The first weeksouth 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 fallingin 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.
