Page 140 of Winter's Echo
I thought about that. About what it meant for a man on a mission to separate from the official party, to send the soldiers south with their census results and their gemstone surveys and their record of a Frosttaken town called Skallfen, and to head north instead with only one companion and no explanation.
About what it meant that they’d both come after me, without apparent hesitation.
“Thank you. Both of you.”
Baxley mumbled something. Nicco flicked a glance my way but said nothing.
“What are you going to do? When we get back to a town or village. With what you know.”
Nicco’s steps didn’t falter. He kept walking, and so did Baxley.
“I don't know yet,” Nicco eventually said.
“Will you let me go?”
“You’re not our prisoner,” Baxley said with a surprised laugh.
But his wasn’t the answer I needed to hear, and Nicco didn’t answer at all. And it was the most honest reply he’d ever given me, yet somehow that made it worse because he hadn’t said a word.
At the end of the second day, I convinced them both to let me take watch. Baxley kicked his friend in the ankle and then made a show of lying down. Nicco sighed loudly and did the same.
Baxley was asleep within moments of lying down, which was a talent I had always envied. Nicco settled on his back with hisarms crossed and his eyes closed, and I had no idea whether he actually slept or merely made a convincing show of it.
I sat at the edge of the small camp we’d made and looked south and thought.
Not about the column. Not about Thiece or Vorn or the community beyond the pass, not about the images that had rushed through my mind when I'd pressed my hand against the stone. Those things had happened, were true, and I was carrying them the same way I carried everything… quietly, without having decided yet what to do with them.
I thought aboutI don't know yet.
In the weeks of watching Nicco make decisions — about who did what, the soldiers, the watch, Baxley's action with Vorn's woman, Skallfen, Iskaeld — I had not once seen him say he didn't know. He might not explain. He might not share. But he alwaysknew.
I don't know yetwas not his register.
Which meant either he was lying, or something had changed in what he thought he was dealing with, making his plans uncertain.
I pressed my fingers against my sternum. The magic hummed, small and quiet and patient.
Known by you first, before anyone else decides what to call it.
Someone would decide what to call it. I knew that. The world I lived in did not leave things unnamed for long. The Verei Kahn existed precisely to name things, classify them, and determine what was sanctioned and what was not. Whatever I carried, whatever the column had shown me about myself, would be named eventually.
The question was who named it first.
And what that naming would cost me.
I looked south. The dark was complete out here, beyond the reach of the dying fire, the kind of dark with no edges or landmarks, requiring you to simply trust that the world was still where you'd left it.
Behind me, Nicco's breathing was slow and even. Asleep or pretending. I couldn't tell. With him, I was beginning to understand that I might never be able to tell.
That was the thing that sat in my chest alongside the magic, patient and humming and impossible to press down.
Not him. Not what I might or might not feel for a man who watched me too carefully, came north when he didn't have to, and saidI don't know yet, as if it cost him something.
Just the fact of not being able to tell.
That was what I couldn't unknow.
Chapter 32
