Chapter 27
Finding a trail was the same in the dark as in the light if you knew what to look for.
My brother Karlus had told me that years ago, crouched in the snow outside our village, his hand flat against the ground and his eyes scanning everything, making me do the same until I understood what he meant. Not seeing the obvious trail.
Searching for it.
The slight compression of the earth where the weight had passed. The way cold air moved differently over disturbed ground than over untouched snow. The quality of silence that signaled a path had been used recently, rather than one that had been abandoned.
My brothers taught me everything I knew about tracking. If they knew I’d let myself be kidnapped from helping Darysian soldiers, they’d kick my ass from here to Iskaeld themselves.
We walked forward, moving through the dark, skirting around Iskaeld in a wide arc.
We weren’t heading for there, we were going north of there…
on purpose. My hands were finally free, but with Vorn's people around me, I knew I was still a prisoner.
I pressed my boot into the snow and felt for the compression beneath.
I am going to be fine. I know how to do this.
My self-assurance helped. A little.
In the dark, I could see the snow rise in front of us as the mountains appeared more clearly.
They wanted me to find the pass through the mountains. I’d been through one before, and it was a harrowing experience I never wanted to repeat. Every step was a hope that we wouldn’t end up buried under an avalanche.
“They’re closer than you think,” Vorn murmured from beside me.
Because distance in Crystallese was misleading.
“The mountains?” I asked stupidly.
I heard his low chuckle. “You think he’s coming for you, Amarya?”
Yes. But not for why Vorn thought.
“No. I really don’t.” I didn’t look at him, and I was proud of how final my voice sounded.
“Keep dreaming.” He scoffed. “You have value for him, and it’s more than what’s between your legs.”
I stopped walking. Vorn looked back at me, his moonstone casting light over us.
“Why do you have to make it sound so ugly?” I demanded. “That’s just… nasty.”
Vorn looked confused. “What’d I say?”
I started walking again. “You said you’re a dick with no manners.”
“Manners?” He bellowed with laughter, and I was glad my face wrappings covered my cheeks. They hid my blush.
“Shut up,” I muttered irritably as I marched through the snow.
Ahead, I could see the faint curve of a trail, the snow slightly higher on either side of a short width, no more than a few feet across. A dip in the terrain told me there was a trail of some sort.
I followed the trail with the aid of Vorn’s moonlight and pretended I needed to focus so the brute wouldn’t have to speak to me.
A while later, the mountains looked no closer, but Vorn seemed happy with the progress.
“We stop here,” he announced.
I looked around. There was nothing wrong with the flat spot in the middle of a whole lot of flat spots. I chose not to argue with him. Gathering my cloak around me, I prepared to lie down. I was in a half-crouch when his words froze me.
“With me, Amarya.”
“Wh-what?” My voice sounded dry.
“You lie with me.”
“No, I don’t.”
His deep sigh was exasperated. “I’m not going to fuck you, girl. Get your ass on my bedroll.”
“You can see how I’d say no, right?” I snarked back at him.
His giant hand wrapped around my upper arm, and he pulled me to my feet. Vorn led me to his bedroll and pushed me back. Hard. I lost my balance and crashed into the snow with a barely contained squeal.
The others laughed, and before I could scramble back to my feet, Vorn was already down, hooking me around the waist and pulling me into his body.
“Body heat beats the cold,” he reminded me, his voice at my ear. “None of your soldiers lay with you, bunny?” he mocked.
I elbowed the fucker in the ribs, and he only laughed. “He calls me bunny because he thinks I’m going to escape, not because of… anything else.”
The arm around my waist pulled me harder back into a hard body. “Not because you bounce from bedroll to bedroll?”
“Eeew no!”
“Because rabbits… well, they fuck like rabbits, and I thought—”
“Could you please never talk to me about your thoughts again?” I demanded through a clenched jaw. “You’re disgusting.”
I stiffened when his hand slipped under my cloak and crept up under my tunic.
I lay still as he pulled the first one, then the second layer of undershirt up.
Calloused fingers skimmed over bare skin, and I was too afraid to breathe.
His fingers rested on the waistband of my pants, and I felt fear as a fingertip tucked under it.
My magic pooled in my chest, desperate for release.
“You look thick, but you’re hiding curves under here, sweetheart.”
