What was happening now was something different.
Something that didn't feel like a tool.
Something that felt like a tide.
I pressed my hand against the wet ground where the snow had melted and drew the glyph. I didn’t know what it meant. I think it was for closing, or maybe for containing, perhaps small. I didn’t know. I just knew it stopped things, like melted snow spreading farther.
I felt the magic respond eagerly, the way it always responded now, as if it understood what I was asking and was desperate to do as I needed.
When I stood, the cold had already refrozen the ground that had melted. I brushed more snow over it, hoping the evidence was gone and nothing was left to see.
I turned back toward camp.
Nicco was standing at the camp's edge.
Not on watch. They’d set no watch. Nicco simply stood, arms crossed, at the precise point where the firelight stopped and the dark began.
I knew it was him. Earlier, I’d thought I’d know him anywhere. Well, in the dark in the north of Crystallese, I wasn’t wrong. From the broad set of his shoulders, from the way he stood with his feet apart, arms crossed, head slightly bowed, looking at me, assessing the threat he was sure I posed.
I wanted to run. I didn’t. I walked back steadily, putting no hurry into my step.
I didn't explain myself, and he didn’t ask. I passed him close enough to touch, and I kept my eyes forward and my expression empty.
He didn’t say a word.
I lay down by the fire, stared at the embers, and listened to my heartbeat slow. What in the shades had that been?
Three days to Iskaeld. I knew that now. I didn’t know how, but I knew.
Three days to figure out what was happening to my magic, and what exactly Nicco had seen tonight and chosen, again, to say nothing about.
Pretty soon, he’d ask his questions, and I was running out of time to come up with an answer.
Chapter 22
The trek northhad been hard on all of us.
We’d been delayed by a day when a snowstorm from absolutely nowhere had formed and kept us pinned to one spot for longer than I thought we’d survive. A wall of white materialized, and we’d barely had time to get into formation before it was on us.
The huddle was tighter this time. We'd all learned from the skarveld. Nobody argued over positioning, complained about proximity, or made a sound about whose elbow was in whose ribs. The soldiers pressed in without being told. When Baxley pulled the two nearest men closer without ceremony, they let him, because everyone understood by then that warmth was shared and cold was personal, and this was not the moment for pride.
I ended up between Larana and Edran, not how I'd have chosen to arrange things, but it turned out to be fine. Larana radiated heat as if she'd been built for it. Edran, to his credit, had stopped shivering within moments of us forming up, the body learning what the mind already knew, that motion and proximity were survival tools, not comforts.
They switched as if they’d been doing it their whole lives, and as before, I was pushed back to the front when I tried to rotate. In doing so, I ended up beside Nicco, as if I were his own personal responsibility. I knew not to argue with him, though I resented his manhandling as much as last time.
The storm lasted half the night. Miraculously, we all still had our fingers, toes, and other extremities, though I was sure I caught more than one soldier checking under his clothes to make sure their dicks were still there.
We’d taken camp, and everyone slept much closer than they had when we first started this trail, shivering even in their sleep. My magic was bubbling happily in my chest, and as they slept, I filtered out slivers of warmth and prayed to the gods that they all slept through it.
In the morning, no one said anything, and none of them were alert enough to realize they’d been touched by magic during the night.
The land changed shortly before we reached Iskaeld.
Not radically. Not in any way I could point to and name with certainty. Just… different. The way your home feels when someone has broken in and left before you arrive. You know it’s your home. The same components, the same furniture, everything where you left it. But you know someone was there, and they had no right to be. That was how it felt.
Something had been here and now wasn’t, or it was here now when it hadn’t been before. Either way, it was unsettling, and I couldn’t relax.
I'd felt it since yesterday. A low pull in my midsection, a persistent awareness of something just outside your peripheral vision that moved when you moved and stopped when you stopped. Was this how animals felt when they were being hunted? Stalked by the Laranas of this world, whose bows were always ready to shoot.
