Chapter 29
I didn't sleep.
Not because of discomfort. Vorn's people had given me a sleeping space warmer than anything I'd had since Eirhollow, a low pallet close enough to a steam hole that its warmth reached me without being overwhelming.
The valley held its own warmth through the dark, the mist drifting softly and constantly outside the low doorway.
It wasn't discomfort keeping me awake. It was me worrying about all the things I couldn’t change.
I lay on the pallet, looked at the ceiling, and thought about dams. About water finding another way through.
About the column in the dark below Iskaeld, pulsing slowly and patiently, moving in rhythm with something in my chest the moment I got close enough, and about whether, when I arrived, I'd be brave enough to walk into the dark alone.
I thought about Nicco. About Baxley, Larana, and the others. I wondered if they were making it south okay. I wondered whether Larana would hate me for leaving her there, unconscious in the snow.
But my thoughts kept returning to Nicco, again and again.
I didn't want them to. I pressed the thought down the same way I pressed everything down, firmly, with the resolve of someone who had been doing this long enough that the action had become automatic.
But it came back up the way things did when you were lying in the dark with nothing to do but think.
I got up off the palette and walked out the door. I followed the path down to a hot spring. There was no room to move around in it, but when I dipped my hand into the water, I sighed at how warm it was.
A bath would be amazing, but I didn’t know how deep the spring was or what else might be down there. I looked around and realized I was alone.
I was almost certain of it. Almost was doing a lot of work lately.
With quick work, I unlaced my boots and pulled off the two layers of stockings. The cold bit at my toes, and I shoved them into the warm water with a hiss of relief. Aches and pains I hadn't known I was carrying melted away in the hot water, and I inched forward until the water reached my knees.
“You may as well go in.”
I screeched, but the low laugh behind me pissed me off more than my cry of alarm. A woman stood behind me. She was wrapped in a thick cloak, yet her legs and feet were bare.
“I’ll use that one.” She pointed to the other side, her voice thick with her accent. “Enjoy.”
“Wh-what?” I looked between her and the place she’d pointed. “Enjoy what?”
“Your bath?” She looked me over carefully. “If you’re shy, keep your cloak around you, but it’s late and very few of us are awake.”
I watched as she walked to the other spring. Without embarrassment, she dropped her cloak, and in the dark, I saw her silhouette crouch and then, with a faint splash, she entered the water.
I was untying my laces eagerly, peeling off layer after layer.
I even unbraided my hair and, with my earlier hesitation gone, slipped into the warm water.
I bobbed there for a moment, with no bottom beneath me, my feet kicking lightly to keep me afloat.
With a sigh, I dunked beneath the water, letting it warm me from head to toe.
I came up for air and did it several more times.
Treading water, I tipped my head back, letting my hair float in the water, and looked at the sky.
Not the flat gray of the trail, not the pressing dark of the storm, the tunnel, or the chamber below Iskaeld. Just sky. Cold and deep, scattered with stars shining in the ink-black sky like the ice rocks in Iskaeld's stone.
I hadn't looked at the stars in a long time. I hadn't had time to look, or I'd had time but hadn't given myself permission, or storm clouds had kept them hidden. But they shone brightly here. Clear, because the valley's warmth kept the worst of the weather from settling here.
The water held me. I floated, letting it, and felt the weeks of cold, walking, and containing myself seep out through my skin and dissolve into the warmth around me.
My magic was quiet. Content, almost. As if the heat had satisfied something it had long sought.
I let myself relax.
Across the water, I heard the woman move, a small splash, then stillness. She wasn't talking. I wasn't talking. We were two people in separate springs in the dark, sharing the valley's warmth without claiming it from one another.
I thought about how I ended up here. Vorn had waited for me to return. He knew I would, and he’d been prepared to take me from the others, from Nicco.
Even here, covered in warmth, my mind kept drifting back to him.
I thought about the way he'd looked at me across the dark outside Vorn's shelter, steady, unreadable, and present in that specific way he was always present. He’d seen me choose to say nothing that night, and he’d made the same choice.
