Chapter 22
The trek north had been hard on all of us.
We’d been delayed by a day when a snowstorm from absolutely nowhere had formed and kept us pinned to one spot for longer than I thought we’d survive. A wall of white materialized, and we’d barely had time to get into formation before it was on us.
The huddle was tighter this time. We'd all learned from the skarveld.
Nobody argued over positioning, complained about proximity, or made a sound about whose elbow was in whose ribs.
The soldiers pressed in without being told.
When Baxley pulled the two nearest men closer without ceremony, they let him, because everyone understood by then that warmth was shared and cold was personal, and this was not the moment for pride.
I ended up between Larana and Edran, not how I'd have chosen to arrange things, but it turned out to be fine.
Larana radiated heat as if she'd been built for it.
Edran, to his credit, had stopped shivering within moments of us forming up, the body learning what the mind already knew, that motion and proximity were survival tools, not comforts.
They switched as if they’d been doing it their whole lives, and as before, I was pushed back to the front when I tried to rotate. In doing so, I ended up beside Nicco, as if I were his own personal responsibility. I knew not to argue with him, though I resented his manhandling as much as last time.
The storm lasted half the night. Miraculously, we all still had our fingers, toes, and other extremities, though I was sure I caught more than one soldier checking under his clothes to make sure their dicks were still there.
We’d taken camp, and everyone slept much closer than they had when we first started this trail, shivering even in their sleep. My magic was bubbling happily in my chest, and as they slept, I filtered out slivers of warmth and prayed to the gods that they all slept through it.
In the morning, no one said anything, and none of them were alert enough to realize they’d been touched by magic during the night.
The land changed shortly before we reached Iskaeld.
Not radically. Not in any way I could point to and name with certainty.
Just… different. The way your home feels when someone has broken in and left before you arrive.
You know it’s your home. The same components, the same furniture, everything where you left it.
But you know someone was there, and they had no right to be. That was how it felt.
Something had been here and now wasn’t, or it was here now when it hadn’t been before. Either way, it was unsettling, and I couldn’t relax.
I'd felt it since yesterday. A low pull in my midsection, a persistent awareness of something just outside your peripheral vision that moved when you moved and stopped when you stopped.
Was this how animals felt when they were being hunted?
Stalked by the Laranas of this world, whose bows were always ready to shoot.
I'd ignored it the way I'd been ignoring a lot of things lately, which meant imperfectly and with increasing difficulty.
The soldiers were barely hanging on, and I told myself it was concern for my charges that was making me uneasy.
I also knew I was lying.
The ice rocks appeared first.
Small ones at first — catching the flat gray light from the exposed rock faces on either side of the trail, a glint here, a cluster there, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. I was looking for it. I'd been looking for it since Baxley mentioned it.
Then larger. A seam of pale blue running through a granite outcropping to the east, thick as my forearm, the color of ice held up to light. Then another, different, deeper, almost violet, embedded in the rock face as if something had pushed it up from below.
I slowed without meaning to.
“Trailfinder,” Nicco said from behind me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
Behind me, I heard the soldiers start noticing.
The low murmur of people encountering unexpected wealth in a place they'd expected to find only cold and more cold.
Someone asked how heavy it would be to cut a chunk of rock and carry it back.
Someone else started speculating about its worth, and a third voice started calculating in the pleased, proprietary tone of a man already mentally spending something that didn't belong to him.
“Don't touch them,” I said, without turning around.
The murmuring stopped.
“Why?” Sergeant Gralen asked.
I didn't have an answer that would satisfy them, or one I could share. How did I tell them that the pull in my body had become sharp and insistent the moment the ice rocks appeared? How did I tell them that the sense of urgency within me was not instinct but more like an instruction not to touch?
I couldn’t. I just knew they couldn’t touch them.
“Because we don't know what they are yet,” I said instead. “And in Crystallese, things that look like gifts usually aren't.”
