Chapter 31
We walked south, and neither of us spoke.
That was fine. I had nothing to say that wouldn't come out wrong, and Nicco had apparently decided that silence was the appropriate register for whatever our relationship was.
A shape dislodged itself from the snow, and I grinned in welcome as Baxley straightened. I guessed he’d been keeping watch. He tugged his face coverings down as we approached.
“Amarya.” His voice was warm, and his smile was wide. He clasped my shoulder as I reached him. “Did they hurt you?”
I shook my head. “No, they were fine. Strange, but we knew that.”
He nodded. “I’m glad you are not hurt. Why did they take you?”
I pretended I didn’t hear the huff of derision ahead. “I think it’s obvious,” Nicco said without looking back.
I rolled my eyes, and Baxley smiled again. “They wanted me to find a trail, obviously.” The last part was directed at the idiot male ahead of us.
Baxley was frowning. “A trail? A trail to where?”
And this was a problem. I didn’t want them to know about the settlement beyond the pass. I wasn’t sure why, so I lied.
“Iskaeld. They’d heard of the ice rocks.”
Nicco grunted, and Baxley considered me as we walked. “Why would Vorn’s people need gemstones?”
Why indeed? I shrugged in response. “I didn’t ask.”
Baxley fell into step beside me — both of us following Nicco — and that was the entirety of our formation.
Three people heading south through the flat gray of a Crystallese afternoon. It was the kind of silence that comes after something significant has happened and nobody is ready to name it yet.
Whether the significant thing was my kidnapping or my going into the tunnel at Iskaeld, I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t planning on asking.
In a way, I was grateful for the silence.
The magic in my chest had settled back to its small, quiet hum — present, patient, and no longer pressing. It felt different from before. Not larger, not stronger. Just known.
I thought about what Thiece had said. That my magic needed to be known by me first, before anyone else could decide about it.
I looked at Nicco's back, three paces ahead of me, and thought about what he'd call it if he knew. What he'd seen as we traveled north together, the melted snow, the burning mug, the way my hand had gone to my sternum too many times for it to mean nothing.
What had he filed away in that careful, deliberate way of his? And what was he going to do with it?
I was following them south, but I didn’t know why. They came after me, but they didn’t go to Vorn’s settlement, not that they’d be able to pinpoint it. They knew to come to Iskaeld. How? They didn’t question the fact I lied about where Vorn wanted me to take him.
They’d come for me to help me, or to keep me? I wanted to ask. I knew I needed to know. The reason had the potential to change everything. Yet I kept my silence as we trekked south.
We made camp when the light began to fail.
Not a comfortable camp. Three people with a pack each and knowledge that only one of us would sleep at a time.
“I can keep watch,” I told them as Nicco made a small fire.
“You’ll sleep.”
“But you and Baxley won’t sleep if I’m sleeping.”
“Nor will we sleep if you’re on watch.”
I glared at him. “I’m not going to run away!”
Not entirely true, I wasn’t going to run away yet.
He looked up at me. “I didn’t say you were.”
“Then why can’t I keep watch?” I demanded.
“Because I would rather you were rested.”
“I—” I had no comeback for that. “Fine.”
Baxley was staring farther across the tundra. “Amarya, when you two are finished squabbling, what’s that?”
I turned to look and smiled. “Looks like shelter.”
Nicco stopped making his fire, stood, and we set off again. It was nothing more than a hollow between two drifts that cut down the wind, but it had a curve to it that was almost like a cave, so there was only one outlook. Which meant only one of them had to keep watch at a time.
Still not me, though.
Nicco made a fire with the efficiency of someone who had done it under worse conditions. He had learned quickly in the weeks we’d traveled together, and we ate what we had without complaint.
I sat on my side of the fire, and Nicco sat on his. Baxley moved between the two with the comfortable ease of a man who understood that his role in this dynamic was to prevent it from becoming a standoff.
“Larana's going to kill you,” Baxley told me conversationally, poking at the fire.
“I know.”
“She woke up with snow in her hair and Nicco gone and two soldiers who couldn't tell her what had happened in any useful way.”
“Oh. That doesn’t sound… good.”
“She's been in a particular kind of mood since then.”
