“I hate you all,” I said, through gritted teeth.
They had the decency to smother their laughter.
Chapter 35
The city announceditself before I saw it.
Not with noise. Glassfyr lacked the market buzz of Eirhollow, where trade was open, and everyone had something to prove. This was different, with a lively energy I hadn't experienced before.
The road changed first.
South of Collharrow, the trails I'd known all my life gave way to something more deliberate. A road, properly built, the kind laid with intent rather than worn into existence by years of boots and wagon wheels. The snow on it was different, too. Not the wild, unpredictable drifts of the open tundra, not the wind-scoured surfaces of the high passes.
Someone cleared this road.
Regularly, recently, with the efficiency of people who understood that a road to the capital had to be navigable because the capital required things.
I noticed the change beneath the horse before I consciously understood what it meant.
“Maintained road,” I said.
“Yes,” Nicco said, from beside me.
I filed that away and kept looking at everything.
The trees came next.
Not the frost-killed, wind-battered things of the north, not the sparse formations I'd used as landmarks for years of trail work. These were managed. Spaced deliberately on either side of the road, their lower branches cleared, their shapes tended into something still wild, yet wild in a controlled way that spoke of hands and time and an understanding that even wilderness could be made to serve.
Snow sat on their branches in the way of snow that fell gently and stayed, rather than snow that was driven by wind into whatever position it could find.
Decorative, almost. The thought was strange enough that I turned it over twice before I felt it was right.
Snow as decoration.
In the north, snow was simply what the world was made of. Up there, it didn't decorate anything. It covered, buried, killed, and sustained. It was the ground beneath your feet, the wall of the world, and the thing that made every decision consequential.
Here it was… pretty.
I wasn't sure what to do with that.
Glassfyr appeared in stages.
The outer settlements first, small clusters of buildings that sat closer to the road than anything in the north would have dared, their windows lit with warm yellow light, their doors whole and functional, not reinforced against the kind of cold that tried to get in and stay. People moved between them without the hunched, purposeful urgency of Crystallese people in the open. They moved like people who were cold but not afraid of it.
I watched a woman cross the road ahead of us, carrying a basket and in no hurry, and thought she had never once had to calculate the exact cost of warmth against the exact distance to shelter.
That was the realization I had at that moment. It wasn't about the road, the trees, or the neatly falling snow. It was about the people. The Crystallese people moved as if each step was a choice, as if the land was a constant negotiation in which you were always involved. Here — still in Crystallese, still winter, still part of the same kingdom — the negotiation had different terms.
I wasn't sure if I found that unbearable or restful. I was pretty sure it was neither.
As we rode, I saw plants. Flowering bushes that still looked frozen, but alive.
I’d never seen a growing plant before. I stared at the small pink flowers far longer than I should have.
And then there was the city itself.
Glassfyr, the city the old kings had built so high into the mountain that its towers caught the ice-light and cast it back like broken glass, blazing cold in the dark.
