I didn't tell Vorn I wasn't planning to return to the settlement. That felt like a conversation for after, when there was an after to have it in. I had fulfilled my part of the arrangement — I'd found the pass, reached the community, and confirmed they were alive and stranger than any people I'd encountered north of Eirhollow.
Vorn's word was that he'd let me go once I got him through the pass.
I intended to hold him to it, just from a different direction than he'd been expecting.
Seryn moved through the valley in the same quiet, unhurried way of his people. I matched his pace, watched the terrain, and tried not to think about what Thiece had said.
You've been so busy hiding it that you haven't looked at it clearly since you were a child.
I didn’t know what I was. I wasn’t even sure I knew what I carried. But I'd made my peace with keeping it, along with the weight of the silence. Hiding it so well, I was annoyed that she had seen it and recognized it for what it was.
What I hadn't done — what I was beginning to understand I'd never done — was to look at it directly. To understand it. To know it the way Thiece said it needed to be known, by me first, before anyone else decided what to call it.
She made it sound like more than magic, but I didn’t know whatelsethere was other than magic.
The column would tell me something. I didn't know what. I wasn't sure I was ready for it.
But I was going anyway.
Seryn set the same grueling pace I did. We reached the pass before the light had fully settled into daylight.
Seryn moved through it without hesitation, which meant he'd been through it before, and that meant there was more traffic between this valley and Iskaeld than Vorn had suggested. I was beginning to doubt everything Vorn had said to me. He hadn’t needed me to navigate this trail at all.
Bastard.
On the far side of the pass, the landscape opened into the approach to Iskaeld, and I felt it immediately. Not the urgent pull of before or the desperate directional pressure of the past weeks. Something quieter. Warmth where there shouldn't be any. A recognition of something in the air.
My magic lifted toward it, gently, and I let it. Just slightly, just enough to be felt in return.
Seryn glanced at me sideways and said something in his language.
“I don't understand,” I told him.
He considered this. Then, carefully, in his accented voice, he said, “It knows you're coming.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Does it always know?” I asked. “When someone's coming?”
Seryn was quiet for a long moment, picking his way through the terrain with that unhurried certainty. “It knows some,” he said finally. “Not all.”
“The ones that are unknown,” I said softly.
He looked at me then, fully, directly, in a way that reminded me of Thiece's pale gaze. His eyes were dark, not pale, yet the quality of his attention was the same. Complete and unguarded.
“Yes,” he said. “Those ones.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, and my magic reached toward Iskaeld with each step. I let it go, and it felt like setting down something I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten it had weight.
A storm did its best to dissuade us, but Seryn and I simply kept going. He was taller than me and broader, too. He proved to be an excellent windbreaker as we carried on.
On the second day, the basin appeared below us as the day settled into its flattest gray.
I stood on the ridge, looking down at the rings in the snow. Recognition moved through me as I stood there.
Seryn stopped beside me.
“I wait here,” he told me, his eyes alert and keen as he scanned our surroundings.
