Chapter 37
The road south from Glassfyr felt different now that I knew we were leaving for a reason we weren't discussing.
Not different in any way I could point to because the road was the same, the horses moved at the same pace, and the cold pressed in from the same directions with the same indifference.
But I moved through it differently with the awareness of someone who had overheard something they weren't meant to hear and couldn't unhear it.
It will be.
I rode at the front. Nicco rode behind me, which was new. He'd been beside me or ahead of me since the day I got my own horse. Behind felt deliberate. Everything felt deliberate now.
Baxley came alongside me before midday.
“Everything okay, Amarya?” He looked me over, as if checking for ailments.
“I’m always okay,” I said with a soft snort. I saw his look and smiled at him. “I’m fine, Baxley. Just still adjusting to this version of snow.”
He smiled a little. “I bet you are.” He lost his smile, and we rode in silence for a moment. “Has everything been too overwhelming?”
I thought about that. About the Verei Kahn building, the hum in my chest, the door opening behind us, and Nicco moving me away with speed, but not enough to draw attention. I thought about the corridor last night, and I didn’t know what their conversation meant.
“I think I’m still trying to figure that out.”
He nodded and stayed beside me without pushing it, which was very Baxley, knowing when a conversation was done, and there was no need to fill the silence.
We stopped at a village that night. It was small and practical, and it was Crystallese in all the ways the north of the country still was.
Suspicious of strangers, economical with warmth, the inn's common room smelled of oats and smoke and the familiarity of a place that kept its doors shut against the cold.
I felt more relaxed here. This I knew.
I sat in the corner with a clear view of the room and the exit, watching the others settle, and I thought about Virellan, the courier job, and the documents we were carrying south.
Documents. We were traveling with papers? Ledgers? What did the papers say?
I thought about what documents a merchant in the upper city of Glassfyr might need to deliver to a contact in a border town. Money requests for payments? I thought about the kind of merchant who had a contact in a border town and required discretion. Discretion usually meant something illicit.
In my experience, anyway.
Larana sat beside me with two cups and pushed one toward me without asking. I took it. We sat in the comfortable silence we'd developed since the baths, and I thought about what I knew, what I didn't, and how to ask what I needed without being obvious.
“Larana.”
“Hmm?”
“The documents we're carrying.”
She looked at her cup. “What about them?”
“Do you know what they are?”
She hesitated. I noticed it, and she noticed me noticing. “It’s courier work,” she said. “We carry, we deliver, we don't ask.”
“Is that always how it works?”
She looked at me sideways. “Yes. It doesn’t matter to us what’s in the documents.”
I considered that. The kind of work where you shouldn't ask questions, and the kind of man who based his operation on not asking. I thought about the gap between his words and his true intentions, a gap I had been trying to navigate without fully understanding its scope.
“But why does it need mercenaries?”
She looked at me, sitting back and assessing. “Baxley found the job. It isn’t necessarily one for our skill set, but we’re going that way, so why not get paid?”
That was a reasonable argument. I just didn’t believe it.
“Larana.” I turned my cup in my hands. “How long have you worked with him?”
“Him? Nicco? Long enough,” she said. The same thing Baxley had said when I'd asked the same question.
“That's what Baxley said.”
“Because it's the right answer.”
I looked at her. She looked back with those direct eyes, and I understood from their expression that this was the limit of what she'd give me. Not hostile. Just the edge.
“Alright,” I said.
She nodded, and we went back to our cups. The silence held the shape of everything neither of us had said.
That night in the village inn, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about documents.
I thought about Nicco saying keep it clean and what it said about him that clean was something he had to specify.
I thought about it will be.
The fire in the hearth had burned to coals. Outside the village was quiet, and I welcomed it. Glassfyr was always moving, always busy. It was nice to be away from the noise. I pressed my fingers against my sternum, then caught myself and lowered my hand deliberately.
A habit I needed to break. I was working on it. The magic hummed, small and patient.
I didn't sleep for a long time.
