Chapter 27 #2
“They do more than survive,” Vorn said, and his voice carried something I hadn't heard in it before. Something that wasn't pride but sat close to it. “Come.”
We walked for a good while. The man beside me knew the way, which meant I was no longer the one finding the trail, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Then I saw the first light.
Not firelight, the quality was wrong for that, too steady, too blue-white.
It came from the ground, or near it, from one of the openings where steam escaped.
As we got closer, I understood. The water carried something.
Whatever lived deep beneath this valley had left its mark on the water that rose through it, the way iron left its mark on well water or peat left its taste in a spring.
Something old. Something the water had been passing through longer than anyone had been here to notice.
The light it gave was faint. Not enough to walk by.
Just enough to be beautiful.
I stopped walking.
Vorn waited.
“That's not natural,” I said.
“Everything here is natural,” he said. “It just doesn't look like what you've learned to call natural.”
I looked at him. He was watching me with that steady, weathered patience, and for the first time since he'd put his hand around my throat in the dark and smiled at my fear, I thought, He's not the problem here. He's just a man trying to keep his people alive in a world shifting beneath them.
I knew something about that.
“Come,” he said again, more quietly. “They'll have seen us by now.”
“The community?”
“They always see us before we see them.” He started walking. “Try not to find that unsettling.”
I found it extremely unsettling, but I followed him anyway.
The settlement was nothing like Vorn's.
Where Vorn's people had built low and dark and into the ground, these people had built differently.
Not up exactly, not in any way that defied the landscape, but alongside it, the structures shaped to follow the contours of the valley floor so precisely that from a distance they looked like features of the terrain rather than things anyone had made.
Only close-up did the deliberateness become apparent, the way the stone had been placed, not stacked.
The way the steam holes had been incorporated rather than avoided.
There were perhaps forty people. Maybe more, it was hard to tell because I knew they weren’t all there. There would be more in their homes, watching, possibly hiding.
The ones who showed themselves were watching us.
All of them. Without appearing to, without grouping or posturing or any of the threat displays I'd learned to read from years on the road. They were just… present. Fully, completely present in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up beneath my layers.
One of them stepped forward.
A woman. Older than anyone else visible, her face showed signs of someone who had spent their entire life in wind and cold and found it agreeable. Her eyes were a color I couldn't name in the light we had, but they were pale, almost colorless, like ice under a bright sun.
She looked at Vorn. Nodded once.
Then she looked at me.
And she didn't look away.
She didn’t look at me the way Vorn looked at me, assessing and strategic. Or the way Nicco looked at me, watchful and cataloging. This was different. This was the look of someone who was seeing something specific, something they recognized, and deciding what to do about it.
My magic, which had been quiet since we crossed the pass, stirred.
Just slightly. Just enough.
I pressed it down.
The woman's eyes flicked to my hand, resting against my sternum.
She said something. Not to me but to Vorn, in a language I didn't know, short and musical, nothing like anything I'd heard before.
Vorn answered in the same language, and whatever he said made her look at me again with that certain pale gaze. Then she said something else.
“What did she say?” I murmured to Vorn.
He was quiet for a moment. “She said she's been expecting someone like you.”
I looked at the woman. She was still watching me with that steady, recognizing expression.
“Like me,” I said carefully. “What does that mean?”
Vorn didn't answer immediately.
“Vorn.”
“She said she’s been waiting for one of the Verei Kahn to come.” He glanced at me sideways. “What haven’t you told me, Trailfinder?”
I knew I looked panicked because his hand grabbed me and pulled me into his side.
“I’m not Verei Kahn,” I whispered, my voice so low only he heard.
He watched me for a moment longer, then licked his bottom lip as his gaze darted to the woman.
“Vorn? Should I be afraid of them?” I asked him. My gaze had returned to the woman.
He considered it longer than I was comfortable with. “Not if you're honest,” he said at last.
I looked at the woman, her pale eyes fixed on me, her attention complete and exact.
I had been lying about what I was for so long that I wasn't entirely sure I remembered how to be honest about it.
And that, I thought, was going to be a problem.