Chapter 32
The first week south of Iskaeld was the hardest.
Not because of the terrain. I knew it now, having mapped it in my body on the way north, and my feet found the trail without much instruction from the rest of me.
Not because of the weather, which stayed cold, flat, and unremarkable, the kind of Crystallese gray that was almost a comfort after what we'd been through.
It was hard because of the silence.
Not the silence between us, that was fine, familiar kind of. It was the silence of the land itself. North towards Iskaeld had a quality of quiet unlike anything south of it. Now that we were moving away from it, I felt its absence like a sound that had stopped mid-note.
My magic was still humming. Small, quiet, patient. But aware of the distance growing between us and the column with each step south.
I didn't look back.
Nicco set the pace.
He'd done it quietly, the way he did most things, not announcing himself, just appearing at the front of our small formation and starting to walk, with Baxley and me falling in behind him because that was how it worked.
I was the trailfinder. I read the terrain.
But Nicco had claimed the front, and somewhere between Iskaeld and here, I'd stopped arguing about it.
I watched his back as we walked, thought about “I don't know yet”, the expression I still couldn't name, and the fact that he'd said, “Are you alright?” like it cost him something, and I filed all of it away in the part of my mind where I’d looked at it from every angle and still didn’t know what it meant. If it meant anything at all.
The wind came from the northwest, carrying the dry, biting cold of the open tundra. I adjusted our route slightly east, not enough for Nicco to notice, just enough to put the wind at an angle rather than full in the face. He didn't ask why I'd adjusted. He just matched the new direction.
That was new too.
I steered us away from where Vorn’s settlement was, and I angled us to the tree line, which would mean we passed Skallfen in an arc. I never wanted to see that town again.
The second week brought the weather.
Not a skarveld, nothing so dramatic. Just the kind of sustained misery Crystallese specialized in when it wasn't being outright lethal.
Wind that never stopped. Snow that came sideways rather than down.
Visibility that reduced the world to the backs of the people in front of you, the snow beneath your feet, and not much else.
I moved to the front.
Not because Nicco stepped back. He didn't. I simply came alongside him, then stepped ahead.
He let me, and we walked that way through the worst of it, with me reading the trail and him watching everything else, and Baxley somewhere behind us making the small sounds of a large man enduring something he'd decided not to complain about.
“West,” I said into the wind.
Nicco adjusted without question.
“There's a formation, rock, sheltered side. Not far.”
He said nothing, just walked where I directed him, and Baxley followed us both.
I found it by feel more than by sight. The change in the wind's quality when the terrain blocked it, and the way the storm's sound shifted when something solid was nearby. I'd been finding shelter in Crystallese for years. My body knew the signs.
The rock formation was exactly where I'd expected it. A wide overhang, deep enough for three people and a small fire, sheltered enough that the wind hit the rock face and went around it rather than through.
I stopped. “Here.”
Baxley appeared from the gray and let out a sound of profound relief he'd never have admitted to in better visibility.
We made camp in the efficient silence of people who had done this enough times that the tasks distributed themselves without discussion. I cleared a space for the fire. Nicco built it. Baxley did something with packs and rations that I didn't track, but food appeared at roughly the right moment.
We ate. The storm did its worst against the rock face above us, but found no purchase.
“How long?” Baxley asked as the silence resumed inside.
I looked at the sky, such as it was. “It'll blow itself out. A day, maybe less.”
He nodded and ate.
Nicco said nothing.
Baxley and I decided to pass the time with a game. It was stupid and easy, throwing a stick at the outside. The person who got it nearest the edge, without it being lost in the snow, won.
It was fun until Nicco scooped it up and tossed it into the fire. He ignored our glares.
“What’s the furthest south you’ve been, Amarya?” Baxley asked me shortly after.
“There’s a town called Svelmenk, it’s southwest, sits above Glassfyr…” I rocked my hand back and forth, “kind of.” I rubbed my hands together against the cold. “Have you been?”
“Never heard of it,” Baxley told me with his easy smile.
“It’s smallish,” I admitted. “For its size, they trade well in hearth rugs,” I saw his puzzled look. “Floor coverings.”
