I looked away, and Larana fell back to walk beside the group of men who followed me.
I took in the sight of them.
Nicco was at the front of the group, where he'd been all morning, setting the pace behind me without discussing it withanyone, giving me the distance I needed. Never mind, it was distance from him as much as anything.
Captain Marson had stopped trying to assert precedence somewhere around the second day since the night of the Hulgrim attack and was now simply walking two steps behind him with the expression of a man who’d made peace with his circumstances.
I watched Nicco longer than I should have. He was looking west. Like Larana, the man was always scouting ahead for trouble. His hood was drawn, and his neck warmer covered the lower half of his face, leaving only his eyes visible. His sword rested against his back, the pommel within easy reach if he needed it. His gray travel cloak was mottled with white, the snow and ice of the territory leaving their mark on the Darysian male. He walked through the snow with a confidence he shouldn’t have had. His large body moved effortlessly, with a grace many native sons of Crystallese would envy.
He hadn't said anything since the confrontation that I knew of. Definitely not to me. He might have said something to Baxley, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem like much of a talker beyond the bare minimum required to keep people moving north in subzero temperatures. Or when he was in the mood to piss me off. The fact that he seemed to be doing my job right now was one of those times when he’d pissed me off without trying.
He handled silence the way he seemed to handle everything, without acknowledgment, as though it were simply the natural state of the world and had nothing to do with him.
I couldn't work out if he was angry or indifferent.
He was always watchful. Always processing. If itwasthere, the anger would be filed away somewhere practical, taken out only when it could be useful to him.
That was the part I kept returning to. Not the confrontation. Not Vorn's men, the woman, or Baxley's unrepentantpracticality. The part I kept returning to was the moment in the dark outside the shelters when I'd turned and found Nicco already there, already watching, and already decided.
He’d seen her? Or at least knew where she was, and he’d decided to say nothing.
The same as me.
I was sure that Nicco had made his decision without any sense of guilt, whereas I was sure the shame of saying nothing would stay with me for many years to come.
And then Baxley did what both of us had quietly decided not to do. And that just sat wrong. The guilt weighed me down. Not because I thought Baxley's choice was right, but because I wasn't sure anymore that mine had been right.
I turned northward and resumed walking. I could dissect it in my mind a hundred different ways, but it would make no difference. I couldn’t change the past, and agonizing over it wasn’t going to change it either.
I was still thinking about it when my foot found the uneven ground beneath the snow — a rock, or a root, something that shifted unexpectedly — and I stumbled.
Not badly. Just enough to break my rhythm, one hand going out automatically to catch my balance, fingers meeting snow.
The magic came instinctively.
Not summoned, just there, reflexive as a flinch, a pulse of heat that spread from my palm into the ground beneath me and radiated outward in a small, quiet circle before I caught it and drew it back inside me.
I straightened. Looked at my hand in disbelief.
The snow on my glove had melted, and the ground where I had fallen was dark and wet but already beginning to refreeze in the cold air.
I looked up.
Nicco was watching me from the front of the group, about twenty feet away. He hadn't moved. Hadn't said a word. His eyes were level and unreadable, and they stayed on me for exactly three seconds before he turned his head left and kept scouting the tundra.
I couldn’t move. My body was still. My magic wasleakingout of me without the aid of a glyph.What in the shades was happening?
The sound of the soldiers grew closer, and I stepped forward, my sweep wide as I turned, covering the area with snow, checking to ensure there was no evidence of my mistake. I walked north, and I did not look at my hand again.
Some things were better not examined too closely. I said it often, and I was becoming less and less sure I believed it.
“Amarya!”
I turned back, a knot in my stomach at what I would face, but it was only Captain Marson.
“Captain?”
“How much longer before we can rest? The men are tired.”