“I can imagine.”
He looked at me over the fire. “I don't think you can, actually.” He poked the fire again. “When I’d calmed her down and convinced her to take them south, I came after him.” He jerked his thumb toward Nicco. “His mood wasn’t much of an improvement on hers.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing.
“You caught up to him quickly,” I said instead.
“I wasn’t trying to outrun him,” Nicco said dryly.
I almost let that go. But then I heard what he hadn’t said. “You think I was trying to outrun you?”
He didn’t look at me or answer. I let the silence fall once more.
Nicco hadn't looked at me since the ridge.
Not directly. I caught him looking when he thought I wasn't, that steady, distinct attention fixed on me the way it was fixed on problems he was working through.
But whenever I looked back, he was looking at the fire, the terrain, or something just past my left shoulder.
It was different from his usual careful blankness. More deliberate. The kind of not looking that required effort.
“Why did you come after me?” I asked.
The question hung in the silence between us and lingered. Baxley went still, as if he had decided he didn’t want to be here for this but had no choice but to be part of it.
Nicco looked up from the fire. Directly this time with no sideways glances, no careful angles. Just straight across the flames, his eyes level with mine.
“They took you,” he said.
“I went with Vorn's people. Voluntarily.”
“You were taken,” he said again, in the same even tone, but his answer was in the way he stressed “taken.”
I held his gaze. He held mine. Baxley tried to make himself smaller.
“I was tasked to take the soldiers north, and I did that. We were on our way back, so my contract was done.”
Nicco sat back, his look assessing. “So you’re saying that you weren’t kidnapped? Larana was hurt for no reason? And that you went with them by choice? You never tried to fight them when they came for you?”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming.
“I’m saying, my contract with Captain Marson was almost done.
I was taken against my will at first. I am truly sorry for the hurt Larana got.
” I looked at Baxley, and he nodded slightly, acknowledging my truth.
“I did fight them, just as I fought Marson when he tried to strong-arm me too.”
Nicco scoffed. “I wasn’t aware Marson had bound your hands and carried you over his shoulder.”
How did he know that? “How do you know that?” I demanded.
“We’re trackers, bunny. Anyone worth their salt would know that.”
Oh. I licked my lips and looked away. If that were true, he’d have known… I looked back, and he was watching me with hard eyes.
“Yeah, I know when they cut you free. I know who you lay beside at night.”
That was the second time he’d looked at me with that gleam of disgust. “Fuck you.”
“Like you fucked Vorn?”
I was on my feet, and so was he. Our little shelter wasn’t big enough for this fight.
“Is this necessary?” Baxley asked reasonably. “Amarya, sit. Who you do or do not sleep with is not our concern.” He glanced at his friend. “Is it, Nicco?”
“Of course not.” He sat back down and resumed glaring out at the terrain.
Baxley looked at me and made a lowering motion with his hand. I slowly sank back down.
The silence this time was suffocating.
The fire crackled, and I jumped. I’d never jumped at a fire in my life, but this man put me out of sorts.
“I did lie with Vorn,” I told the silence.
Baxley started to speak, but I shushed him.
“But all that happened was we lay beside each other. His hands did wander, and I reminded him of what would happen if they didn’t stop.
He kept me beside him for warmth.” I ignored the snort from the other side of the shelter.
“I was taken, and I will apologize to Larana if I see her again for my carelessness. I should have heard them… Or something.” Neither of them spoke, and I carried on.
“I am not lying, my contract, as you know, Baxley, was to lead them north.”
“You were to get five to go and five to come back,” Nicco reminded me.
“Yes, but no one said where back would be.” I didn’t flinch from his narrowed glare. “When Vorn took me, I knew you three would get the others back safely. Vorn asked me to find a trail. When I found it, I was to go free.”
“He would never let you go free,” Nicco snapped.
“I know. That’s why when I left Iskaeld, I was going to head south.”
He didn’t look like he believed me.
“This is the truth,” I told them both. “Do with it what you will.”
Silence fell again.
Then Baxley spoke. “I believe you, Amarya.” He stood and stretched. “I need to step outside.”
When Baxley had left us, Nicco spoke again. “I have a question.”
“What now?”
