Chapter 25
We left Iskaeld the way we'd arrived — on foot, in the cold, and without ceremony.
The difference was that arriving felt like moving toward something, while leaving felt like being removed. I noticed it within the first hour and spent the second hour trying to convince myself I was wrong.
I wasn't wrong.
The formation had shifted. Not dramatically.
No one had issued new orders or explicitly changed position.
It had just happened, the way things do when a group of people share a space long enough to develop instincts about it.
The soldiers were spread wider than before, flanking rather than following.
Baxley was at the rear. Larana was on the left.
Nicco was beside me.
Not behind me, where he usually walked when he wasn't at the back.
Beside me, matching my pace, close enough that I was aware of him the way I was always aware of him — constantly and with increasing irritation.
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the terrain ahead with that distinct, unhurried focus, reading the landscape the way I did, which should have been reassuring and wasn't.
I was the trailfinder.
I led.
That was the arrangement. That had always been the arrangement.
Yet here we were, walking side by side. When I adjusted my route slightly east to avoid a patch of snow that didn't feel right underfoot, Nicco adjusted with me without asking why, and the soldiers followed suit, and I had the sudden, disorienting sense that the chain of authority had shifted somewhere between the tunnel and the ridge, and nobody had told me.
I thought about Baxley's words. The gap between what he said and what he meant.
I thought about the column, and the pulse, and the tracks in the snow that shouldn't have been there.
I thought about evidence, what kinds of evidence require a group this size to collect, and what exactly Nicco planned to do with it now that he had it.
I kept walking.
The soldiers were quieter than they'd been on the way north.
Not exactly subdued. They were talking and eating when they stopped, arguing mildly about inconsequential things, the way soldiers did to remind themselves they were still ordinary people in an ordinary situation. But the quality of their noise had changed.
There was a carefulness to it now. A restraint.
They'd been in the tunnel. Most of them hadn't gone far enough to see the chamber — Marson had kept them in the upper sections for cataloging — but they'd felt it.
I could see it in the way they moved. The slightly wider spacing between the men.
The way their eyes moved to the skyline more often than they had on the way up.
Edran sat down beside me during a rest break, his right hand flexing and curling with the automatic regularity of someone who had made it a habit.
“Amarya?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Those stones in the tunnel,” he said quietly. “The ones in the ceiling.”
“The diamonds,” I said.
He looked at me sideways. “Is that what they are?”
“That's what I'm told.” I shrugged. “We call them ice rocks.”
“Ice rocks.” He was quiet for a moment as he mused that over, looking at the white expanse ahead. “They were moving.”
I turned to look at him properly. “What do you mean, moving?”
“The light in them.” He frowned, as if trying to describe something that didn't quite fit the words he had. “It was moving. Like… like something breathing. I thought I was imagining it.” He glanced at me. “Was I imagining it?”
“Anyone else see it?” I asked him softly.
“More than me, not all.”
I held his gaze steadily. “You weren't imagining it.”
He nodded slowly. The nod of a man who had suspected as much and had hoped to be told otherwise.
He got up and moved away without another word, and I watched him go, thinking about the pulse in the column and how it had synced with something in my chest, and wondering how many of the others had felt something similar but hadn't said it.
Like before, rest stops were brief. I was watching a storm approaching from the west and mapping potential spots to stop and shelter. It was so vast and open, I wasn’t sure if I should stop us now and dig us out a small shelter, something to burrow against when the storm came.
Nicco waited until the group had settled into the rhythm of the march before he spoke.
“The tracks,” he said. Not loudly, a conversation just between us.
“What?”
“You have a theory.”
I gestured to the sky. “I have a snowstorm coming our way.”
He looked at where I pointed, sniffed, and dismissed it. “It’ll be fine.”
I didn’t hide my shock. “Um… I think I’ll be telling everyone to stop.”
“Why?” He looked around. “It’s a snowstorm. We know what to do. Let’s keep moving while we can.”
“Who died and put you in charge?”
He grinned at that. “If you were alone, would you stop?”
I didn’t look at him. I very purposely refused to look at him.
