I rode with my eyes wide, taking it all in, and I felt Nicco lean over and take the reins from me.
Stalls were selling things I didn't have names for. The buildings were four and five stories tall, which I understood intellectually but hadn't quite believed, and I stared at them, unblinking, as we passed. My head craned back to look at them over my shoulder as we passed.
Children were playing in the cleared snow of a courtyard, moving with the energetic carelessness of children who didn't know what the north was.
A woman selling something hot from a cart on a corner, steam rising from it in the cold air.
A man carrying something too large for one person, but managing anyway. People not making way for him or offering help.
Life here was very, very different from what I was used to.
I had known this existed. The south was real. Trade came from it, and people traveled through it. I had known Glassfyr was the capital and that capitals were large, full of people, and different from anywhere I'd lived.
Butknowingand seeing were not the same thing.
“Alright?” Nicco asked, quietly, the word close to my ear.
“Yes,” I said automatically and then thought about it. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Hold on.” He pulled back on the horse’s reins. I was still gawking at everything when I felt the hand on my leg.
I looked down, and he was looking up. I blinked.
“Why did we stop?”
Baxley was beside him.
“Come on.” Wordlessly, they helped me down, and then Baxley was helping me up into the saddle in front of Nicco.
“I have a horse,” I said weakly, but I was already leaning back, feeling his chest against me, taking the support he silently offered as his hand settled on my hip, anchoring me in place.
He didn't say anything else. He just guided the horse through the streets with the ease of someone who had been in cities before and knew how they worked, and I looked at everything that passed and let myself look, without pressing anything down.
Just for a moment.
Just for the length of a city block in the ice-light.
And they let me. They let me take it all in and didn’t judge as my eyes got wider and wider, and my head swiveled left and right, as I tried to see it all.
We found an inn that Nicco seemed to know well. It was larger than anything I'd stayed in. Three floors, a common room that could fit half of Eirhollow's market square, and a fire so large it had its own dedicated wall.
I stood in the doorway, staring at it.
“Move bunny,” Nicco said, from behind me.
I moved.
Baxley handled the rooms with the ease of someone who had done this in cities before. Not negotiating, just stating, which apparently worked here in a way it wouldn't have in Collharrow. By the time I stopped gaping at the fire, we had two rooms and a table in the corner, and something hot appeared in front of each of us, smelling like nothing I had ever encountered.
I looked at it. The gravy was thick, the meat pale but sumptuous, and carrots and onions chopped into chunks. Chunks. Not slivers like I was used to.
“Eat it,” Larana said. “It won't bite you.”
“How do you know?” I asked. But I took a tentative bite.
It was warm and rich and complicated in a way that I didn’t know flavorcouldbe complicated. Crystallese food was fuel. Itkept you alive, it kept you warm, and it got you to the following morning.
This was something else. This was food that had been thought about. I ate all of it and looked at the empty bowl for a moment, my disappointment real.
