Chapter 24 #2
“So whatever made them was here before us.”
“Yes.”
“And came from the north.”
“Yes.”
He looked northward, a slight change flickering across his face. It wasn't exactly fear, but rather a calm, calculated expression—like a man trained to assess threats and currently doing so.
“Captain, let’s hurry your men along with their task.” He waited for the two men to move away. “And there’s nothing north of here?”
“Nothing,” I confirmed. “According to everything I know, there's nothing north of Iskaeld.”
“And what do you feel?” he asked me quietly. He saw my sharp look and met my gaze without flinching. It was the closest he'd come to saying it outright, or I was being extra paranoid. “What does your gut say, Trailfinder?”
My gut.
“Something's wrong,” I said carefully. “This whole place feels… off.” I watched him closely. “But you already know that. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It’s not for diamonds.”
He didn't confirm or deny it. He just held my gaze with that steady, unreadable attention, letting the silence sit between us like a third person.
“The tracks lead into the tunnel,” Baxley said quietly, walking up behind me. I hadn’t noticed him walk away. “I checked. They’re faint, but now I know what to look for.”
Nicco turned to him. “You went back in.”
“Briefly.” Baxley's voice was entirely unrepentant. “There are signs all the way down. Whatever it was, it went where you went.”
The column.
I thought about the pulse. The resonance. The way my magic had opened like the lid had been taken off whatever had been containing it.
I thought about Skallfen, and the Frosttaken that walked its streets. About the Hulgrim, and the Drift Wolves, and the way this entire journey north had felt less like a path chosen and more like one followed.
“We need to go back down,” I said, turning back to Nicco.
“No,” Nicco said with the flat finality of someone not to be argued with.
I stepped closer to him. “Something has been to that column. Something that came from the north, where nothing is supposed to exist. Don't you want to know—”
“I want to leave this basin before the light fails.” He turned to search for Marson. “Captain, pack up your men. We leave soon.”
Marson looked between us with the expression of a man who had long since decided the friction between Nicco and me wasn’t what he was getting paid for. “Aye,” he said, then turned to his soldiers.
I glared at Nicco, and he met my glower with a cool tolerance that only fueled my anger.
“You're making a decision without all the information,” I said, knowing my jaw was tight. I wasn’t going to win this argument, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.
“I'm making a decision with the information I have.” His voice was equally quiet, but cold and precise.
“Which is that something larger than a man has been visiting a strange underground column that almost feels alive, in the northernmost part of a kingdom where monsters roam, and we are nothing but a handful of soldiers, three mercenaries, and one trailfinder with wet boots.” He held my gaze coolly. “We have what we came for. We leave.”
“What did we come for?” I asked, refusing to budge. “Because I don’t see any people for you to count.”
His expression shifted into one that looked a lot like exasperation. Or irritation. Either way, I saw it before he could mask it.
“Evidence,” he said. “That's what we came for. And we have it.”
He walked toward the tunnel entrance, where the soldiers were beginning to gather their gear, and I stood in the basin with Baxley beside me, the pulse in my chest, and the footprints of something enormous leading down into the dark.
The soldiers moved with practiced efficiency. They were almost ready.
I looked at the tunnel entrance and thought about the column in the dark below and the thing that had been there before us, and I thought about how my magic had felt when I was in front of it, not frightening, not unwelcome. More like it was returning to its right place after a very long time away.
I could go back down.
Not far.
Just far enough to understand what I'd felt, to put a name to it, and to stop carrying around the wordless question of what it was and why I was responding to it. And what would happen if I touched it?
Just far enough.
My foot shifted. Just slightly. Just enough to turn back—
“Don't do it,” Baxley said.
I looked over at him. He watched me with that steady, patient expression, and he hadn't moved, and wasn't reaching for my arm to stop me. He was just watching. Waiting.
“I wasn't going to,” I said, hearing the lie in my words.
“Pigshit.”
I looked back at the tunnel entrance. At the dark beyond it. At the place where the tracks disappeared into the rock, and the pulse in my chest said go back, go back, go back, at a volume just below hearing.
“Amarya, no.”
With my gut screaming at me in protest, I turned away, with Baxley at my side.
“He's not wrong,” Baxley said as we walked. Or I was escorted. I preferred to think of it as Baxley walking beside me as a friend.
“He’s sometimes wrong,” I said. I had no proof of this. Nicco hadn’t made any mistakes that I could see.
“He’s not.” Baxley’s lips twitched. “I don’t know what’s down there, but you can’t go back, and you definitely cannot go alone.”
I looked at the tunnel entrance. At the darkness beyond it. At the place where the tracks disappeared.
“Then come with me.” I looked up at him and saw his surprise at my request. “We need to know what’s down there, because it’s something,” I said. “I could feel it.”
Baxley was quiet for a moment. “You could feel it? Did you tell Nicco?”
I nodded quickly. “He felt it too, you need to—”
“That's exactly why we're leaving,” he said. And his voice, for once, was entirely serious.
I looked up at Baxley. He looked back at me with something that looked a lot like worry.
“We could just—”
“Trailfinder.” I looked over at where Nicco stood. “Why are you dawdling? It's time to move. Let’s go.”
“I—”
“Now, bunny.”
I ground my back teeth as I focused on him. “You’re not in charge. Captain Marson is in charge. Tell him, Loel.”
Several of the soldiers were suddenly very interested in the waterspouts. Even Captain Marson was avoiding eye contact.
The silence was deafening.
Nicco’s expression was so smugly victorious that I wished a waterspout would drench the bastard where he stood. “You done?” he asked me, arrogance dripping from every word.
“You’re not a likable person,” I told him, ensuring my pack sat right on my back, ignoring the wide grins on Baxley’s and Larana’s faces.
“You don’t need to like me, bunny. You just need to follow.”
I started walking. “Wrong again, asshole. I’m the trailfinder. You follow me.”
He had the audacity to laugh. One of these days, I would wipe that smirk right off his face.
The pulse in my chest faded as we climbed.
I stopped at the threshold — the exact point where the basin ended and the ridge began — and stood for a moment with one foot on either side of it.
On the basin side, a faint warmth. The column, reaching upward through rock, dark, and distance. Something that knew I was there and reached for me, but I didn’t think it was to draw me back.
I didn’t think so anyway.
On the ridge, cold with a flat gray sky and endless white expanse going north. The east wind picked up, indifferent to human struggles.
I felt the feeling within me fade.
Not all at once but by degrees, like the warmth leaving a fire that was burning down to its last. The first to fade was the echo, that sense of two things vibrating at the same time to the same beat.
Then the openness, that feeling of just being, uncontained.
Then the pull itself, direction becoming directionless, the lodestone within me losing its north.
By the time the ridge was behind us, the pulse was nothing but a low hum.
I didn't look back.
I could always come back once I had fulfilled this trail and left my charges. I could explore it all on my own.
With no hard-eyed mercenary watching my every move.
Yeah, in the lighter winter months, I would come back.