looked at my hand, slowly separating my fingers within my glove, flexing them. Beyond them, the snow on the ground within a small radius around my boots had melted slightly, barely a handspan, a ring of wet ground in the white that could have been anything. Boot heat. The warmth of nearby bodies.
I stepped forward and covered it with fresh snow.
“Trailfinder.” Captain Marson appeared at my shoulder. “Are we safe to continue?”
I looked north. The land was empty and still. Behind us, the smoke from Vorn's settlement was already behind us.
“We're safe to continue,” I said.
Whether that was true depended entirely on what Vorn decided to do next, whether the woman Baxley had freed was already dead in the snow somewhere, and whether whatever waited at Iskaeld was better or worse than what we'd just left behind.
I didn't say any of that.
I just started walking, my eyes already searching for the trail to follow.