Chapter 28
The woman's name was Thiece.
I learned this not because anyone introduced us — introductions didn't seem to be a custom here — but because I heard Vorn use it when he spoke to her in that language I didn't know, but the word Thiece was said more than once to describe something other than her.
Thiece watched me the way I watched the weather. With the patient attention of someone who understood that the weather did what it did and that your feelings about it were irrelevant.
I found it deeply unsettling and refused to show it.
They gave us food. Not generously, the portions were carefully measured, the careful kind of sharing that came from people who knew exactly how much they had and how long it would last. But they gave it, and it was warm, and I ate without asking what it was because that was a question I'd learned not to ask in the wilds of Crystallese, and I saw no reason to change the habit now.
Vorn's people ate with them without ceremony, settling into the space with easy familiarity. There was history here between Vorn's settlement and this one. Not a comfortable history. The kind that had been negotiated.
I sat apart from them all and observed.
The community moved in a way unlike any group I had seen before.
Free of the wasted motion most people never noticed they had.
Every gesture had a purpose. Nothing was wasted.
Even the children moved this way, which was the strangest part.
Children usually moved with the carelessness of people who hadn't yet learned that the world had limits. These ones didn't.
A small girl — perhaps five, perhaps less, it was hard to tell — crouched in the snow three feet from me and looked at me with the same pale, particular attention as Thiece.
I looked back.
“Hello,” I offered with a small smile.
She tilted her head slightly, reminding me of a small bird, and like a bird, she said nothing.
“I'm Amarya.”
Still nothing.
“You're staring,” I told her. “Did you know it’s rude to stare?”
It was what Nicco had said to me, and here I was repeating his stupid question. A pang of regret moved through my chest. I hoped they were far south of here. The thought of him here… I didn’t want to think about it. Would he understand their way? Would he sit back and watch like I was?
Would he, too, feel that there was a puzzle here that needed solving?
The girl blinked once, slowly, and then she reached out and touched the back of my gloved hand with one finger. Quick and certain. As if confirming something.
She stood and walked away.
I looked at my hand.
My magic stirred, just faintly, just enough for me to notice.
Not the pull of Iskaeld but something quieter, something that felt like recognition.
I'd felt it before, in small ways. The warmth I drew from the earth on cold nights.
The glyph drawn on my palm to sharpen sound.
Magic responding to intent, to need, to the deliberate shape of a thought.
But this… this was different. This time my magic had responded to her.
To a child's finger against the back of my gloved hand, quick, certain, and gone before I could name what had passed between us. As if she'd knocked on a box to see if it were hollow, and my magic had answered before I could decide whether to let her know it wasn’t empty.
I pressed the stirring in my chest down. Firmly. The way I always did, with the resolve of someone who had been doing this long enough that the action had become reflex rather than effort.
But in this place, this settlement beyond the mountains, it took longer than usual to settle.
And when it did, the quiet it left behind felt less like containment and more like patience. As if it had decided to wait rather than being made to.
I looked to see where the girl had gone. She'd slipped back into the settlement's flow without a ripple, as if she'd never paused to crouch in front of me.
I looked back at my hand.
Whatever she'd confirmed, she was keeping it to herself. I hoped. Or maybe it wasn’t that simple. For my sake, I hoped that things were simple here.
Vorn found me when the light was failing.
Not that the light failed much here. The valley had its own kind of illumination, bursts of steam breathed their pale blue-white into the dark, the hot springs threw up mist that caught and held whatever light was available, softened it, and gave it back.
It wasn’t fully dark in the valley. Just differently lit.
It was eerie yet gently soothing.
I sat near the edge of the settlement, watching the mist move across the valley floor, when he lowered himself onto the rock beside me with the ease of a man who had done this specific thing many times.
“Thiece wants to speak with you,” he said.
I sniffed, not looking at him. “In a language I don't understand?”
“I'll translate for you.”
“And is Thiece okay with that?” Thiece — the name sat strangely in my mouth the first time I tried it, rhyming with the geese that never came this far north. I looked at him sideways. “Why?”
He was quiet for a moment. “She says you carry something that doesn’t belong in this place.”
