“If you wanted certainty. You should have hired a different trailfinder.” I studied the approach. “The snow on the left slope is newer than on the right. Wind comes from the northeast up here, so the left is the sheltered side that snow didn't blow in. It fell. That means the left slope is more stable.” I pointed. “We goright of center, hug the right wall but not too close, and move quickly through the narrowest section.”
Vorn looked at the pass. Then at me. “You got all that from looking at it once?”
“I got all that from years of reading snow,” I said. “Looking at it was just confirmation.”
He almost smiled. “Lead the way.”
We moved through the pass in single file, quickly and quietly, the way Vorn's people seemed to do everything. I went first because that was my role and I'd accepted it, and because going first meant I was the first to see what was on the other side.
The right wall was cold granite, close enough to touch, and I kept one hand trailing along it as we moved. Not for balance, but to read. Rock spoke if you knew how to listen. Where water had run and frozen. Where the stone had shifted under the weight of what sat above it. Whether the path beneath our feet was trustworthy or merely patient.
This wall was patient in the way of something that had been waiting a very long time and had almost run out of reasons to wait.
I moved faster.
We were through before the light shifted noticeably, which was fast for a pass this unforgiving. I heard at least two of Vorn's people exhale when we cleared the far side, and I didn't mention it because I understood.
The terrain beyond the pass opened into a valley I had no name for. Wide and deep, sheltered on three sides by the same mountain range we'd just crossed, open to the north where the land continued in the precise way of places that had decided they would simply go on forever and hadn't been told otherwise.
The valley floor was snow-covered and flat, and… I frowned.
“It's warmer,” I said.
“Yes,” Vorn said.
“Why is it warmer?”
“The mountains block the worst of the northern wind.” He paused. “And there are hot springs. Throughout the valley floor.” He looked at me sideways. “Like the waterspouts at Iskaeld, but calmer.”
I looked at the valley. At the wisps of steam rising from a dozen points in the snow, pale against the dark sky. At the way the snow itself was patchier here than anything I'd seen since Eirhollow.
“People can actually survive here,” I said. The surprise in my voice was genuine.
“They do more than survive,” Vorn said, and his voice carried something I hadn't heard in it before. Something that wasn't pride but sat close to it. “Come.”
We walked for a good while. The man beside me knew the way, which meant I was no longer the one finding the trail, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Then I saw the first light.
Not firelight, the quality was wrong for that, too steady, too blue-white. It came from the ground, or near it, from one of the openings where steam escaped. As we got closer, I understood. The water carried something. Whatever lived deep beneath this valley had left its mark on the water that rose through it, the way iron left its mark on well water or peat left its taste in a spring. Something old. Something the water had been passing through longer than anyone had been here to notice.
The light it gave was faint. Not enough to walk by.
Just enough to be beautiful.
I stopped walking.
Vorn waited.
“That's not natural,” I said.
“Everything here is natural,” he said. “It just doesn't look like what you've learned to call natural.”
I looked at him. He was watching me with that steady, weathered patience, and for the first time since he'd put his hand around my throat in the dark and smiled at my fear, I thought,He's not the problem here. He's just a man trying to keep his people alive in a world shifting beneath them.
I knew something about that.
“Come,” he said again, more quietly. “They'll have seen us by now.”
“The community?”
