Nicco’s expression was so smugly victorious that I wished a waterspout would drench the bastard where he stood. “You done?” he asked me, arrogance dripping from every word.
“You’re not a likable person,” I told him, ensuring my pack sat right on my back, ignoring the wide grins on Baxley’s and Larana’s faces.
“You don’t need to like me, bunny. You just need to follow.”
I started walking. “Wrong again, asshole. I’m the trailfinder.Youfollowme.”
He had the audacity to laugh. One of these days, I would wipe that smirk right off his face.
The pulse in my chest faded as we climbed.
I stopped at the threshold — the exact point where the basin ended and the ridge began — and stood for a moment with one foot on either side of it.
On the basin side, a faint warmth. The column, reaching upward through rock, dark, and distance. Something that knewI was there and reached for me, but I didn’t think it was to draw me back.
I didn’t think so anyway.
On the ridge, cold with a flat gray sky and endless white expanse going north. The east wind picked up, indifferent to human struggles.
I felt the feeling within me fade.
Not all at once but by degrees, like the warmth leaving a fire that was burning down to its last. The first to fade was the echo, that sense of two things vibrating at the same time to the same beat. Then the openness, that feeling of just being, uncontained. Then the pull itself, direction becoming directionless, the lodestone within me losing its north.
By the time the ridge was behind us, the pulse was nothing but a low hum.
I didn't look back.
I could always come back once I had fulfilled this trail and left my charges. I could explore it all on my own.
With no hard-eyed mercenary watching my every move.
Yeah, in the lighter winter months, I would come back.
Chapter 25
We leftIskaeld the way we'd arrived — on foot, in the cold, and without ceremony.
The difference was that arriving felt like moving toward something, while leaving felt like being removed. I noticed it within the first hour and spent the second hour trying to convince myself I was wrong.
I wasn't wrong.
The formation had shifted. Not dramatically. No one had issued new orders or explicitly changed position. It had just happened, the way things do when a group of people share a space long enough to develop instincts about it. The soldiers were spread wider than before, flanking rather than following. Baxley was at the rear. Larana was on the left.
Nicco was beside me.
Not behind me, where he usually walked when he wasn't at the back.
Beside me, matching my pace, close enough that I was aware of him the way I was always aware of him — constantly and with increasing irritation. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the terrain ahead with that distinct, unhurried focus, reading thelandscape the way I did, which should have been reassuring and wasn't.
I was the trailfinder.
I led.
That was the arrangement. That had always been the arrangement. Yet here we were, walking side by side. When I adjusted my route slightly east to avoid a patch of snow that didn't feel right underfoot, Nicco adjusted with me without asking why, and the soldiers followed suit, and I had the sudden, disorienting sense that the chain of authority had shifted somewhere between the tunnel and the ridge, and nobody had told me.
I thought about Baxley's words. The gap between what he said and what he meant. I thought about the column, and the pulse, and the tracks in the snow that shouldn't have been there. I thought about evidence, what kinds ofevidencerequire a group this size to collect, and what exactly Nicco planned to do with it now that he had it.
I kept walking.