“Leave me alone,” I whispered, hearing the tremor in my voice and not caring. “Remove your hand, or I swear to the fucking gods, Vorn, I will slice your dick off and feed it to you.”
He huffed out a laugh as he pulled his hand away. “Your secret’s safe with me, sweetheart.”
I didn’t ask what the secret was.
I didn’t move for a long time, despite my muscles screaming at me to relax, and his gentle snoring in my ear telling me the danger had passed.
Sleep never found me that night, and I only relaxed when the others stirred in the morning, and I forced myself out of his hold and put enough distance between him and me at the other side of the camp.
They’d taken my short sword and two of my daggers, but my fingers itched to grasp the handle of the dagger I kept between my breasts.
When Vorn yawned loudly and announced he’d had a great sleep, I had to turn away in case I threw the fucking thing at him.
My staff was with Captain Marson and his men and I missed it desperately.
“Amarya, come eat. You need some meat on those bones.”
I closed my eyes briefly before I turned and walked over to the others. I took the cold meat without a word, I didn’t look too closely at it, terrified I might try to identify it, and not wanting to know the answer.
As Vorn walked past me, he leaned down and murmured in my ear, “It’s just pig, you can swallow without turning green.”
I almost forgave him for his wandering hands. Almost. But not quite.
We spent the morning walking through a snowstorm, heading to the mountains. A trail was there, faint but present, and a few times I lost sight of it, but I kept finding it.
The pass revealed itself gradually, as passes often do, not suddenly but through a buildup.
First, the wind shifted, its direction changing as the terrain began to funnel and narrow.
Next, the sound altered. The vast tundra moan diminished into a lower, more focused noise, like air forced through a tight space.
Then, the ground rose sharply on either side, and there it was, not an obvious gap but a choice made by the mountains themselves about where they would allow crossing.
I stopped.
Vorn stopped beside me.
“This is it?” he asked.
I looked at the pass. Narrow. Steep on both sides. The kind of terrain that was navigable in reasonable conditions and lethal in bad ones. Conditions north of Iskaeld had not yet shown a reliable tendency toward reasonableness.
“Probably,” I said.
“Probably?”
“If you wanted certainty. You should have hired a different trailfinder.” I studied the approach.
“The snow on the left slope is newer than on the right.
Wind comes from the northeast up here, so the left is the sheltered side that snow didn't blow in. It fell. That means the left slope is more stable.” I pointed.
“We go right of center, hug the right wall but not too close, and move quickly through the narrowest section.”
Vorn looked at the pass. Then at me. “You got all that from looking at it once?”
“I got all that from years of reading snow,” I said. “Looking at it was just confirmation.”
He almost smiled. “Lead the way.”
We moved through the pass in single file, quickly and quietly, the way Vorn's people seemed to do everything. I went first because that was my role and I'd accepted it, and because going first meant I was the first to see what was on the other side.
The right wall was cold granite, close enough to touch, and I kept one hand trailing along it as we moved.
Not for balance, but to read. Rock spoke if you knew how to listen.
Where water had run and frozen. Where the stone had shifted under the weight of what sat above it.
Whether the path beneath our feet was trustworthy or merely patient.
This wall was patient in the way of something that had been waiting a very long time and had almost run out of reasons to wait.
I moved faster.
We were through before the light shifted noticeably, which was fast for a pass this unforgiving. I heard at least two of Vorn's people exhale when we cleared the far side, and I didn't mention it because I understood.
The terrain beyond the pass opened into a valley I had no name for.
Wide and deep, sheltered on three sides by the same mountain range we'd just crossed, open to the north where the land continued in the precise way of places that had decided they would simply go on forever and hadn't been told otherwise.
The valley floor was snow-covered and flat, and… I frowned.
“It's warmer,” I said.
“Yes,” Vorn said.
“Why is it warmer?”
“The mountains block the worst of the northern wind.” He paused. “And there are hot springs. Throughout the valley floor.” He looked at me sideways. “Like the waterspouts at Iskaeld, but calmer.”
I looked at the valley. At the wisps of steam rising from a dozen points in the snow, pale against the dark sky. At the way the snow itself was patchier here than anything I'd seen since Eirhollow.
“People can actually survive here,” I said. The surprise in my voice was genuine.