He grinned. “I know what a hearth rug is.”
“Oh, you looked” —I glanced at Nicco— “never mind. They weave them on what they call looms. Huge things. They’re pretty.” I scrunched my nose up as I thought about it. “If you like that kind of thing.”
“Merchant’s trade them up north?” Baxley guessed.
“Tried to. I don’t think they got many purchases after Claswik.” I moved closer to the fire. “Merchant got so lost he paid me four silver just to get him home again.” I smiled at Baxley’s chuckle. “Easiest four silver I ever made.”
The silence came again, and I settled into my cloak.
“I’m from Florlunia originally,” Baxley suddenly said.
I didn’t hide my surprise.
He nodded. “Only been to Crystallese a few times, once to Glassfyr, even though we have cool spells in Florlunia, your kingdom’s temperature was too cool for me.”
“And now you’re freezing your balls off in its deep north.” He laughed at my crassness. “What made you leave?”
Baxley’s face turned somber. “Knew I was a better fighter than a scholar, my blade is my fortune.”
Nicco turned his head then, his gaze on Baxley. A look passed between them, and I knew better than to pry.
“Sleep,” Nicco told us both. “Bond when I can actually walk away without having to listen.”
“You can do that now,” I muttered, hearing Baxley choke back a laugh, but I rolled over and gave him my back, even though I was doing what he asked. I did it on my terms.
We were pinned for the better part of a day.
I slept in shifts, woke to find one of them on watch, then slept again.
The magic in my chest hummed through it all, steady and low, occasionally rising toward something I couldn't name before settling back.
I let it. It wasn't straining anymore. It wasn't fighting containment. It just was — present, patient, mine.
That was new too.
When the storm eased, I was the first to move, checking the trail ahead and reading the new snow for what had changed while we waited. Nicco appeared at my shoulder without announcement.
“South-southeast,” I said, before he asked. “The storm pushed new drifts across the direct route. We go around and avoid any Hulgrim hiding in drifts.”
“How much time does it add?”
I thought about it. “Not much. Less than if we tried to go through and come across them.”
He nodded and turned back to wake Baxley.
I stood in the new quiet of the post-storm morning, looked at the trail ahead, and thought about the fact that I was a trailfinder.
That was what I was, what I did, and what I was good at.
Whatever else was complicated — the magic, the column, the thing I wasn't examining that went by the name Nicco — this was simple.
Snow, ground, direction. I knew how to do that. I didn’t need to know anything else.
“You ready?” he asked from behind me.
“Well, I’m not standing here for fun.” My tartness was met with silence. Followed with a sigh.
“Should be a good day,” he murmured as he walked past.
I watched him move ahead without looking back, hood up, pace already set, doing his normal thing, which was to assume the world would fall in behind him. The infuriating part was that as far as I could see, it worked, which made it even more infuriating.
I exchanged a look with Baxley, who rolled his eyes as he pulled up his neck warmer over his mouth and nose.
He playfully nudged me with his elbow as he passed, and I smiled despite myself.
It was so easy with Baxley. He didn't watch me the way Nicco did, didn't assess my every move, and didn't make me feel like I was losing an argument I didn’t know I was having.
Baxley just was. Present, warm once he decided he liked you, and took up space without making you feel its weight.
There should be more Baxley’s, I decided.
I fell into step behind them both, took my place in the formation, and let my body do what it knew how. Read the snow, read the sky, and find the trail south.
Nicco was three paces ahead, and the distance felt deliberate.
I let it be.
Two days later, we found them. Or rather, Larana found us. I heard her before I saw her — a presence rather than a sound.
She came from the south along the same trail we were on, moving fast. When she rounded the edge of a rock formation and stopped in front of us, I had the impression she'd been looking for us for longer than a day and had not enjoyed the search.
She was fine. Physically, clearly, entirely fine. Her stride had been fast and certain, and she'd come through the storm's aftermath without apparent difficulty. But her face, as much of it as was visible above her wrappings, showed that she was pissed off.
Worse.
She was angry.
Not the cold fury of the standoff with Vorn’s men. Something more personal than that. Something that had been living in her chest for days had decided it was done waiting.
