Page 129 of Winter's Echo
“Your bath?” She looked me over carefully. “If you’re shy, keep your cloak around you, but it’s late and very few of us are awake.”
I watched as she walked to the other spring. Without embarrassment, she dropped her cloak, and in the dark, I sawher silhouette crouch and then, with a faint splash, she entered the water.
I was untying my laces eagerly, peeling off layer after layer. I even unbraided my hair and, with my earlier hesitation gone, slipped into the warm water. I bobbed there for a moment, with no bottom beneath me, my feet kicking lightly to keep me afloat. With a sigh, I dunked beneath the water, letting it warm me from head to toe.
I came up for air and did it several more times.
Treading water, I tipped my head back, letting my hair float in the water, and looked at the sky.
Not the flat gray of the trail, not the pressing dark of the storm, the tunnel, or the chamber below Iskaeld. Just sky. Cold and deep, scattered with stars shining in the ink-black sky like the ice rocks in Iskaeld's stone.
I hadn't looked at the stars in a long time. I hadn't had time to look, or I'd had time but hadn't given myself permission, or storm clouds had kept them hidden. But they shone brightly here. Clear, because the valley's warmth kept the worst of the weather from settling here.
The water held me. I floated, letting it, and felt the weeks of cold, walking, and containing myself seep out through my skin and dissolve into the warmth around me.
My magic was quiet. Content, almost. As if the heat had satisfied something it had long sought.
I let myself relax.
Across the water, I heard the woman move, a small splash, then stillness. She wasn't talking. I wasn't talking. We were two people in separate springs in the dark, sharing the valley's warmth without claiming it from one another.
I thought about how I ended up here. Vorn had waited for me to return. He knew I would, and he’d been prepared to take me from the others, from Nicco.
Even here, covered in warmth, my mind kept drifting back to him.
I thought about the way he'd looked at me across the dark outside Vorn's shelter, steady, unreadable, and present in that specific way he was always present. He’d seen me choose to say nothing that night, and he’d made the same choice.
Nicco and I made the same choices, and I didn’t know if that worried me or pleased me. I didn’t want to be like him. Did I?
I let myself think about him, just for a moment, just for the length of a breath held and released. “Enough,” I scolded myself.
I dunked beneath the water and didn’t let myself come back up until all I could think about was the need to breathe. My head broke the surface, and as I gasped for air, all thoughts of the mercenary were gone.
I got out, shivering as the cold attacked, and wrapped in my cloak, I ran back to the shelter and tried not to flinch as I put my dirty clothes back on. The bath had worked wonders, and I fell asleep, still damp, with wet hair around my face, and my sleep was dreamless.
I rose before dawn, as I always did. Old habits didn't care where you were. The trailfinder's instinct for the turn of the dark.
The settlement was not fully awake. Two people moved at the far edge of the valley, and I watched them from the doorway of my sleeping space. Not a watch exactly, more like what Larana did, a specific vigilance that wasn't general but targeted. They were looking north.
Everyone here looked north. Which was strange, because the danger to them was south.
I thought about what Vorn had said.Like goes to like.About the column drawing things toward it. About the creatures coming from somewhere north of Iskaeld, from the direction of this valley and whatever lay beyond it.
I thought about the large tracks in the snow at the basin's edge, nonhuman yet moving with purpose toward the tunnel entrance.
I thought about what had visited the column in the dark.
What were they watching for? Did it have a name? Had they seen it?
The two watchers at the valley's edge didn’t move from their posts. They looked casual in their watch, but I had no doubt they were aware of everything happening in front of them and beyond.
This valley just kept offering up question after question. I pulled my cloak tight around my shoulders and went to find Vorn and some answers.
He was awake and unsurprised to find me awake, which I was beginning to understand was simply the condition of Vorn. Unsurprised by most things, patient with the rest.
“You want to leave,” he said, before I'd said anything.
“I need to go back to Iskaeld,” I said. “Thiece told me to.”
