“I told you to keep it clean,” Nicco said in a low voice.
“Well, if he hadn’t tried not to pay us, we would have,” Baxley countered. “But he knew—” His eyes flicked to mine, and he stopped.
“He knew to look for me?” I guessed, sharing a look with Nicco. “This could be a problem.”
“It’s already a problem,” Nicco said as he urged his horse to move. “It needs to end.” He looked around at us. “We move faster, next town, we draw him out.”
No one said anything, but the three of us followed him at the fast pace he set.
South of Virellan, the snow stopped.
Not gradually, it simply ended, the way Baxley had said it would. One moment, the ground was dusted with the thin, decorative snow of the border region, and then we crossed an invisible line, and there was none. Just ground. Actual ground, brown and cold and present in a way I hadn't seen since…ever, possibly. I'd never seen ground without snow on it.
I stopped my horse.
The others stopped around me without complaint, which told me this wasn't their first time watching someone encounter the border.
I looked at the ground.
At the brown of it, the texture of it, the way it simply was without the white layer that had been between me and it for my entire life. I had known that ground existed under snow. That there was earth down there, rock and soil and the bones of the land. I had pressed my hands into it often enough, drawing warmth through the frozen surface in the dark.
But I had never seen it.
I got off the horse. I landed as awkwardly as always.
Nobody said anything. I heard Baxley make a small sound that might have been surprise, then stop himself, and I was grateful for that.
I crouched and laid my palm flat on the ground. It was cold, but a different kind of cold. It wasn’t buried or frozen, just resting, waiting for warmth to guide it. Under my hand, I sensed my magic hum softly, and this time I didn't suppress it. I simply allowed it to acknowledge the difference. The way the earth felthere contrasted with that north of the pass, north of Collharrow, and of all I had ever known.
Alive was the word. Not warm yet, but alive in a way the frozen north wasn't, in a way that promised something.
I straightened. Looked south. Then looked up.
The sky was not blue. Not yet. But in the center, directly above us, was a quality of light I hadn't seen since the column showed me what blue actually looked like. The edges of something. The promise of it rather than the thing itself.
I took a deep breath.
“Amarya,” Nicco said, from behind me.
“One moment,” I said.
I looked at the ground for another breath. Then I looked up again, noting the differences. No snowfall. No storm clouds.
“Amarya,” Nicco said again, but his voice was different. I couldn't name the difference. Quieter, maybe. Or just careful.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” I stood and turned, surprised he had gotten off his horse and was behind me.
Nicco helped me back onto the horse, and I urged the mare forward as we crossed into Florlunia. The ground remained brown, and the sky stayed its nearly blue hue. I kept my eyes up more than down, trying to memorize the quality of the light.
The trees were the first thing.
Not their shape. I'd registered that the branches reached upward without bracing, the bark that was more brown than the dark twisted trunks I knew, and more alive than anything north of the border. What I hadn't expected was the sound. The branches had green shoots, ready to burst forth, and in the boughs of the trees,lifelived. Birds tweeted, calling out to each other in song. The trees were full of it.
I kept stopping to listen to them, hearing the absence of the wind trying to creep into every corner. Here, there was no wind,not like I knew it. A gentle breeze, if that, and all around me was song.
Stop listening to the air and make yourself useful, I told myself, and made myself useful.
The fire Baxley built threw warmth differently here, too. Not the desperate, contained warmth of a campfire in Crystallese. This warmth spread. Into the air, into the ground, into the grove around us, without meeting resistance. It was almost wasteful.
