Chapter 26
I looked past Vorn and saw Larana with her hands being bound, two of Vorn's men holding her arms, a third with a blade at the back of her neck. Her face was expressionless as they restrained her.
Our eyes met, and I saw the fury within them.
The image of that smaller tent flashed in my mind, a woman tied to a pole. I felt sick. I couldn’t let them take her.
I looked at Vorn.
“If I come willingly,” I said slowly, knowing what I was giving up. “You let her go.”
“Amarya, no.” Larana’s voice was a flat warning. She wasn’t afraid for herself. She was afraid for me.
I couldn’t ignore that and it made me even more sure I was doing the right thing. “Do we have an agreement?”
Vorn studied me. “We had an agreement last time.”
“Don’t be a prick. You know I never broke it.” I tried to loosen their grip on my arms, but they gripped me harder. “Vorn? I’ll come, but you have to let her go. They won’t come for me. They’ll come for her, though. Do you want that? Do you want them to chase you?”
His eyes narrowed in speculation, and he glanced at Larana.
“Amarya.” Larana’s voice was harder this time despite the blade pressed at her throat. “Don’t do this.”
“Tell your captain what happened,” I said to her, still looking at Vorn, knowing who Larana’s captain was. “Tell them not to worry about me, I'll find my own way back home.” I looked at Larana then. Her jaw was set, and her eyes were burning with anger. I tried to smile. “I'll be fine.”
“You don't know that,” she said, and I saw her mask slip, and she looked worried. Genuinely worried for me.
“I never know that,” I said with false bravado. “I go anyway. It’s part of the job.”
I turned back to the man who was now in front of me.
“Vorn, you leave her here.” I met his gaze with a hard one of my own. “I won’t run,” I told him steadily. “But you do not take us both.”
“You’re negotiating?” he asked with a small smirk.
“I’m giving you my terms,” I told him flatly. “Or I swear to the gods, I’ll leave you in the depths of winter and walk away whistling.”
He looked like he wanted to say something. His hand came up and curled loosely around my neck, squeezing once. My heart skipped a beat as fear surged. He saw it and liked it. It was in the way he smiled, and I was beginning to think I might be fucked.
“You’re willing?”
It was the way he said it that made my nerves spike. “I will willingly find you the trail you seek, only the trail. That’s all you get from me. Keep your hands to yourself, and you let her go.”
“Amarya!” Larana called out, struggling against her captors.
“It’s fine, Rana,” I told her, holding Vorn’s stare. “He’s going to let you go. He has what he needs. Don’t you?”
Vorn watched me, and then he nodded before turning away. I saw one of them strike the back of Larana’s skull, and she went down in the dark.
I surged forward, but strong hands held me back.
For a second, I couldn't move.
Larana was down in the snow, and the men who'd been holding her were already stepping back, already done with her. I stood there, my hands gripped by Vorn's people, and felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with the temperature.
She'd looked worried.
Larana, who watched everything with the flat patience of someone who had seen worse and expected more, who sharpened her blade like a meditation, who had stood in a skarveld without flinching, had looked at me and looked worried.
Not for herself. For me.
I hadn't expected that. I hadn't known what to do with it in the moment, and I still didn't. It sat in my chest alongside the pull Iskaeld had left behind, two things that didn't belong together and had nowhere else to go.
“She'll be found soon,” Vorn said, reading me correctly. “Your camp isn't far.”
“I know,” I said, my voice faint.
“Then stop looking at her and let’s move.”
I looked at him instead. His pale eyes were steady and patient and entirely without cruelty, which was almost worse. A cruel man you could hate cleanly. Vorn just looked like a man who had done what was necessary and would do it again.
I understood that. I hated that I understood it.
“You’ve made enemies here you might not be able to outrun, Vorn.”
He smiled. “I made an enemy of your Darysian the night he thought I took you to my bed.” He smirked. “Let’s go.”
My Darysian. I almost laughed.
Vorn's men moved me forward. I went with them. I didn’t struggle, and I didn't look back.
I had to hope Larana was okay. I had to hope she told them I went as a trade and had not left them easily. That was important.
I walked into the cold with Vorn's people and tried very hard not to think about Nicco’s fury when he found out I had allowed myself to be kidnapped.
I had to hope he knew enough not to follow. He’d get them all killed. I wasn’t worth their lives. I knew Nicco knew that. I had to hope that Larana woke up to tell him it wasn’t my betrayal that took her down.
Because I didn’t trust him enough not to think this was somehow my fault.
Vorn and his men moved in complete darkness. Darkness so profound that I struggled to make out their shapes. At one point, I was lifted and flung over someone’s shoulder like a sack of goods.
Being upside down only disoriented me more. My hands were tied far enough apart that I couldn’t draw any glyph. Not that I would use my magic on them. Not when I didn’t know how many there were. Magic would only ensure my death.
I tried to calm down, tried to will myself to be rational. In my four years of traveling alone in Crystallese, no one had ever kidnapped me before. Tried to have sex with me? Many times, but I’d dissuaded them easily. Daggers had that effect.
But kidnap me? That was a first. I was going to stab Vorn in the eye for this.
His people moved fast.
Faster than I expected from people who lived in this cold, which meant they moved through it the way I did — not fighting it, not enduring it, just using it. They didn’t stop, putting enough distance between us that no one other than them or me could follow quickly.
I could have told them not to bother, but I kept my silence.
After the first night, they put me down for a little while, and I walked alongside them. Vorn didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t utter a word. Then I was picked up and carried again.
I didn’t know why. I had nowhere to run where they couldn’t catch me.
Their steady, unhurried pace covered ground unfamiliar to me, but they knew it well.
