Larana, who watched everything with the flat patience of someone who had seen worse and expected more, who sharpened her blade like a meditation, who had stood in a skarveld without flinching, had looked at me and looked worried.
Not for herself. Forme.
I hadn't expected that. I hadn't known what to do with it in the moment, and I still didn't. It sat in my chest alongside the pull Iskaeld had left behind, two things that didn't belong together and had nowhere else to go.
“She'll be found soon,” Vorn said, reading me correctly. “Your camp isn't far.”
“I know,” I said, my voice faint.
“Then stop looking at her and let’s move.”
I looked at him instead. His pale eyes were steady and patient and entirely without cruelty, which was almost worse. A cruel man you could hate cleanly. Vorn just looked like a man who had done what was necessary and would do it again.
I understood that. I hated that I understood it.
“You’ve made enemies here you might not be able to outrun, Vorn.”
He smiled. “I made an enemy of your Darysian the night he thought I took you to my bed.” He smirked. “Let’s go.”
My Darysian. I almost laughed.
Vorn's men moved me forward. I went with them. I didn’t struggle, and I didn't look back.
I had to hope Larana was okay. I had to hope she told them I went as a trade and had not left them easily. That was important.
I walked into the cold with Vorn's people and tried very hard not to think about Nicco’s fury when he found out I had allowed myself to be kidnapped.
I had to hope he knew enough not to follow. He’d get them all killed. I wasn’t worth their lives. I knew Nicco knew that. I had to hope that Larana woke up to tell him it wasn’t my betrayal that took her down.
Because I didn’t trust him enough not to think this was somehow my fault.
Vorn and his men moved in complete darkness. Darkness so profound that I struggled to make out their shapes. At one point, I was lifted and flung over someone’s shoulder like a sack of goods.
Being upside down only disoriented me more. My hands were tied far enough apart that I couldn’t draw any glyph. Not that I would use my magic on them. Not when I didn’t know how many there were. Magic would only ensure my death.
I tried to calm down, tried to will myself to be rational. In my four years of traveling alone in Crystallese, no one had ever kidnapped me before. Tried to have sex with me? Many times, but I’d dissuaded them easily. Daggers had that effect.
But kidnap me? That was a first. I was going to stab Vorn in the eye for this.
His people moved fast.
Faster than I expected from people who lived in this cold, which meant they moved through it the way I did — not fighting it, not enduring it, just using it. They didn’t stop, putting enough distance between us that no one other than them or me could follow quickly.
I could have told them not to bother, but I kept my silence.
After the first night, they put me down for a little while, and I walked alongside them. Vorn didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t utter a word. Then I was picked up and carried again.
I didn’t know why. I had nowhere to run where they couldn’t catch me.
Their steady, unhurried pace covered ground unfamiliar to me, but they knew it well.
I tried to memorize it. It was hard when you were upside down, with my hands bound and my heart doing something irregular in my chest that I was choosing to call anger rather than fear.
It was probably both.
After a while, they set me down. Not gently. I hit the snow feet first and stumbled, and the man who'd been carrying me caught my arm before I went down, which was either consideration or pragmatism. I suspected pragmatism. An injured trailfinder was useless.
I straightened and looked around.
