The silence this time was different. Longer than I liked. “It will be.”
I stood in the dark corridor and contemplated ‘it will be’ and felt the magic hum quietly in my chest alongside the thing I still didn't have a name for, both of them patient, both of them waiting.
I went to my room without making a sound.
In the morning, Nicco woke us early and told us the job needed an early start. We didn’t get breakfast. Baxley nodded in greeting as he helped me onto the horse, and Larana grumbled that it was insufferably early. I said nothing and watched his face and thought aboutit will be.
It felt as if the city watched us leave.
I didn't look back.
Chapter 37
The road southfrom Glassfyr felt different now that I knew we were leaving for a reason we weren't discussing.
Not different in any way I could point to because the road was the same, the horses moved at the same pace, and the cold pressed in from the same directions with the same indifference. But I moved through it differently with the awareness of someone who had overheard something they weren't meant to hear and couldn't unhear it.
It will be.
I rode at the front. Nicco rode behind me, which was new. He'd been beside me or ahead of me since the day I got my own horse. Behind felt deliberate.Everythingfelt deliberate now.
Baxley came alongside me before midday.
“Everything okay, Amarya?” He looked me over, as if checking for ailments.
“I’m always okay,” I said with a soft snort. I saw his look and smiled at him. “I’m fine, Baxley. Just still adjusting to this version ofsnow.”
He smiled a little. “I bet you are.” He lost his smile, and we rode in silence for a moment. “Has everything been too overwhelming?”
I thought about that. About the Verei Kahn building, the hum in my chest, the door opening behind us, and Nicco moving me away with speed, but not enough to draw attention. I thought about the corridor last night, and I didn’t know what their conversation meant.
“I think I’m still trying to figure that out.”
He nodded and stayed beside me without pushing it, which was very Baxley, knowing when a conversation was done, and there was no need to fill the silence.
We stopped at a village that night. It was small and practical, and it was Crystallese in all the ways the north of the country still was. Suspicious of strangers, economical with warmth, the inn's common room smelled of oats and smoke and the familiarity of a place that kept its doors shut against the cold.
I felt more relaxed here.ThisI knew.
I sat in the corner with a clear view of the room and the exit, watching the others settle, and I thought about Virellan, the courier job, and the documents we were carrying south.
Documents. We were traveling with papers? Ledgers? What did the papers say?
I thought about what documents a merchant in the upper city of Glassfyr might need to deliver to a contact in a border town. Money requests for payments? I thought about the kind of merchant who had a contact in a border town and required discretion. Discretion usually meant something illicit.
In my experience, anyway.
Larana sat beside me with two cups and pushed one toward me without asking. I took it. We sat in the comfortable silence we'd developed since the baths, and I thought about what I knew, what I didn't, and how to ask what I needed without being obvious.
“Larana.”
“Hmm?”
“The documents we're carrying.”
She looked at her cup. “What about them?”
“Do you know what they are?”
