I sat close to it anyway — old habit.
The air smelled different. I'd noticed it at the border but hadn't had words for it. Now, sitting still in it, I could begin to separate the components, something earthy and green beneath everything, like things growing slowly in the cold, resting but not dead. Something cleaner than smoke. The smell of water that wasn't frozen.
I had spent twenty-three years breathing air that smelled of cold and nothing else.
This was not that.
Larana appeared beside me and sat without ceremony, wrapping her cloak around herself and looking at the fire with the expression of someone who had been here before and was glad to be back.
“Different,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good different.”
She looked at me sideways — something warm in her expression. “Wait until spring,” she said. “This is just the edge of it.”
I looked at the trees. At the branches reaching up. In the sky above them, dark now, the stars were different from Crystallese stars, somehow brighter and less cold-looking. “How long until spring?” I asked.
“Here?” She considered. “Not long. The season turns early in Florlunia. Another month, maybe less. You'll see it happen.”
I thought about the column. About flowers bursting through soil, about light that was warm rather than merely present. About all the things the land had shown me that I hadn't had context for yet.
Not long.
I looked back at the fire.I will be here when it happens.
That felt like something to look forward to.
Chapter 38
The town was called Bloomreach,the kind of name that, if it were in Crystallese, you’d say was for a place that decided to be optimistic about its future.
I’d said that to Baxley, and he’d laughed and told me to get used to hearing a lot of nature-associated towns and villages.
Bloomreach sat not far from the Florlunia border. It wasn’t large enough to be important, nor small enough to be overlooked. That was how they explained it to me. As we got closer, I knew it was the kind of town that trade passed through rather than stopped in, and the town was built around that role.
We arrived as the light was failing, when towns like this were at their most useful as evening approached. Inns open, fires lit, no one looking too closely at who came in from the road.
I knew these places well. I’d always felt most relaxed in these kinds of towns. No questions. No one’s eyes lingered on you long enough to remember. You were just another faceless person moving through.
We stabled the horses, took rooms, then met downstairs to eat. Larana had caught me counting my purse and asked if everything was okay. It was. I was just used to frugal living, and it was clear to me that my companions were not.
We had finished eating, and Baxley and Larana were talking among themselves. Both looked content to rest at the table for a while longer.
“I’m going to walk through the town,” Nicco said as he stood. He gave me that sideways look that was as close to an ask as I was going to get.
I pushed back from the table. "I'll come."
Baxley said nothing. Larana looked between us. Neither offered to join us.
“Alright then,” Nicco murmured, and we left them to their ale and their own company.
“I’ll get my cloak?—”
“You won’t need it,” he told me, already heading for the door.
Outside without a cloak? What a strange thought.
