Chapter 30
The basin was exactly as we'd left it.
That shouldn't have surprised me — we'd been gone only a few days, and how exactly could it have changed in such a short time? But still… I'd half expected it to have been different. To have closed up, gone dark, or something.
It hadn't. The rings in the snow pulsed slowly and patiently. The waterspouts rose and fell in their unpatterned way. The gemstone veins in the rock faces still caught the flat gray light and threw it back in pale, fractured color.
It hadn’t changed at all, but one thing was clear. As clear as I was standing there.
It was waiting.
I felt it the moment I stepped off the ridge. It wasn’t the urgent pull of the first time, not the desperate pressure of the weeks before that. It was quieter than either of those.
It was recognition.
My magic pulsed within me.
I navigated the waterspouts from memory, moving across the basin floor with the careful attention of someone who had mapped this terrain and trusted their body to remember it.
Only one caught me, a small one that caught my left boot, soaking it through to the stocking before I stepped clear.
The warmth it gave fled soon after contact.
I kept moving to the entrance.
The tunnel lay in the far rock face, dark and still. I stood at the threshold for a moment, not from fear, but from the trailfinder's instinct to pause at the edge of unknown territory and take stock of what I was walking into.
I knew what I was walking into, and it scared the shit out of me. Were the creatures we hadn’t seen still down there? I had no weapons.
I went in anyway.
The diamonds in the ceiling were exactly as I remembered.
All sizes, all colors, catching the light from the small moonstone in my hand and throwing it back, the whole ceiling alive with it in that slow, breathing way that Edran had noticed and not wanted to name.
I walked slowly this time. Not out of caution — I knew the way — but because I wanted to look. I'd been too occupied the first time, too busy managing the pull, and having Nicco beside me, seeing far too much.
This time, there was only me, and I let myself take it in.
They were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with their worth.
Not the kind of beauty that comes from rarity or expense.
Rather, it was the beauty of something that existed long before anyone thought to put a price on it, and it would be here long after the last merchant decided what they should cost.
I thought about Thiece. About the ones that are unknown.
I didn’t hesitate as the tunnel grew narrower. I didn’t have him to press against this time, but I wasn’t scared either. I hadn’t seen any evidence of the creatures who had come here. They had probably left again.
I really hoped they’d left again.
The chamber announced itself the same way it had before with the tunnel opening all at once, the space expanding beyond what the torchlight could reach, the ceiling rising into the dark.
And in the center, the column.
I stopped.
It was exactly as I remembered it and entirely different.
The same stone, the same veins of color running through it, the same slow, rhythmic pulse of light moving across it.
I took it in freely, my eyes running over it, seeing more than I had allowed the first time.
Now I didn’t need to worry about hiding my reaction.
Now there was no one to manage anything for.
I stood in the dark at the edge of the chamber, looking at the column, feeling my magic move toward it with a gentleness that had nothing of the frantic, weeks-long pressure.
You've been so busy hiding it that you haven't looked at it clearly since you were a child.
I took a breath, slipped my moonstone into the pocket of my cloak, and walked forward.
I stopped three feet from the column.
Up close, the pulse was even more visible, as if the column itself were breathing. Which, I was beginning to understand, was exactly what it was doing. The magic of this place, pooled here longer than anyone had been alive to measure it, doing what magic did when left to itself. It was being.
I did what I hadn’t been allowed to do the first time. I pressed my palm flat against one of the stones.
And the world opened beneath my touch.
There was no flash of light, no sound, no physical sensation beyond the warmth of the stone beneath my palm. Instead, I felt it inside. Something inside me opened, properly this time. Slowly, it swung back on a hinge that had always been there, waiting for someone to push it.
Waiting for me to push it.
I felt the column's pulse sync with mine.
I felt my magic, which had been contained, suppressed, rationed, and hidden for so long that I had never known what it felt like to be uncontained. It rose within me. Not a surge, not a boil, not the desperate pressure of the past weeks. Just rising within me, ready to be known.
I felt its size as it surfaced.
That was what stopped me.
It wasn’t fear. It was simply the staggering fact of understanding, for the first time since I was a girl touching a winter-bare tree and feeling the sap move somewhere deep inside it, what I actually carried within me.
It was not small. It had never been small.
I'd been treating it as something trivial, unimportant. And it had been patient with that, patient the way the column was patient, the way the land was patient. But it was not small, and it never had been.
I had been carrying something vast in a very tiny container for a very long time.
I stood with my hand against the column and breathed, and it breathed with me.
Images rushed through my mind. So many images.
I saw glyphs I had never known. I saw life in the soil, plants and flowers bursting through it and growing.
I saw the sun, not covered by gray clouds, but shining bright in blue skies that stretched further than I'd ever seen. I saw boats on water, water that wasn’t frozen.
I saw buildings, large and imposing, small and humble, and spires, spires that rose above palaces and reached for the sky.
I stepped back, panting.
“Too much,” I told it. “Slower.”
I placed my hand back on the column. Again, image after image flooded my mind. Slower this time, but still so much.
I didn’t understand it, but I knew it.
And it knew me.
The way Thiece had said, known by me first, before anyone else decided what to call it. I didn't know how long I stood there.
Long enough for the images to slow to a trickle, and I understood them no better than I had in the first moment I touched it. Long enough for the chamber to become something other than frightening.
I looked at the column one more time, still pulsing, slow and patient, no different from before. It had given me what it had to give and asked nothing in return, which was more than most things managed.
My magic had settled back to that small ball inside me, right at my sternum, and it hummed within me, almost like it was purring.
“Thank you,” I said to the empty chamber, to the column, to whatever had been patient enough to wait for me to show up and finally look.