That was true enough that no one argued. And I didn’t have to look to know that eager, greedy hands had been drawn back inside the warmth of their cloaks.
I kept walking.
The pull intensified with each step.
Not in a dramatic way. It didn't announce itself like discomfort, hunger, or any sensation I could name. It was subtler than that.
The ice rocks didn't help.
Each new seam I passed added to that pull. With every one we passed, I felt a small increment of pressure inside me. Whatever was inside me, frozen for a long time, was very slowly giving way to something else.
The blue seam. Then the violet. Then, a deep amber vein appeared in a rock face to my left, running upward and out of sight. When I passed it, the pull sharpened so abruptly that I missed a step and had to correct.
I'd never felt anything affect my magic like this before.
My magic had always been mine. Something I reached for when I needed it, something that responded to my intention. What was happening now was different in a way I didn't have the words for.
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum briefly, the way I did when I needed to confirm it was still contained.
It was. Barely. Like trying to hold water in cupped hands while walking.
I kept moving.
The pull got stronger as we climbed. Stronger to the point of painful.
The terrain here was unlike anything farther south, not just in temperature or exposure, but in the quality of its silence. Crystallese was always quiet in nature, but this kind felt intentional.
This quiet made you aware of every sound your body made, the crunching of snow underfoot, the movement of the wind against your cloak, the soft thumping of your own heartbeat.
I was very aware of my heartbeat.
My magic was also no longer surging. That unnerved me even more. After days of almost boiling-pot pressure, of trying to hold onto desperate containment, carrying out small, careful releases in the dark, it had gone still.
I hadn’t depleted it. I’d not even been able to suppress it. But after playing chaos in my chest, it was now... waiting.
It was also paying attention, and that was more unnerving than anything. The pull within me felt like it was reaching. My magic felt like a lodestone, pointing me in the direction it wanted me to go and simply waiting for me to catch up.
I didn't know what to do with that. I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
I kept my hand on the strap of my pack across my chest and my eyes on the ground, and I concentrated on not reaching back toward whatever was pulling at me.
“You've gone quiet,” Nicco said. He'd moved up beside me earlier, close enough to speak without being heard by the others. I was always aware of him at the best of times, but the way my body felt right now, I wished he’d go back to the main group and leave me alone.
“I'm always quiet.”
He scoffed. “True. Okay, so you're quiet differently.” He paused. “What’s wrong?”
I looked at the ground, knowing I could lie, knowing he’d know I lied, and then he’d just hound me until I told him. “The ice rocks.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t think they should be here,” I said. “Not like this. We have mines for that, right? But these are on the surface.” I chose my next words carefully. “Like something pushed them up.”
“Something?”
“Or maybe not something, maybe the ground shifted. Frost heave, maybe? Extreme cold forcing the rock.” I knew this was the kind of explanation that sounded reasonable, yet even saying it out loud felt wrong. “I don't know.”
He was quiet for a moment. Beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body even in this cold. “You’ve never been this far north,” he mused. “Maybe they’re always like this?”
“If they are, then why are we mining in the south of the kingdom and not up here plucking them off the ground?”
He didn’t answer.
I looked at him sideways. His eyes were fixed on the terrain ahead, watchful in that careful, unhurried way of his. Not scanning for threats, but something more focused than that. Looking for something specific.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He didn't answer right away. Long enough that I thought he wasn't going to. When he spoke, I felt a chill down my spine. “The same thing you are, I suspect.”
“I’m looking for the way home,” I muttered, desperate to deflect, and I saw his lips twitch.
“Aren’t we all, bunny.” He turned to walk back to the others. “Aren’t we all.”
It was a while later that we crested the final ridge as the light was failing.
I stopped to take it all in.
Below us, in a wide, shallow basin ringed by rock faces thick with gemstone seams that caught the last of the gray light and threw it back in pale, fractured color — blues and violets, a deep amber and a deep green I hadn't seen in any stone before — was Iskaeld.
It was not nothing, not like I’d been told, and it was not ruins. But it also wasn’t something.