In the morning, we left and went to deliver the documents. There seemed to be some unspoken debate between the three of them, and I got the impression that Baxley and Larana weren’t in agreement with Nicco.
“What’s going on?” I asked Baxley as he helped me into the saddle. I still couldn’t get on and off without help. Well, I could, I just couldn’t do it well.
“Nicco being Nicco,” he told me with a wink, but that wasn’t an answer, and he was on his own horse before I could tell him that.
I was following Baxley’s horse, Larana, with Nicco behind me, when he came up beside me. Reaching over, he took the reins and pulled the mare gently to a stop. “We’ll wait here, let them make the drop.”
I looked at him, but Larana was already passing me, and she and Baxley picked up speed.
“What is it? What don’t you want me to see?” I asked him, twisting in my saddle to look at him.
“Want you to see?” He huffed out a laugh. “It doesn’t take four of us to hand it over. Best not to overwhelm anyone.”
I watched him, and he watched me back lazily.
“You’re full of shit.”
His lips twitched at that. “I probably am.”
“What are you hiding? What are you keeping from me?”
His head cocked to the side as he studied me. “Why do you think I’m hiding something?”
Because you are, is what I wanted to say. Instead, I kept silent. Nicco’s look turned calculating.
“What have you been listening to?” he asked softly, moving his horse closer.
I hated that he suspected. I hated that knowing look on his face as he considered what I could have overheard.
“What won’t I question?” I asked him quietly.
He looked away, a small smile on his lips. “I never took you for one who would be eavesdropping, bunny.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
He looked back at me. His eyes shuttered, but still, the look made my stomach swoop. “I know you well enough.”
He did? I looked away from him, knowing he probably did. “Are you going to tell me?”
He thought about it, and I genuinely thought he wouldn’t, but then he seemed to decide otherwise.
“We’re being followed.”
I looked behind me and saw the road empty in the gently falling snow. When I looked back, he was giving me that flat, unimpressed stare.
“What?” I demanded. “You said follow, so it’s natural for someone to look back.”
“If we were being followed so obviously, do you not think I would have dealt with it by now?”
I considered that. “Then how do you know?”
“Because someone is putting out feelers, looking for a girl with long dark hair, traveling with a woman and two men, heading south.”
I didn’t like that. “Me? Who would want to follow me?” And then I knew who, and I closed my eyes in understanding. “Vorn.”
“Vorn,” Nicco agreed.
“Shit.” I looked over my shoulder again. “He’s a long way south just for me,” I murmured, more to myself than to him, but he snorted, and it sounded loud in the quiet.
“Makes you wonder what he’s so desperate to get back.”
I turned back and saw the cool assessing stare. “You mention one word about bed or sleeping, and we’re going to fall out.”
He held his hands up mockingly in defense. “I never said anything.”
“With you? You don’t need to.”
The silence that followed was suffocating. The sound of horses coming our way made us both turn to look up the road. Baxley and Larana were heading back.
Nicco moved forward, and since he still had my horse’s reins, she went with him.
“All done,” Baxley said. The look he gave Nicco told me more than his words.
“What went wrong?” I asked them both.
“Why do you ask that?” Larana asked me.
“Because you have blood on your dagger that you haven’t wiped clean.”
“I told you to keep it clean,” Nicco said in a low voice.
“Well, if he hadn’t tried not to pay us, we would have,” Baxley countered. “But he knew—” His eyes flicked to mine, and he stopped.
“He knew to look for me?” I guessed, sharing a look with Nicco. “This could be a problem.”
“It’s already a problem,” Nicco said as he urged his horse to move. “It needs to end.” He looked around at us. “We move faster, next town, we draw him out.”
No one said anything, but the three of us followed him at the fast pace he set.
South of Virellan, the snow stopped.
Not gradually, it simply ended, the way Baxley had said it would.
One moment, the ground was dusted with the thin, decorative snow of the border region, and then we crossed an invisible line, and there was none.
