This quiet made you aware of every sound your body made, the crunching of snow underfoot, the movement of the wind against your cloak, the soft thumping of your own heartbeat.
I wasveryaware of my heartbeat.
My magic was also no longer surging. That unnerved me even more. After days of almost boiling-pot pressure, of trying to hold onto desperate containment, carrying out small, careful releases in the dark, it had gone still.
I hadn’t depleted it. I’d not even been able to suppress it. But after playing chaos in my chest, it was now...waiting.
It was also paying attention, and that was more unnerving than anything. The pull within me felt like it was reaching. My magic felt like a lodestone, pointing me in the direction it wanted me to go and simply waiting for me to catch up.
I didn't know what to do with that. I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
I kept my hand on the strap of my pack across my chest and my eyes on the ground, and I concentrated on not reaching back toward whatever was pulling at me.
“You've gone quiet,” Nicco said. He'd moved up beside me earlier, close enough to speak without being heard by the others. I was always aware of him at the best of times, but the way my body felt right now, I wished he’d go back to the main group and leave me alone.
“I'm always quiet.”
He scoffed. “True. Okay, so you're quietdifferently.” He paused. “What’s wrong?”
I looked at the ground, knowing I could lie, knowing he’d know I lied, and then he’d just hound me until I told him. “The ice rocks.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t think they should be here,” I said. “Not like this. We have mines for that, right? But these are on the surface.” I chose my next words carefully. “Like something pushed themup.”
“Something?”
“Or maybe not something, maybe the ground shifted. Frost heave, maybe? Extreme cold forcing the rock.” I knew this was the kind of explanation that sounded reasonable, yet even saying it out loud felt wrong. “I don't know.”
He was quiet for a moment. Beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body even in this cold. “You’ve never been this far north,” he mused. “Maybe they’re always like this?”
“If they are, then why are we mining in the south of the kingdom and not up here plucking them off the ground?”
He didn’t answer.
I looked at him sideways. His eyes were fixed on the terrain ahead, watchful in that careful, unhurried way of his. Not scanning for threats, but something more focused than that. Looking for something specific.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He didn't answer right away. Long enough that I thought he wasn't going to. When he spoke, I felt a chill down my spine. “The same thing you are, I suspect.”
“I’m looking for the way home,” I muttered, desperate to deflect, and I saw his lips twitch.
“Aren’t we all, bunny.” He turned to walk back to the others. “Aren’t we all.”
It was a while later that we crested the final ridge as the light was failing.
I stopped to take it all in.
Below us, in a wide, shallow basin ringed by rock faces thick with gemstone seams that caught the last of the gray light and threw it back in pale, fractured color — blues and violets, a deep amber and a deep green I hadn't seen in any stone before — was Iskaeld.
It was not nothing, not like I’d been told, and it was not ruins. But it also wasn’tsomething.
The basin was perhaps half a league across. The mountain around it rose on three sides, while the fourth opened to the north, where the land simply continued into the white as far as the eye could see. At the center of the basin, the snow was different. Not packed or shaped by storms, but arranged in a pattern, almost like rings.
Again, in the rock faces were the visible seams of the colored stones. So many colors. And all seams of stone around the basin ran toward the center.
“By the gods, this is a stone merchant’s dream…” someone murmured behind me.