She looked at Nicco, then at Baxley, then at me. “You're alive,” she said to me.
“I am.”
“Good.” She crossed to me in four strides, and I held my ground. She stopped close enough that I could see her eyes clearly over the wrappings, sharp, dark, moving, assessing, and missing nothing. “Don't,” she said. “Do that again.”
“I didn't exactly—”
“I know.” Her voice was perfectly even. “You thought you were protecting us, protecting me. You made a call. I understand all of that.” A pause. “Don't do it again.”
I held her gaze. “Alright.”
She held mine for one more breath. Then she stepped back and looked at Nicco with an expression that suggested she had things to say to him, too, and had decided to save them.
“The soldiers,” she said. “Are two leagues south. Marson is moving them well. They lost one more on the way back.” She looked at me briefly. “Not the cold. One of the injuries from those snow people reopened.”
“The Hulgrim?”
She nodded once. I thought about the soldier whose name I'd never learned. About the cost of decisions made in the cold.
“Larana—”
“I'm not finished being angry,” she said, without looking at me. “I'll tell you when I am.”
From somewhere behind me, Baxley made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a cough. She fixed him with a look. He arranged his face into something more appropriate with the practiced speed of a man who had survived her moods before.
“All done?” Nicco asked dryly. When she didn’t answer, he nodded. “Then let’s keep moving.”
Larana pulled her face wrappings back up without ceremony and turned to look south. Whatever she'd needed to say, she'd said it. Whatever she'd needed to feel, she'd felt it on the trail coming north and wasn't going to perform it for an audience.
I found that I respected her enormously for it.
Baxley fell into step beside her and muttered something low I didn't catch. She didn't respond, but her shoulders dropped slightly — a fraction, almost nothing — and that was apparently enough because he nodded and said nothing more.
I watched them move ahead and thought about what it looked like when two people had been through enough together that they didn't need words for it anymore. The way her shoulder dropped carried the weight of a conversation, and he understood it without it being said out loud.
I thought about what it would be like to have that with someone.
“You coming?” Nicco asked from somewhere to my left.
I looked at him. He was already moving, not waiting, just checking. The way he checked everything, briefly and without seeming to care about the answer.
“I’m coming.”
I fell into step behind them all. The trail opened south, and the cold pressed in from every direction with its usual indifference.
I was a trailfinder again, heading somewhere with people I'd somehow ended up trusting, which was both the most ordinary and the most alarming thing about the last several weeks.
We caught the soldiers before the light failed.
Marson saw us coming and said nothing. He just gave a single nod that encompassed everything he wasn't going to ask about, then turned back to his men. That nod held everything unsaid. I appreciated every question he didn’t ask.
The camp that night was louder than it had been in weeks. There were two fires, and the night held the noise of a group reassembling after separation. I sat at the edge of the firelight, watching it, and thought that this was probably one of the last nights we'd all be in the same place.
I was ready to move on, and by the sounds of it, so were the soldiers.
Edran appeared at my elbow with a portion of food. He held it out without preamble.
“How’s your hand?” I asked him.
He flexed the fingers of his right hand in answer. Smooth, full movement, no hesitation.
I took the food from him. “That’s good.”
We ate in silence for a while. Around us, the camp did what camps do. They talked, argued mildly, and settled into the rhythm of people who were nearly done with something hard. All of them were unanimous in their eagerness for a bed.
“Thank you,” he said eventually. “For the fingers. And… the other things.”
I looked at him sideways. “For finding the trail?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, his gaze furtive. “The second storm,” he said quietly. “We were colder than we’d ever been, I didn’t think we’d make it, and then we weren't.” He kept his eyes on the fire. “I don't know what you did, but I know you did something.”
I was very still.
“I'm not going to say anything,” he added hurriedly. “I just wanted you to know that… it mattered.”
I looked at the fire for a long moment, uncomfortable but also unsure of what to say.
“You're welcome,” I said eventually.
He stood and went back to the others, and I sat with the weight of that — his knowing, his choosing, what he'd decided to do with it — and it felt like the most quietly significant thing since the column.
Which was saying something.