I tried to memorize it. It was hard when you were upside down, with my hands bound and my heart doing something irregular in my chest that I was choosing to call anger rather than fear.
It was probably both.
After a while, they set me down. Not gently. I hit the snow feet first and stumbled, and the man who'd been carrying me caught my arm before I went down, which was either consideration or pragmatism. I suspected pragmatism. An injured trailfinder was useless.
I straightened and looked around.
We'd stopped in a hollow between two mountains, sheltered from the wind, and I could see the sky above, still dark, the stars sharp and cold the way they only got this far north.
I tried to read our direction from them and got partial information, enough to know we'd moved northeast, which was farther from the group and closer to nothing.
That was good. Or at least survivable. Northeast was the terrain I'd heard about before. Toward the jagged rocks that made landing a ship on the coast of Crystallese impossible.
Vorn was watching me, studying me, while I pretended he didn’t exist.
“You're memorizing the route,” he said flatly.
“Trailfinder,” I said with a cockiness I wasn’t feeling. “It's what I do.”
He looked amused, and I didn’t like the look of appreciation he gave me. “Sit,” he said.
I sat. Not because he told me to, but because my legs were tired and the snow was packed enough that sitting didn’t mean I’d be immediately wet.
A water skin appeared in front of me. I looked at it, then at the man holding it, young, dark-eyed, watching me with the cautious wariness of someone who had been told to be careful.
“It's water,” Vorn said.
“I know.” I took it and drank. The water was cold and tasted of metal, and I drank it gratefully. “Where are we going?”
“North.”
“You want to go to Iskaeld?”
“No.”
“Then where? There’s nothing north of here.”
“You keep saying that.” He crouched in front of me, bringing his face level with mine. His pale eyes were steady in the dark. “Yet here we are, heading north of Iskaeld.”
“You know where you’re going,” I realized as I looked at him for a long moment. “What do you need a trailfinder for?”
“There's a pass,” he said like he hadn’t just kidnapped me and we were two friends having a conversation. “Two days further north. We've lost two people trying to find it in the last season.”
“A pass to where?”
He didn't answer that.
“Vorn.” I held his gaze. “A pass to where?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters if you want me to find it.” I shifted my bound hands in my lap, making the restraint visible, deliberate. “I find trails. That's the transaction I promise people. I can't do that if I don't know what I'm navigating toward.”
He studied me for a long moment. The wind moved overhead, above the hollow, carrying the sound of open tundra at night. It was a low, directionless moan that wasn't quite music and wasn't quite nothing.
“There's a community,” he said finally. “Beyond the pass. People who have been there for generations. People who want no contact with the south.”
“A community?” Gods, there were more of them. “Like yours?”
“More so.” He tilted his head slightly when he saw my reaction to that. “They’re a bit…wilder.” He grinned when my eyes widened. “We trade with the south, occasionally. They don't. Haven't for a very long time.”
“Then why do you need to reach them?”
“Because they might know something,” he said.
And his voice, for the first time since I'd known him, carried something that wasn't controlled.
Something that had weight to it. “There are things wrong in the rest of Crystallese — the creatures are coming down, and whatever it is — it started from beyond Iskaeld. Or in that direction.” He held my gaze.
“I need to know if they're still alive.”
I sat with that for a moment.
The creatures coming down was worrying. But was it really Vorn’s concern?
“Pigshit.”
His eyebrows raised.
“You don’t give a fuck if Frosttaken drain every town, now tell me the truth.”
He grinned, amusement dancing in his eyes. “Believe it or not, I really do.” He looked up at the night sky. “Some things aren’t meant to roam, Amarya.”
That feeling I'd felt in my chest for weeks, the pull and the surge and the column in the dark with its slow, patient pulse.
“You really think it started from up there?” I asked.
“I think it started from somewhere, and that's the only direction I haven't been able to look.”
I looked at my bound hands. At the dark beyond the hollow.
At Vorn, crouching in front of me with his very non-villainous reasons for taking me.
Was he a bad man? Kidnapping and holding women hostage suggested he was, but I still wasn’t sure he was bad.
Right now, he was desperate, which was different. Dangerous in different ways.
“If I find your pass,” I said carefully. “You take me to the community, we establish whether they're alive or not, and then you let me go?”
“Yes.”
“Unharmed.”
“You have my word.”
I thought about how much Vorn's word was worth in light of the recent evidence.
Then I thought about the column, the tracks in the snow, and the creature that had come from the north to visit a source point.
I thought that whatever was happening in Crystallese, with monsters of myth moving freely over the snow, had a direction, and that direction was north.
I was already north and already involved, whether anyone had asked my permission or not.
“Alright,” I said.
Vorn looked at me. “That was easier than expected.”
“Don't mistake me being a practical person for being a willing one,” I told him flatly. “You kidnapped me. Now, I'm going because I want to know what's up there. Not because you took me.”
His mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “Fair enough, Trailfinder. If that makes it easier for you.”
He stood and moved away, and I sat in the hollow with my bound hands and the cold pressing in and the stars sharp and clear above the rock formations, and I thought about Nicco, and what his face would have looked like when he found Larana taken down, and what he was going to do about it.
He was going to follow.
And not because he cared about me, or whatever Vorn assumed.
I knew that with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic. He was going to follow because I was useful, and exceptionally useful was not something he was going to leave in the hands of Vorn's people if there was another option.
I just didn't know how far behind he was. Or how much time I had before the pass was found, and I took us through it.
I looked across the night. Two days, Vorn had said. I suppose I'd better start looking for the trail before things got any worse.
I stood. “Vorn, untie my hands, and let’s get to work.”
His grin shouldn’t have unsettled me, but it did.
When I got out of this, I really needed to think about a new line of work.