Just ground. Actual ground, brown and cold and present in a way I hadn't seen since…
ever, possibly. I'd never seen ground without snow on it.
I stopped my horse.
The others stopped around me without complaint, which told me this wasn't their first time watching someone encounter the border.
I looked at the ground.
At the brown of it, the texture of it, the way it simply was without the white layer that had been between me and it for my entire life.
I had known that ground existed under snow.
That there was earth down there, rock and soil and the bones of the land.
I had pressed my hands into it often enough, drawing warmth through the frozen surface in the dark.
But I had never seen it.
I got off the horse. I landed as awkwardly as always.
Nobody said anything. I heard Baxley make a small sound that might have been surprise, then stop himself, and I was grateful for that.
I crouched and laid my palm flat on the ground.
It was cold, but a different kind of cold.
It wasn’t buried or frozen, just resting, waiting for warmth to guide it.
Under my hand, I sensed my magic hum softly, and this time I didn't suppress it.
I simply allowed it to acknowledge the difference.
The way the earth felt here contrasted with that north of the pass, north of Collharrow, and of all I had ever known.
Alive was the word. Not warm yet, but alive in a way the frozen north wasn't, in a way that promised something.
I straightened. Looked south. Then looked up.
The sky was not blue. Not yet. But in the center, directly above us, was a quality of light I hadn't seen since the column showed me what blue actually looked like. The edges of something. The promise of it rather than the thing itself.
I took a deep breath.
“Amarya,” Nicco said, from behind me.
“One moment,” I said.
I looked at the ground for another breath. Then I looked up again, noting the differences. No snowfall. No storm clouds.
“Amarya,” Nicco said again, but his voice was different. I couldn't name the difference. Quieter, maybe. Or just careful.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” I stood and turned, surprised he had gotten off his horse and was behind me.
Nicco helped me back onto the horse, and I urged the mare forward as we crossed into Florlunia. The ground remained brown, and the sky stayed its nearly blue hue. I kept my eyes up more than down, trying to memorize the quality of the light.
The trees were the first thing.
Not their shape. I'd registered that the branches reached upward without bracing, the bark that was more brown than the dark twisted trunks I knew, and more alive than anything north of the border.
What I hadn't expected was the sound. The branches had green shoots, ready to burst forth, and in the boughs of the trees, life lived.
Birds tweeted, calling out to each other in song. The trees were full of it.
I kept stopping to listen to them, hearing the absence of the wind trying to creep into every corner. Here, there was no wind, not like I knew it. A gentle breeze, if that, and all around me was song.
Stop listening to the air and make yourself useful, I told myself, and made myself useful.
The fire Baxley built threw warmth differently here, too. Not the desperate, contained warmth of a campfire in Crystallese. This warmth spread. Into the air, into the ground, into the grove around us, without meeting resistance. It was almost wasteful.
I sat close to it anyway — old habit.
The air smelled different. I'd noticed it at the border but hadn't had words for it.
Now, sitting still in it, I could begin to separate the components, something earthy and green beneath everything, like things growing slowly in the cold, resting but not dead.
Something cleaner than smoke. The smell of water that wasn't frozen.
I had spent twenty-three years breathing air that smelled of cold and nothing else.
This was not that.
Larana appeared beside me and sat without ceremony, wrapping her cloak around herself and looking at the fire with the expression of someone who had been here before and was glad to be back.
“Different,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good different.”
She looked at me sideways — something warm in her expression. “Wait until spring,” she said. “This is just the edge of it.”
I looked at the trees. At the branches reaching up. In the sky above them, dark now, the stars were different from Crystallese stars, somehow brighter and less cold-looking. “How long until spring?” I asked.
“Here?” She considered. “Not long. The season turns early in Florlunia. Another month, maybe less. You'll see it happen.”
I thought about the column. About flowers bursting through soil, about light that was warm rather than merely present. About all the things the land had shown me that I hadn't had context for yet.
Not long.
I looked back at the fire. I will be here when it happens.
That felt like something to look forward to.