I'd ignored it the way I'd been ignoring a lot of things lately, which meant imperfectly and with increasing difficulty.
The soldiers were barely hanging on, and I told myself it was concern for my charges that was making me uneasy.
I also knew I was lying.
The ice rocks appeared first.
Small ones at first — catching the flat gray light from the exposed rock faces on either side of the trail, a glint here, a cluster there, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. I was looking for it. I'd been looking for it since Baxley mentioned it.
Then larger. A seam of pale blue running through a granite outcropping to the east, thick as my forearm, the color of ice held up to light. Then another, different, deeper, almost violet, embedded in the rock face as if something had pushed it up from below.
I slowed without meaning to.
“Trailfinder,” Nicco said from behind me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
Behind me, I heard the soldiers start noticing. The low murmur of people encountering unexpected wealth in a place they'd expected to find only cold and more cold. Someone asked how heavy it would be to cut a chunk of rock and carry it back. Someone else started speculating about its worth, and a third voice started calculating in the pleased, proprietary tone of a man already mentally spending something that didn't belong to him.
“Don't touch them,” I said, without turning around.
The murmuring stopped.
“Why?” Sergeant Gralen asked.
I didn't have an answer that would satisfy them, or one I could share. How did I tell them that the pull in my body had become sharp and insistent the moment the ice rocks appeared?How did I tell them that the sense of urgency within me was not instinct but more like an instruction not to touch?
I couldn’t. I just knew they couldn’t touch them.
“Because we don't know what they are yet,” I said instead. “And in Crystallese, things that look like gifts usually aren't.”
That was true enough that no one argued. And I didn’t have to look to know that eager, greedy hands had been drawn back inside the warmth of their cloaks.
I kept walking.
The pull intensified with each step.
Not in a dramatic way. It didn't announce itself like discomfort, hunger, or any sensation I could name. It was subtler than that.
The ice rocks didn't help.
Each new seam I passed added to that pull. With every one we passed, I felt a small increment of pressure inside me. Whatever was inside me, frozen for a long time, was very slowly giving way to something else.
The blue seam. Then the violet. Then, a deep amber vein appeared in a rock face to my left, running upward and out of sight. When I passed it, the pull sharpened so abruptly that I missed a step and had to correct.
I'd never felt anything affect my magic like this before.
My magic had always been mine. Something I reached for when I needed it, something that responded tomyintention. What was happening now was different in a way I didn't have the words for.
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum briefly, the way I did when I needed to confirm it was still contained.
It was. Barely. Like trying to hold water in cupped hands while walking.
I kept moving.
The pull got stronger as we climbed. Stronger to the point of painful.
The terrain here was unlike anything farther south, not just in temperature or exposure, but in the quality of its silence. Crystallese was always quiet in nature, but this kind felt intentional.