“Now you want to be quiet?” He let out a huff of a laugh. “So I’m right. We keep walking.”
Asshole.
“Back to your theory.” It wasn't a question, and I wasn’t surprised that he knew I had a theory.
“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Now, bunny, I know that’s not true. You’ve been wanting to chew my ear off for the last few leagues if those glares of yours are anything to go by. Now, here I am. Talk to me about your theory.”
I could argue. I could. I could argue with this man for days. But what was the point? All that would happen is that I’d be exhausted, and he’d still be asking the same thing at the end: tell me about your theory.
“I think that the column is used for something,” I said carefully.
I looked over at him, and he didn’t react.
“If whatever that was is coming from the north, which, according to everything I know, is empty, to visit a source point of concentrated…” I looked around and lowered my voice.
“Magic?” He still didn’t react. “And if it is, then I think they may be visiting it regularly.” He did look at me at that.
“Baxley said the tracks are worn into the pattern of it.” I kept my eyes on the trail ahead.
“Inside.” I swallowed. “Whatever it is, what we saw isn’t new behavior.
I think it’s been doing it for a while.”
“And it's not human.”
I swallowed again. “Not with those prints.”
He was quiet for a moment. The wind came from the east, carrying the dry cold of open tundra. “Things are definitely different in Crystallese.”
I glanced at him sideways. He was looking ahead, his profile giving nothing.
“You mean the creatures?” I asked. “The Frosttaken in Skallfen. The Hulgrim. The Drift Wolves.”
He nodded. “Things that we thought of as myth, or rare, are walking across the frozen waste of this land and...” He paused. “They're not staying where they should.”
“No,” I agreed. “I guess not. You think they’re connected?” I waited for him to confirm or deny. He didn't offer it. “You're not going to tell me?” I asked incredulously.
“I have nothing to tell you,” he said.
And I didn’t believe him.
I didn’t believe him at all.
I turned and looked at him, and he turned his head to meet my gaze. He held it with steady, unreadable attention. There was no harshness in it, no unkindness, but there was also no warmth. Just… measured. Whatever he was hiding, if he was hiding anything at all, he hid it well.
I scrambled for something to say. “That's not reassuring.”
“No,” he agreed. “It's not.”
He looked at the land in front of us, his gaze flicking once to the gathering storm.
I looked back at the trail and said nothing. Neither did he. The quiet between us had stopped needing to be filled somewhere after Iskaeld, and neither of us had mentioned it.
The light was failing by the time we made camp that second night south of Iskaeld.
I sat at the edge of the firelight, watching the group settle, and tried to name the thing that had been sitting in my chest since we left the basin.
I'd been employed.
I was a trailfinder. I'd been hired for my skills, my knowledge of this terrain, and my ability to navigate where others couldn't. That was the transaction. Clean, understood, with a clear endpoint when we reached our destination.
We'd reached our destination.
And nobody had mentioned where the endpoint was on the return journey.
I watched Nicco across the fire. He talked quietly with Marson, the kind of conversation that involved maps, distances, or both.
He said something. Marson nodded. Whatever was being decided was being decided without my input, and that had always been true.
Somehow, it felt different now than it had three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, I was a resource they'd acquired. Useful. Exceptionally useful. I was beginning to understand that “useful” might not be the same as “free to leave.”
The fire crackled. Around it, soldiers talked, ate their rations, and rested. Larana was sharpening something. She was always sharpening something. Baxley watched the darkness beyond the camp with that distinctive vigilance that never quite settled, his knife whittling a piece of wood.
Nicco looked up from his conversation with Marson and found my eyes across the fire.
He held the look for a moment. Then he returned to his conversation.
I pulled my cloak tighter, stared at the flames, and thought about the word escorted and how it was different from the word employed, and how the difference between them was exactly as large as I'd been trying to convince myself it wasn't.
South.
We were heading south.
And if I wasn’t careful, then I was going with them. Whether that was still my choice was the question I was becoming less and less sure I wanted answered.
Fuck. I’d have to leave them at some point. I had the five gold. I’d earned that other five, but I’d rather be short on payment than be forced to go farther than I was willing.