Page 174 of Winter's Echo
I didn’t look at him, though I had to make the conscious effort not to.
"I'm learning," I said.
Vorn nodded slowly. Then he looked at Nicco again. That same assessing look, longer this time. Something in it shifted to a new quality, a recognition of a different kind. "I know your secret," he said quietly, directed entirely at Nicco.
What?
Silence fell heavily around us. Something in the air, in the quality of the moment, in the way Nicco's stillness changed its register from prepared to something else entirely.
I looked at Nicco.
His face was doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. The blankness was so complete and so deliberate that it was its own kind of answer.
"I don't know what you mean," Nicco said. His voice was very even.
"Yes, you do," Vorn said. Simply and without threat.
One breath.
Two.
Nicco moved.
It was fast. Not violent fast, not the explosive speed of the Hulgrim or the Frosttaken or any of the things we'd faced on the trail, but precise fast. Efficient fast. Deadly.
Vorn's people moved too, but they were across the square. They had been blocking the exit, and Nicco had no intention of leaving. It happened so quickly, so quietly, that if I hadn't been watching directly, I might have missed it.
I didn't miss it.
I saw it, saw the flash of a dagger in the low light, the quick slash against skin, and I stood in the square in the moonlight, and my limbs felt frozen like the water in the fountain.
Vorn's people looked at their leader. At what had happened. At Nicco, who had stepped back with that same loose-handed quality, as if what he’d just done meant nothing to him, as Vorn dropped to his knees, his hands at his throat, trying to stop the blood from spilling.
One of them took a step forward.
"I wouldn’t do that," Nicco said. Flat and final. A voice that left no room for argument.
They looked at each other. At Vorn. At Nicco. They weighed their chances. They left quickly, without further discussion, back through the entrance to the square and gone into the dark of Bloomreach.
Silence once more.
Vorn lay still on the ground in front of the frozen fountain square of a border town in Florlunia, and the moonlight caught the ice in the fountain basin and threw it back pale and cold, over his dying body. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I saw his last exhale.
"Amarya." Nicco's voice. Quiet but not gentle.
I turned to look at him. At his face, doing the careful blankness. At his hands, which were loose at his sides again.
"We need to move," he said.
I looked back at Vorn. At the man who had kidnapped me, had me carried over someone's shoulder, put his hand around my throat, and slipped it under my shirt. He had known Thiece, cared about his people, and understood what it meant to carry something the people of power wanted to control.
He wasn't cruel. I'd always known that. I mean, he was, in his way, but he wasn’t cruel just because hecouldbe. There was a difference between the two that not many would recognize.
I had.
"Now, Amarya, we need to move now," Nicco said. “Before the watch finds us with a dead body.”
I moved.