Nicco and I made the same choices, and I didn’t know if that worried me or pleased me. I didn’t want to be like him. Did I?
I let myself think about him, just for a moment, just for the length of a breath held and released. “Enough,” I scolded myself.
I dunked beneath the water and didn’t let myself come back up until all I could think about was the need to breathe. My head broke the surface, and as I gasped for air, all thoughts of the mercenary were gone.
I got out, shivering as the cold attacked, and wrapped in my cloak, I ran back to the shelter and tried not to flinch as I put my dirty clothes back on. The bath had worked wonders, and I fell asleep, still damp, with wet hair around my face, and my sleep was dreamless.
I rose before dawn, as I always did. Old habits didn't care where you were. The trailfinder's instinct for the turn of the dark.
The settlement was not fully awake. Two people moved at the far edge of the valley, and I watched them from the doorway of my sleeping space. Not a watch exactly, more like what Larana did, a specific vigilance that wasn't general but targeted. They were looking north.
Everyone here looked north. Which was strange, because the danger to them was south.
I thought about what Vorn had said. Like goes to like. About the column drawing things toward it. About the creatures coming from somewhere north of Iskaeld, from the direction of this valley and whatever lay beyond it.
I thought about the large tracks in the snow at the basin's edge, nonhuman yet moving with purpose toward the tunnel entrance.
I thought about what had visited the column in the dark.
What were they watching for? Did it have a name? Had they seen it?
The two watchers at the valley's edge didn’t move from their posts. They looked casual in their watch, but I had no doubt they were aware of everything happening in front of them and beyond.
This valley just kept offering up question after question. I pulled my cloak tight around my shoulders and went to find Vorn and some answers.
He was awake and unsurprised to find me awake, which I was beginning to understand was simply the condition of Vorn. Unsurprised by most things, patient with the rest.
“You want to leave,” he said, before I'd said anything.
“I need to go back to Iskaeld,” I said. “Thiece told me to.”
“Thiece told you to go back to the place where the pull started.” He looked at me with those steady, pale eyes. “I'm not sure she had a timeline in mind.”
“Nevertheless.”
He was quiet for a moment. The light in the valley shifted, the steam holes breathing their pale hue into the freshening air. “You'll need someone with you.”
“I'd rather go alone.”
“I bet you would,” he said with a small smile.
“You won't.” He said it the way Nicco did, flat, final, already decided.
I was beginning to think that kind of certainty wasn't a Darysian trait.
It was just what happened to people who were used to leading.
“The things that move between here and Iskaeld move at night. You're not going alone.”
“Then come yourself,” I said, my irritation showing.
He looked at the valley. At the ones who were beginning to stir into their quiet, purposeful morning routines. At the watchers to the north, still and patient. “You know I can’t.”
“Then why are we talking about this?” I tried to stay reasonable. “I’m happy to go alone.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he turned and called out in their language — two short words — and a figure detached itself from the edge of the settlement and crossed to us.
The young one. Dark-eyed, careful, the one who'd brought me water after the first night.
“I’m sending someone I trust,” he told me as we watched the other man approach. Vorn said something to him. The young man looked at me steadily, then nodded.
“His name is Seryn,” Vorn said. “He knows the way between here and Iskaeld. He'll take you, wait, then bring you back.”
“And if I don't want to come back?”
Vorn held my gaze. “I'd rather you did.”
I looked at Seryn. He looked back with the same patience as everyone in this valley, neither unkind nor unfriendly, just entirely itself. “Can you fight?” I asked him.
He said something to Vorn.
“He says he can,” Vorn translated. “He also says it's unlikely to matter.”
I thought about that. “Is that reassuring or not?”
“Probably not,” Vorn agreed.
“Can he speak?”
Vorn gave me a flat look. “You just heard him speak.”
“I heard him say something in a language I don’t know. Can he speak to me when I need to understand him?”
“I can.” I looked at Seryn. His voice was steady and low, with a heavy accent.
“Do you want to come?” I asked him. I was all about making your own choices, and from the huff of laughter beside me, I knew Vorn had heard my jab.