I kept my expression still. “I don't know what that means.”
“I think we all do.”
I looked back at the valley. The mist moved in slow, rolling banks, catching light from everything and nothing. Beautiful in its own quiet, unassuming way.
“What does she want from me?” I asked.
“A conversation,” he said. “And to see if you’re a danger.”
I looked at him then. “If I were a danger, Vorn, why would I be your prisoner?” I asked him, and he gave me a stare that told me he didn’t think I was a prisoner.
“You’re not my prisoner, Amarya.”
“Tell that to the ones you kidnapped me from. Tell that to my tied hands.”
“Which I cut you free of, a short time later.” He squinted at me. “Are you trying to change the subject? It won’t work.”
I would neither confirm nor deny.
“She thinks I’m a danger? To them?”
“To everyone.” He looked at me steadily. “The things walking the land we haven’t seen for many years — the creatures, the wrongness of it all — she says it started when people like you stopped declaring.”
I went very still. Declaring?
“Declaring?”
“People who carry more than they choose.” His pale eyes were steady. “In the old language, they had a word for it. It’s what the institutions were made for. It’s why they have the Chosen.”
I thought about the Verei Kahn. About the Chosen ones. About the girl I'd been when I first understood that what I carried inside me was larger than what a normal girl was allowed to be. I then made the choice that has shaped every day of my life since.
“What's the word?” I asked.
Vorn said it, short, two syllables, nothing like anything I knew, or anything that I could pronounce.
“What does it mean?”
“Roughly?” He considered. “The ones that are unknown.”
I sat with that for a long moment. Unknown.
The mist rolled past us. A steamhole somewhere nearby breathed its pale light upward into the dark. The valley held a specific kind of warmth, and I was aware of my magic in my chest, quiet now, but present. Always present.
“What happens,” I said slowly, “when people who carry too much inside them choose differently?”
Vorn looked at the valley. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I think Thiece might.” He paused. “I think it might be a buildup of…something. Like water behind a dam.”
“Dams break.”
“They can do.” He turned to watch me. “Or the water finds another way through.”
I thought about Skallfen. About the Frosttaken, and the Hulgrim, and the Drift Wolves racing over the snow.
About the column in the dark below Iskaeld, pulsing slow and patient and alive.
About my magic, boiling in my chest for weeks, surging without direction, finding its way out whether I chose it or not.
“She thinks I'm part of this?” I asked.
“Not you specifically.” He fell silent for a moment.
“But people like you, across the kingdoms. The ones who hide rather than learn. The magic accumulates.” He looked at the valley again.
“Iskaeld is a place I don’t care to go to.
It’s a place of wild, raw magic. Even I can feel that.
It… pools naturally.” He paused. “It draws things to it.”
“Things?”
“Like goes to like, Amarya.”
“Or it pushes things out,” I countered. “The creatures came from somewhere.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s unstable.”
That would also make sense if the equilibrium shifted. Things that lived in the deep places of the world come toward the surface. Things that were sleeping would wake up.
“Things that were myth stop being myth,” I said softly, so softly I didn’t think he’d heard me.
“Come on, let’s go talk to Thiece.”
“Can I refuse?”
“No. You’re my prisoner, remember.” He held his hand out and when I took it, he pulled me to my feet.
“Only when it suits you,” I muttered as I followed him.
“Or only when it suits you,” he countered.
I chose to pretend I never heard that.
Around us, the settlement was settling into its own version of night. Quieter, slower, but never fully still. People moved with that unhurried economy. The children had disappeared into the low stone structures.
“It’s late, she could be sleeping,” I said as we walked. It wasn't a question.
“She’s not.”
He was right. He entered her house as if he were welcome, and she sat on a low couch, the way people sit when they have been in that spot for a very long time, and the spot has learned the shape of them.
Her pale eyes found me before the door had fully closed, and they stayed there with that unblinking quality I was beginning to associate with everyone in this valley.
Vorn stood slightly behind me. Translator and witness both.
Thiece spoke. Short, musical, nothing I could follow.
