“Yes.” He looked back at the tundra. “You did.”
The silence between us felt uneasy, which was expected. It had a unique quality: two people standing amid the ruins of a shared choice, realizing they couldn't blame each other without also blaming themselves.
“Did you try to stop him?” It was important that I knew this, but I didn’t know why.
“No.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
A pause. Fractionally too long. “No.”
I stared at him. “And you were okay to risk us all?”
He turned to look at me properly then. His face was cold, not with anger, just with the flatness of someone who was being honest and knew it wouldn't be received well. “What would you have had me do, Amarya? Tie him up in the tent like she was?”
She was tied up? I pushed the thought aside.
“You could have told me.”
“So you could do what?” His voice was even. “Talk him out of it? You couldn't have. If you'd tried, he'd have done it anyway, and you'd have lost his trust in the process.” He held my gaze. “At least this way, you're only responsible for not knowing. Keep up the disapproval, and you’ll lose his respect entirely.”
I felt the ground shift slightly under me. Not physically, just the realization of someone who understands they've been handed their ass with no apology.
“You think that my ignorance of his actions is my protection?” I asked carefully. “And the declaration of killing everyone who comes after me? What was that?”
His expression shifted slightly, too fast to read, before becoming the cold mask again. “A deterrent. Nothing more.”
He walked away before I could respond, moving to the front of the group with the easy authority of someone who had never once questioned his right to be there.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then I felt it. The cold, and beneath the cold, something else. That low hum in my chest that I spent considerable energy ignoring. My magic had been there since the confrontation started, pressing up against the inside of my ribs, waiting to be used for something useful.
I pressed my fingers against my sternum briefly, firmly.Not now.
It subsided. Reluctantly.
I looked at my hand, slowly separating my fingers within my glove, flexing them. Beyond them, the snow on the ground within a small radius around my boots had melted slightly, barely a handspan, a ring of wet ground in the white that could have been anything. Boot heat. The warmth of nearby bodies.
I stepped forward and covered it with fresh snow.
“Trailfinder.” Captain Marson appeared at my shoulder. “Are we safe to continue?”
I looked north. The land was empty and still. Behind us, the smoke from Vorn's settlement was already behind us.
“We're safe to continue,” I said.
Whether that was true depended entirely on what Vorn decided to do next, whether the woman Baxley had freed was already dead in the snow somewhere, and whether whatever waited at Iskaeld was better or worse than what we'd just left behind.
I didn't say any of that.
I just started walking, my eyes already searching for the trail to follow.
Chapter 19
Nobody spokefor the first league.
Nor did they try to catch up with me. That was okay. I didn't feel like saying anything that might be misinterpreted, and from the quiet around us, neither did anyone else. We headed north in the calm of people who had just gone through something they couldn't undo and were still figuring out how to feel about it.