“I’m not doing anything else,” Seryn said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”
He walked away then, and I wasn’t sure whether the fact that he “wasn’t doing anything else,” was a reason to trek across the tundra to Iskaeld, but I was hardly in a position to argue. I was amazed Vorn was letting me go at all.
“I want you back in a few days, Amarya.”
I met his steady gaze. “Let’s hope the weather is kind to us.”
He said nothing, but I was left with no doubt that Vorn was still very much in control here.
We left as the valley settled into its morning rhythm.
I didn't tell Vorn I wasn't planning to return to the settlement.
That felt like a conversation for after, when there was an after to have it in.
I had fulfilled my part of the arrangement — I'd found the pass, reached the community, and confirmed they were alive and stranger than any people I'd encountered north of Eirhollow.
Vorn's word was that he'd let me go once I got him through the pass.
I intended to hold him to it, just from a different direction than he'd been expecting.
Seryn moved through the valley in the same quiet, unhurried way of his people. I matched his pace, watched the terrain, and tried not to think about what Thiece had said.
You've been so busy hiding it that you haven't looked at it clearly since you were a child.
I didn’t know what I was. I wasn’t even sure I knew what I carried. But I'd made my peace with keeping it, along with the weight of the silence. Hiding it so well, I was annoyed that she had seen it and recognized it for what it was.
What I hadn't done — what I was beginning to understand I'd never done — was to look at it directly. To understand it. To know it the way Thiece said it needed to be known, by me first, before anyone else decided what to call it.
She made it sound like more than magic, but I didn’t know what else there was other than magic.
The column would tell me something. I didn't know what. I wasn't sure I was ready for it.
But I was going anyway.
Seryn set the same grueling pace I did. We reached the pass before the light had fully settled into daylight.
Seryn moved through it without hesitation, which meant he'd been through it before, and that meant there was more traffic between this valley and Iskaeld than Vorn had suggested. I was beginning to doubt everything Vorn had said to me. He hadn’t needed me to navigate this trail at all.
Bastard.
On the far side of the pass, the landscape opened into the approach to Iskaeld, and I felt it immediately. Not the urgent pull of before or the desperate directional pressure of the past weeks. Something quieter. Warmth where there shouldn't be any. A recognition of something in the air.
My magic lifted toward it, gently, and I let it. Just slightly, just enough to be felt in return.
Seryn glanced at me sideways and said something in his language.
“I don't understand,” I told him.
He considered this. Then, carefully, in his accented voice, he said, “It knows you're coming.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Does it always know?” I asked. “When someone's coming?”
Seryn was quiet for a long moment, picking his way through the terrain with that unhurried certainty. “It knows some,” he said finally. “Not all.”
“The ones that are unknown,” I said softly.
He looked at me then, fully, directly, in a way that reminded me of Thiece's pale gaze. His eyes were dark, not pale, yet the quality of his attention was the same. Complete and unguarded.
“Yes,” he said. “Those ones.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, and my magic reached toward Iskaeld with each step. I let it go, and it felt like setting down something I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten it had weight.
A storm did its best to dissuade us, but Seryn and I simply kept going. He was taller than me and broader, too. He proved to be an excellent windbreaker as we carried on.
On the second day, the basin appeared below us as the day settled into its flattest gray.
I stood on the ridge, looking down at the rings in the snow. Recognition moved through me as I stood there.
Seryn stopped beside me.
“I wait here,” he told me, his eyes alert and keen as he scanned our surroundings.
I looked at him in surprise. “You're not coming down?”
“No.” He met my gaze steadily. “This part is yours.”
I looked back at the basin. At the waterspouts. At the tunnel entrance in the far rock face, dark and still and waiting.
My magic pressed upward, gently insistent, the way it had pressed all morning.
“How long will you wait?” I asked.
Seryn looked at me steadily. “Until you come out.”
“I could die in there.” I didn’t like how my voice quivered, but I chose to ignore it. “I might never come out.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll leave.”
Right… well, that was comforting.
I didn’t look back at him as I went down alone.