“She asks if you know what you are,” Vorn said. “She thinks you need to understand what you are before it does something about you.” He stood to the side. “There's a difference.”
I looked at Thiece. “Tell her I know what I carry.”
He translated. She listened. Then spoke again.
“She says that's not the same thing.”
It wasn't, and I knew that. I'd always known that. “Tell her I'm aware of the difference.”
Vorn did, and Thiece's expression didn't change, her eyes changed as she watched me, the adjustment of someone recalibrating their assessment. She spoke again, longer this time.
“She says she's met three others like you,” Vorn told me. “In her lifetime. All carrying, none of them declared as Chosen. All convinced that silence was its own protection.”
“And was it?” I asked, knowing that it wouldn’t be. Knowing that now Vorn had information about me, and he would never unknow it.
He translated. Thiece's answer was short.
“In time, no, not for them,” he said. “Or for the land.”
I held her gaze. She held mine. The fire between us breathed quietly.
“Ask her what happened to them?” I told him.
Vorn translated. Thiece looked at me for a long moment before answering.
“Two of them found their way to the institutions eventually,” Vorn said. “The third…” He paused. “The third didn't.”
I didn't ask what that meant because it didn’t really need further translation.
Thiece spoke again, and this time, her voice had a different quality — more direct. Like she wanted to let me know she was serious, even though I couldn’t understand her.
“She says you shouldn’t have what you have,” Vorn said. “It was never yours alone. It belongs to something older than you, older than the institutions, older than the kingdoms.” He paused. “She says hiding it isn’t saving you. It’s hurting you and those around you.”
He looked at me, a flicker of accusation in his gaze, and I remembered that Vorn wasn’t a fan of the Verei Kahn, and even though I wasn’t one, I also wasn’t normal either.
I thought about what he said earlier, about water behind a dam. And that water finds another way through.
“And if I…” I swallowed back my nerves. “If I went to the institutions—”
Thiece interrupted before Vorn could finish translating the question. Her answer was flat and certain.
Vorn was quiet for a moment. “She says the institutions won’t help. Not you. Not the land.” He looked at me sideways. “She doesn't recommend that.”
Well, that made no sense at all. “What does she recommend?”
Thiece answered immediately. Vorn translated slowly, choosing words.
“She says what you carry needs to be known. Not declared. Not owned. Known. By you, first. Before anyone else decides what to call it.” He paused.
“She says you've been so busy hiding it that you haven't looked at it clearly since you were a child.”
I said nothing.
Because she was right, and I had no argument for things that were simply true.
Thiece spoke again, softer now.
“She says you need to go back,” Vorn said. “To the place you know. To where it answered you.” He looked at me. “What does that mean?” he asked me.
She meant Iskaeld. But I already knew that. I'd known it since the moment we walked away.
“And what will I find there?” I asked her directly.
Thiece's answer was short. Two words in her language, then silence..
Vorn looked at me steadily. “She says she doesn't know. But she says whatever you find…” He paused. “You won't be able to leave it.”
She held my gaze one more time. Then she looked away, back at the fire, and the conversation ended as simply as it had begun.
I left her house with a word of thanks, but she never acknowledged it, and I knew she would not speak to me again.
Vorn left me shortly after, and I was uneasy about him knowing as much as he did.
I sat on the rock in the warmth of the valley and thought about
dams and water and the specific quality of magic that had been building in my chest for weeks, pressing outward, finding cracks.
I thought about the column in the dark beneath Iskaeld. About its slow, patient pulse, the way it had synced to something in my chest the moment I got close enough.
About the lid being lifted off the box inside me.
I needed to go back, not because Vorn had talked to me about it, and not because of anything Thiece had said.
Because the thing that had opened in my chest when I stood in that chamber hadn't closed when I left. I was carrying it within me, and I needed to understand what it meant before someone else decided for me.
I feared the Verei Kahn more than I feared any creature that might be lurking in the depths of Iskaeld.
I looked south, back the way we'd come.
It was a two-day walk, give or take. The question wasn’t whether I would go; it was whether I could do it without Vorn finding out and whether, when I got there, I could handle whatever would be waiting for me in the dark.