I'd said those words before, recounting what I'd been told and heard, a description traveling along trade routes and around fires as long as I could remember. I'd said them without a clear image behind them. The words were placeholders for something I couldn't picture.
Now I could see it.
It was built into the mountain, as the community beyond the pass had built into the valley, not on the land but with it, the pale stone of the structures rising from the gray stone of the mountain itself, so that the joins were deliberate seams rather than intrusions. The towers did exactly what they were said to do. In the flat gray of the late afternoon, they caught whatever light was available and threw it back, in a blue-white light that the ice gave everything this far north.
It blazed like fire. Like cold fire.
That was the only accurate description. It was neither warm nor welcoming in any conventional sense. It was magnificent in the way that took your breath away.
“The castle,” I said to no one in particular.
“Yeah, they knew how to build for dramatic effect,” Larana said, from behind me.
I looked at it for a long moment. At the towers, the pale stone, the sheer magnitude of all that it was. I looked at the streets I could just begin to make out, they seemed wider than anything I’d seen before, properly paved, the snow on them cleared and tidy in a way that was almost offensive after months of the wild kind.
And I watched the people as we passed. More people than I'd seen in one place since… ever, probably. All of them were moving with that same not-afraid-of-the-cold quality. They were wrapped against the cold, but in a way that told me they’d never experienced the killing kind of winter like I had.
I had never been in a city before.
The realization arrived plainly, without drama. I'd been to Eirhollow, Halegrave, Collharrow, Skallfen, and every village, trading post, and waypoint between them and the northern tundra. I'd been to places where the population numbered in the dozens and places where it numbered in the hundreds.
I had never been somewhere that counted in the thousands.
“You've gone quiet,” Nicco said.
“I'm always quiet,” I said, fighting the smile back as I spoke.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh if he'd let it get that far. “You're differently quiet.”
I didn’t hold the smile back that time.
I looked at Glassfyr. At its towers and its ice-light and its managed snow and its streets full of people who didn't walk like every step counted to get out of the cold. “It's so big,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess it is.” He sounded like he hadn’t thought about it before.
“Do we have to go in?”
I felt him pause. “We need supplies.”
“Can't we get them somewhere smaller?” Did he hear the apprehension in my voice? I’d tried to hide it.
Another pause, longer. I felt his attention on the side of my face, that specific, particular attention. “Does it frighten you?”
I considered lying, then decided against it. “I don't know what to do with it,” I said softly. “I don't know how to read it.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Then you read the people,” he said. “Same as terrain, just a different vocabulary.”
I looked at the city. On the streets, I couldn't navigate by snow or wind, or the angle of the rock. “You'll be with me,” I said, and it came out less like a question and more like a need for reassurance.
“Yes,” he said. Simply. No qualification.
Which was its own kind of answer.
We rode through the northern gate as the light was failing, and the city seemed to envelop us in itself, swallowing us among its people and the streets and the noise andeverything.
The ice-light was everywhere at once and up close. The blue-white caught on every surface where snow had settled, the towers overhead bouncing the light across the city as the day faded. The streets smelled of smoke, but light smoke, not the heavy smoke from hearths that I was used to. This was almostdelicate. There were plenty of animals, but people had them as pets, dogs on leashes that held their noses higher than their owners. The aroma of hot food was strong, a hundred different scents all at once, and the people… The people. The collective smell of thousands of lives happening in proximity assaulted my nostrils.
The clean bite of snow was gone entirely. In its place, everything — perfume, animals, food, bodies — all at once.
