He considered it longer than I was comfortable with. “Not if you're honest,” he said at last.
I looked at the woman, her pale eyes fixed on me, her attention complete and exact.
I had been lying about what I was for so long that I wasn't entirely sure I remembered how to be honest about it.
And that, I thought, was going to be a problem.
Chapter 28
The woman'sname was Thiece.
I learned this not because anyone introduced us — introductions didn't seem to be a custom here — but because I heard Vorn use it when he spoke to her in that language I didn't know, but the word Thiece was said more than once to describe something other than her.
Thiece watched me the way I watched the weather. With the patient attention of someone who understood that the weather did what it did and that your feelings about it were irrelevant.
I found it deeply unsettling and refused to show it.
They gave us food. Not generously, the portions were carefully measured, the careful kind of sharing that came from people who knew exactly how much they had and how long it would last. But they gave it, and it was warm, and I ate without asking what it was because that was a question I'd learned not to ask in the wilds of Crystallese, and I saw no reason to change the habit now.
Vorn's people ate with them without ceremony, settling into the space with easy familiarity. There was history here between Vorn's settlement and this one. Not a comfortable history. The kind that had been negotiated.
I sat apart from them all and observed.
The community moved in a way unlike any group I had seen before. Free of the wasted motion most people never noticed they had. Every gesture had a purpose. Nothing was wasted. Even the children moved this way, which was the strangest part. Children usually moved with the carelessness of people who hadn't yet learned that the world had limits. These ones didn't.
A small girl — perhaps five, perhaps less, it was hard to tell — crouched in the snow three feet from me and looked at me with the same pale, particular attention as Thiece.
I looked back.
“Hello,” I offered with a small smile.
She tilted her head slightly, reminding me of a small bird, and like a bird, she said nothing.
“I'm Amarya.”
Still nothing.
“You're staring,” I told her. “Did you know it’s rude to stare?”
It was what Nicco had said to me, and here I was repeating his stupid question. A pang of regret moved through my chest. I hoped they were far south of here. The thought of him here… I didn’t want to think about it. Would he understand their way? Would he sit back and watch like I was?
Would he, too, feel that there was a puzzle here that needed solving?
The girl blinked once, slowly, and then she reached out and touched the back of my gloved hand with one finger. Quick and certain. As if confirming something.
She stood and walked away.
I looked at my hand.
My magic stirred, just faintly, just enough for me to notice. Not the pull of Iskaeld but something quieter, something that felt like recognition. I'd felt it before, in small ways. The warmth I drew from the earth on cold nights. The glyph drawn on mypalm to sharpen sound. Magic responding to intent, to need, to the deliberate shape of a thought.
But this… this was different. This time my magic had respondedtoher.
To a child's finger against the back of my gloved hand, quick, certain, and gone before I could name what had passed between us. As if she'd knocked on a box to see if it were hollow, and my magic had answered before I could decide whether to let her know it wasn’t empty.
I pressed the stirring in my chest down. Firmly. The way I always did, with the resolve of someone who had been doing this long enough that the action had become reflex rather than effort.
But in this place, this settlement beyond the mountains, it took longer than usual to settle.