The basin was perhaps half a league across.
The mountain around it rose on three sides, while the fourth opened to the north, where the land simply continued into the white as far as the eye could see.
At the center of the basin, the snow was different.
Not packed or shaped by storms, but arranged in a pattern, almost like rings.
Again, in the rock faces were the visible seams of the colored stones. So many colors. And all seams of stone around the basin ran toward the center.
“By the gods, this is a stone merchant’s dream…” someone murmured behind me.
Was it? I scanned the area in front of me. I didn’t know why, but I had the feeling the basin below promised death, not wealth.
I stood on the ridge, looked at it, and felt the pull in my chest resolve from direction to destination.
Whatever Iskaeld was, my magic knew it. Had always known it, I suspected. Had been leaning toward it since we left Eirhollow, since before that maybe, since longer ago than I was comfortable thinking about.
“Well,” Baxley said quietly, from somewhere behind me. “Do we go down?”
I heard the soldiers behind him react the way soldiers always reacted to unexpected wealth, with the distinct energy of men calculating how much they could carry and whether anyone was watching.
“Those seams—” someone started.
“Are not yours,” Nicco said flatly, without turning around. Final. The voice he used when he had already decided something and was merely informing the room of the outcome.
The voices behind us stopped.
I glanced at him. He remained focused on the basin, his expression now different from before.
It wasn't the usual assessment, blank watchfulness, or the almost smile he used to irritate me.
Instead, he looked more cautious, more deliberate.
Like someone observing something he'd been warned about, seeing it exactly as described but still nothing like he had imagined.
Larana appeared on my other side. She looked down at the basin for a long moment without speaking. Then she said, quietly enough that only I could hear, “It looks like it’s breathing.”
I looked at her.
“The rings,” she said. “In the snow. Watch them.”
I looked back at the basin. The pattern of rings in the white wasn't static.
The movement was so slow it was almost imperceptible — barely a tremor, barely a shift — but it was there.
An outward pulse, slow and rhythmic, coming from the center of the basin and spreading through the rings like a heartbeat through water.
Like something breathing.
“What’s making it do that?” Edran asked from somewhere behind me. His voice sounded like someone who had already decided he didn't want to know the answer.
Nobody answered him.
Suddenly, as if summoned by our watching, water pushed upward, high into the sky, and then fell again. I watched the way the water fell, and even from here I could feel heat.
“What in the shades?” I asked no one and everyone.
“Waterspouts,” Larana answered. “We have them in Cinderia. Mostly in the desert lands, not under snow and ice.” She looked around. “Makes sense now. It was probably full of water at one point.”
“Why is the water warm?” I asked her curiously.
“The water is deeper, toward the core. It’s hot down there.”
“It is?”
She nodded, gave me a small smile, and turned back to the others, the mystery of the land breathing answered for her.
Nicco turned to the group. “We camp on the ridge tonight. We go down in the morning.”
Nobody argued. I wasn't sure whether that was wisdom, exhaustion, or the simple human instinct that understood, without being told, that some places deserved daylight.
I looked back at the basin one more time before I turned away to help make camp. The rings pulsed outward, slow and patient, and the pull in my chest pulsed with them, and I stood for a moment in the stillness of someone who has just understood something they weren't ready to understand.
My magic wasn't pulling me toward Iskaeld. It was answering it, and I couldn’t move away.
“Trailfinder?” Nicco came and stood beside me, looking down at the basin with an expression I couldn't read.
I turned to look at him properly. He felt me looking and turned his head to meet my gaze.
“You've seen this before,” I said, my eyes narrowing.
He held my look for three seconds before he turned away. “No,” he said.
He was telling the truth. I was almost certain of it. Almost.
I looked back at the basin. The rings in the snow. The converging lines of color in the stone.
The pull in my chest had settled into something that felt less like urgency and more like anticipation, and I wasn't sure which was worse.
My magic knew this place.
The question was whether this place knew me back.