Chapter 33 #2
“Get comfortable,” he ordered. I tried to move forward so I wasn’t leaning on him, but he pulled me back against his chest. “No. Lean against me. You don’t yet know how to move with the animal. Learn from me.”
My cheeks were aflame, and I was sure this was wildly inappropriate. Neither Larana nor Baxley looked upset or alarmed by my closeness to him, and I had no choice but to lean back.
“You’re too stiff,” he admonished as the horse moved forward, and I clung onto the pommel as if it were a lifeline.
“It’s high,” I told him through gritted teeth.
“Heights scare you?” he asked, and his breath was very close to my ear. It was causing strange sensations in my body.
“I can’t normally fall from them.”
He laughed. His body vibrated, and I wished he hadn’t done that.
“Put your hood up if you’re cold.”
I didn’t say a word and pulled my hood up, and avoided looking at either of the others in case they could see that it wasn’t Crystallese winter that was causing me to shiver.
Nicco rode at the front. Of course he did.
The horses made the difference. Days that would have taken a week on foot collapsed into something manageable. We stopped when the light failed, camped where the terrain allowed, and moved again when the dark lifted. The rhythm was almost ordinary, almost comfortable.
I didn't trust comfortable. Comfortable was what happened just before something changed.
The first day after riding, my legs and ass had never known such pain. Larana had laughed when I fell in a heap in the snow, and Baxley had explained that I’d used muscles to hold the horse that I hadn’t used before.
All I knew was that the aches were getting better and that I still preferred my own feet to horses' hooves, no matter how much time they saved.
“You're quiet,” Nicco said from behind me on the fourth day.
I hadn’t been paying attention, which was either a testament to how distracted I was or how comfortable I was with him now on horseback.
“I'm always quiet,” I said.
“You're differently quiet.” I could feel the frown he was probably sending my way. “I know the difference.”
I didn't know what to do with that, or how to answer.
“I'm thinking,” I said.
“About?”
I looked at the trail ahead. The way it curved south around a rock formation, I didn’t recognize. Even just these few leagues south, I wasn’t as familiar with the terrain as I was to the north.
It felt strange. Not wrong. Just strange. Like reading something backward and finding that it made a different kind of sense.
“The column showed me things,” I said. I hadn't said this out loud before. Not to anyone.
Nicco was quiet for a moment. “What kind of things?”
“Places. The lands south of here. Buildings and boats and—” I paused. “Blue skies.”
He tugged on my hood, and I turned to look at him. “You've never seen a blue sky?”
“I don’t think Crystallese has them. Not like that.” I turned back, far too aware of how close we were, and kept my eyes on the trail. “Gray. Always gray. Sometimes lighter gray. But not—” I stopped. “Not like what I saw.”
He was quiet for a long moment. The horse moved steadily beneath us, breath misting in the cold air.
“Then we show you a blue sky.”
I looked back at him.
“South of here,” he said. “Farther south than you've been. Past the border into a warmer country.” He kept his eyes ahead, sparing me the discomfort of watching my reaction. “There are blue skies. Not all the time. But enough.”
I thought about the column. About the images that had moved through my mind, slow and certain, things the land had wanted me to know. Blue sky, water that wasn't frozen, buildings that reached upward and weren't built against the cold.
I thought about Vorn. About his patience. About the fact that a man who had followed me to Iskaeld and back, and had taken me in the dark, wasn't going to stop just because I was heading south. He'd wait. He'd find another trail, another time, another moment when I was alone or close enough to it.
I didn’t want to be the woman tied to a pole in his spare tent.
I thought about my purse, heavy and generous, and the fact that generous didn't last forever.
“For how long?” I asked, not liking the fact that my uncertainty was in my voice.
Nicco considered. “As long as you want. There's work farther south. People who need someone who can read terrain and find trails.” His arm around my waist tightened a little. “You're very good at it.”
“I am,” I agreed. “In Crystallese, where I read the snow I’m good. I don’t know if I can do it where there’s no snow.”
I heard his huff of laughter and turned to look at him.
He raised an eyebrow. “So? You learn.”
I looked south. The trail curved, and the land opened ahead. Somewhere beyond the gray horizon lay a border, and beyond that was warmth and blue skies and a world the column had shown me as if it were an invitation.
“I'll think about it,” I said.
Nicco made no further argument, and the conversation was done.
We rode in silence. Baxley and Larana talked quietly among themselves behind us. I sat there, thinking as Nicco guided the horse, considering everything.
That evening, Nicco appeared beside me as I was tending the fire. The others were tending the horses, and the snow was falling gently.
“Have you given it more thought?” he asked as he unwrapped his face coverings, and I saw the thick beard he’d grown during the weeks of traveling.
“Nicco.” I looked at him then, directly, which I'd been avoiding for days. He looked up at me. “Why does it matter to you where I go?”
He held my gaze. That thing, the unnamed thing in his expression, quick and gone as always.
“It doesn't,” he said.
He got up and walked away.
I sat there in the cold and thought about the specific quality of a lie told by someone who usually told the truth.
It sat in my chest alongside everything else.
Patient.
Humming.
And I knew that I was going to Florlunia, the land of spring.