The air grew suddenly tight, as if the cavern itself had inhaled, and then a burst of light shot out, almost blinding me.
I crouched instinctively, arms over my head, and when I looked again, the column was nothing more than a solid mass of stone.
No light. No colors. Not even the veins I’d seen in the stone on the way down.
There was no life in the stone in front of me. Not anymore. I looked around in the darkness. A flash of light was there and then gone.
Like a blink.
And suddenly, I didn’t feel alone down here anymore. I fought back my panic and slowly turned and walked back to the tunnel, up toward the light.
The basin was gray, cold, and ordinary when I emerged. I’d seen the world in color, and now I was back to the gray and white of the tundra of Crystallese.
Nothing followed me. I breathed out in relief as I looked around. This land I knew almost as well as I did myself.
I stood at the tunnel entrance, blinking in the flat daylight, and felt the cold settle back around me.
I am not the same person I was when I went in. Everything is different… and I am the same. Everything is the same… but I have changed.
Both of those things were true at the same time, and I wasn't yet sure what to do with that.
I looked up at the ridge.
Seryn was where I'd left him, a dark shape against the gray sky, crouched, still, and patient in that way of everyone from the valley.
Only there was another shape beside him.
Broader. Darker cloaked. They rose from their crouch as I watched. They stood with feet apart, arms crossed, and head slightly bowed, in the posture of someone who had been waiting for a while, had decided to be patient about it, and was not entirely succeeding.
I knew that posture.
I knew it the way I knew the lodestone pointed north, the way I knew the smell of a skarveld before it hit, the way I knew my own heartbeat without deciding to, without meaning to, just a known constant inside my body.
I stood at the tunnel entrance at the bottom of the basin, looked up at the ridge, looked at him, and felt something in my chest pound in a way that had nothing to do with the column's magic and everything to do with the fact that he was here.
He'd come.
I started walking toward the ridge, maneuvering effortlessly through the waterspouts.
He didn't move forward. He waited, the way he always waited — with the practiced patience of a man whose patience was hard won and was on the brink of running out.
His eyes were on me from the moment I emerged, and they stayed on me as I crossed the basin floor. When I finally climbed the ridge and stood in front of him, the look on his face was not the careful blankness, not the assessment, and not the almost-smile. It was something else.
Something that left me neither calm nor wary, and something I wasn't ready to examine directly.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I looked at him. At those warm brown eyes that held no warmth, steady on mine in the flat gray light.
It was the first time he'd asked me that. He wasn’t being practical or strategic. At this moment, he was being personal.
I didn't know how to answer. I stood on the ridge with the cold pressing in from all sides and the column's warmth still fading from my palm, and I looked at Nicco, with absolutely no idea what to say.
“Yes,” I answered finally. “I think so.” I looked at Seryn, who was still down in his crouch, but now I saw he wasn’t in a crouch. He was slumped to the side. “Seryn!” I moved forward in alarm, but a hand caught my wrist.
“He's fine.” Nicco pulled me back to his side with a grip that left no room for argument.
“You killed him?” The disbelief in my voice was genuine.
“No, don’t be stupid.”
I looked between Seryn’s unmoving shape and the man who still held my wrist with the grip of a vise. “He isn’t moving, Nicco.”
He held my gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, then his attention moved past me. “He’s sleeping.”
I stared at him. “He's sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“You knocked him out?”
“I didn't want an audience.” He said it plainly, as if the logic were self-evident and the problem was mine for not seeing it immediately. His grip on my wrist hadn't loosened.
I looked at Seryn again. I saw it now, his chest was rising and falling, slow and even. Sleeping, not dead. Fine, as Nicco had said.
“He's going to wake up,” I said it more to myself than Nicco.
“Eventually.”
He held my stare, waiting for me to put it together. “And then he's going to tell Vorn.”
“Eventually.”
I looked around, my eyes searching. “And Vorn is going to—”
“Amarya.” His voice was quiet. Not sharp, just quiet, but I heard the authority in it. “If you want me to leave him sleeping, we leave. Now. Before he wakes up and it becomes a problem we don’t need.”
I looked at him. His eyes were steady on mine, uncompromising. He still had my wrist. Not roughly, just there.
“Is Larana okay?”
His lips twitched. “She’s pissed as fuck, but she’s fine.”
I nodded. “I’m glad.” I looked back at Seryn. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
“Because I didn’t want to hear you complaining about it for the journey back.”
I watched him the way he watched everyone, with suspicion. “Is that true?”
“Do you want it to be?”
I answered immediately. “Yes.”
“Then it’s true.”
Neither of us moved.
“You came,” I said. It came out smaller than I intended.
Something flickered in his eyes. Too fast, as always. Gone before I could name it. “You went into the tunnel again,” he said. “Alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I had Seryn.”
“You had a sleeping, Seryn.”
“He was awake when I went in.”
Nicco’s look was unimpressed. Then he looked at the basin below — one long, assessing look — and then back at me. From behind his back, he pulled my staff and held it out to me. “Are you ready?”
Was I? From Nicco, to Vorn, to Nicco again. Truthfully, I was ready to be free. Somehow, I didn’t think freedom was in my future. I didn’t say that, though, I took my staff and simply nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Then let's go.”
He released my wrist, turned, and started walking south without further comment.
I stood on the ridge for one breath. Then another. Willing whatever was happening inside my chest to settle down.
I leaned down and made sure Seryn was wrapped as warmly as he could be. I tucked his face wrappings up and over his mouth and pulled his hood low.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I straightened.
“Amarya, let’s move,” Nicco barked from in front of me.
I glanced once more down at the basin and the tunnel, and I dipped my head once.
I turned away, pulled my hood low, and followed him.
Like he knew I would.