Chapter 38 #2
"Well." The voice came from behind us. Unhurried. Almost amused. "Isn’t this cozy?"
I’d heard Vorn's voice only a handful of times, and the dark changed its quality. But I sensed the change in the air around us, the way it shifted as we felt the danger, and the square suddenly felt smaller than it had a moment ago.
I turned to face him.
Vorn stood at the square's entrance. Not alone — two of his people flanked him, sharing the same careful, cold-practiced stillness — but he was the one looking at us, with the expression of a man who had traveled a considerable distance for this very moment and found it worth the effort.
"Vorn." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "You're a long way south."
"That makes two of us, Amarya," he said.
He looked at Nicco. The look had a quality, not threatening, not even unfriendly.
Just assessing. The way you assess something you've been thinking about for a long time, finally seeing it up close, and realizing your opinion of it hasn’t changed.
"Mercenary," he said, with something in his tone I couldn’t name.
"Vorn," Nicco said. His voice was entirely flat. His hands hung loose at his sides, which meant nothing because they were always loose at his sides before they weren't.
"You move fast," Vorn said, still looking at Nicco as he walked closer. "For a man with no specific urgency."
"I have urgency," Nicco said. "I'm just quiet about it."
Vorn almost smiled. "I noticed." He looked at me then. "Amarya. It’s time to go. We have unfinished business."
"We don't," I said and felt myself move closer to Nicco without conscious thought. "I found your pass. I brought you to where you needed to be. The arrangement is done."
"The arrangement was that I'd let you go." He tilted his head slightly. "I haven’t let you go yet."
I felt Nicco shift beside me, just a small movement as he prepared himself. Because even without looking at him, I knew he was ready to fight.
"Vorn." I kept my voice even. "My job for you is finished. Whatever you think you need me for, find another trailfinder. There are others."
"Not like you." He looked at me with those steady pale eyes. "You know that."
"Vorn." I heard the plea in my voice. "You don’t need me. You found me here. You can track better than I ever could!”
He was not to be moved. “You know why I need you.”
I almost stepped back. “You of all people should understand why I can’t.”
Something shifted in his expression. Recognition. "I do," he said. And he meant it. I could hear that he meant it. "But what you carry affects more than just you. You know that now. Thiece told you."
"Thiece told me to know it myself first."
"And do you?"
The question landed in the square and sat there. Nicco was very still beside me.
I didn’t look at him, though I had to make the conscious effort not to.
"I'm learning," I said.
Vorn nodded slowly. Then he looked at Nicco again. That same assessing look, longer this time. Something in it shifted to a new quality, a recognition of a different kind. "I know your secret," he said quietly, directed entirely at Nicco.
What?
Silence fell heavily around us. Something in the air, in the quality of the moment, in the way Nicco's stillness changed its register from prepared to something else entirely.
I looked at Nicco.
His face was doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. The blankness was so complete and so deliberate that it was its own kind of answer.
"I don't know what you mean," Nicco said. His voice was very even.
"Yes, you do," Vorn said. Simply and without threat.
One breath.
Two.
Nicco moved.
It was fast. Not violent fast, not the explosive speed of the Hulgrim or the Frosttaken or any of the things we'd faced on the trail, but precise fast. Efficient fast. Deadly.
Vorn's people moved too, but they were across the square. They had been blocking the exit, and Nicco had no intention of leaving. It happened so quickly, so quietly, that if I hadn't been watching directly, I might have missed it.
I didn't miss it.
I saw it, saw the flash of a dagger in the low light, the quick slash against skin, and I stood in the square in the moonlight, and my limbs felt frozen like the water in the fountain.
Vorn's people looked at their leader. At what had happened. At Nicco, who had stepped back with that same loose-handed quality, as if what he’d just done meant nothing to him, as Vorn dropped to his knees, his hands at his throat, trying to stop the blood from spilling.
One of them took a step forward.
"I wouldn’t do that," Nicco said. Flat and final. A voice that left no room for argument.
They looked at each other. At Vorn. At Nicco. They weighed their chances. They left quickly, without further discussion, back through the entrance to the square and gone into the dark of Bloomreach.
Silence once more.
Vorn lay still on the ground in front of the frozen fountain square of a border town in Florlunia, and the moonlight caught the ice in the fountain basin and threw it back pale and cold, over his dying body. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I saw his last exhale.
"Amarya." Nicco's voice. Quiet but not gentle.
I turned to look at him. At his face, doing the careful blankness. At his hands, which were loose at his sides again.
"We need to move," he said.
I looked back at Vorn. At the man who had kidnapped me, had me carried over someone's shoulder, put his hand around my throat, and slipped it under my shirt. He had known Thiece, cared about his people, and understood what it meant to carry something the people of power wanted to control.
He wasn't cruel. I'd always known that. I mean, he was, in his way, but he wasn’t cruel just because he could be. There was a difference between the two that not many would recognize.
I had.
"Now, Amarya, we need to move now," Nicco said. “Before the watch finds us with a dead body.”
I moved.
We walked back to the inn at a pace that wasn't a run, because running was how you became memorable, and we couldn't afford to be.
Nicco set the pace, and I matched it. The streets of Bloomreach passed by, the amber windows, the ordinary life of a town that didn't know what had just happened in its square.
I didn't speak, and neither did he.
At the inn door, he stopped and turned to me.
"Upstairs," he said. "Pack. Quickly. We don’t have time. I'll explain to them."
"Are you going to explain to me?" I asked.
He held my gaze. Something in his expression, not the blankness, not the careful calculation, but something beneath them, older than them, something I'd been almost seeing for months and was now seeing clearly for the first time.
"Yes," he said. "I will."
He went inside.
I stood at the inn door in the cold Florlunia night, thinking about what happened at a fountain square, a dead man in the moonlight, and the words, I know your secret, directed at a man who hadn't flinched when he heard them. He’d killed.
He'd said he would explain.
Something had just changed, and I didn't know what happened next.
I took a deep breath, and I followed him inside.