“What do you mean by if you see Larana again?”
I looked up over at him, and he was still looking outward. “I assume you haven’t kidnapped me instead, so I am free to go?”
He didn’t answer. When it was clear he wasn’t going to answer, I curled up to sleep.
“What did he do to you when his hands wandered?”
Well, I wasn’t in any hurry to answer that, so I lay still and pretended to be asleep.
“I know the sound of your breathing when you sleep, bunny. Answer the question.”
“It was nothing, hands under clothes, that’s all. I told him to remove them, and he did.”
“Go to sleep, Amarya.”
I closed my eyes, knowing the conversation was over.
In the morning, his mood hadn't improved. Neither of them had woken me for watch, which annoyed me, and Baxley was clearly done with both of us. Our small party was not a happy one as we resumed our southbound trail.
Midmorning, I was bored with the silence. “The soldiers,” I said. “They went south?”
Baxley was the one to answer. “Yes.”
“Captain Marson will be eager to report back on what he found?”
“He will. He’ll be eager to find good horses.” Baxley scratched his arm as we walked. “Unlikely they’ll be too far in front, though. Larana knows to move them slowly.”
I thought about that. “She’ll be okay?” The look he gave me confirmed he thought so. “And you didn't go with them.”
He shook his head. “Nicco was alone. You were alone.”
I thought about that. About what it meant for a man on a mission to separate from the official party, to send the soldiers south with their census results and their gemstone surveys and their record of a Frosttaken town called Skallfen, and to head north instead with only one companion and no explanation.
About what it meant that they’d both come after me, without apparent hesitation.
“Thank you. Both of you.”
Baxley mumbled something. Nicco flicked a glance my way but said nothing.
“What are you going to do? When we get back to a town or village. With what you know.”
Nicco’s steps didn’t falter. He kept walking, and so did Baxley.
“I don't know yet,” Nicco eventually said.
“Will you let me go?”
“You’re not our prisoner,” Baxley said with a surprised laugh.
But his wasn’t the answer I needed to hear, and Nicco didn’t answer at all. And it was the most honest reply he’d ever given me, yet somehow that made it worse because he hadn’t said a word.
At the end of the second day, I convinced them both to let me take watch. Baxley kicked his friend in the ankle and then made a show of lying down. Nicco sighed loudly and did the same.
Baxley was asleep within moments of lying down, which was a talent I had always envied. Nicco settled on his back with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, and I had no idea whether he actually slept or merely made a convincing show of it.
I sat at the edge of the small camp we’d made and looked south and thought.
Not about the column. Not about Thiece or Vorn or the community beyond the pass, not about the images that had rushed through my mind when I'd pressed my hand against the stone.
Those things had happened, were true, and I was carrying them the same way I carried everything…
quietly, without having decided yet what to do with them.
I thought about I don't know yet.
In the weeks of watching Nicco make decisions — about who did what, the soldiers, the watch, Baxley's action with Vorn's woman, Skallfen, Iskaeld — I had not once seen him say he didn't know. He might not explain. He might not share. But he always knew.
I don't know yet was not his register.
Which meant either he was lying, or something had changed in what he thought he was dealing with, making his plans uncertain.
I pressed my fingers against my sternum. The magic hummed, small and quiet and patient.
Known by you first, before anyone else decides what to call it.
Someone would decide what to call it. I knew that.
The world I lived in did not leave things unnamed for long.
The Verei Kahn existed precisely to name things, classify them, and determine what was sanctioned and what was not.
Whatever I carried, whatever the column had shown me about myself, would be named eventually.
The question was who named it first.
And what that naming would cost me.
I looked south. The dark was complete out here, beyond the reach of the dying fire, the kind of dark with no edges or landmarks, requiring you to simply trust that the world was still where you'd left it.
Behind me, Nicco's breathing was slow and even. Asleep or pretending. I couldn't tell. With him, I was beginning to understand that I might never be able to tell.
That was the thing that sat in my chest alongside the magic, patient and humming and impossible to press down.
Not him. Not what I might or might not feel for a man who watched me too carefully, came north when he didn't have to, and said I don't know yet, as if it cost him something.
Just the fact of not being able to tell.
That was what I couldn't unknow.