Page 160 of Winter's Echo
“More?” Baxley asked.
“Is that allowed?”
He flagged someone down before I'd finished the question.
The fire had burned lower by the time the second bowl was empty, and the common room had thinned into the kind of late-night quiet that was more presence than noise. Somewhere, someone was playing an instrument I didn't recognize, something with strings, its sound low and warm and entirely unlike anything I'd heard before.
I listened to it intently without meaning to.
“You've never heard a lute,” Nicco said curiously.
“Is that what it is?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the musician in the corner. She was a young woman, playing with the focused ease of someone for whom the instrument was simply an extension of thought. “It's nothing like anything we have.”
“What do you have?” Larana asked.
I thought about it. “Drums. Mostly. And a kind of pipe. Things you can play with cold hands.” I looked at the lute player's fingers, quick and certain on the strings. “You couldn't play that in my Crystallese. Your fingers would seize.”
“Practical,” Baxley said. He wasn't mocking it. He was observing.
“Everything has to be practical,” I said honestly. “Or it would never last.”
Larana looked at me with something that might have been understanding. “Cinderia is similar. Not cold, but autumn canbe brutal. We have forest fires, and the land is dry and ready to burn. In our own way, everything in the kingdom is built for survival too.” She looked at the fire. “Beauty is what happens when survival is handled.”
I thought about Glassfyr. About a city that had taken the most brutal landscape in the known world and made it magnificent on purpose.
“We make beautiful things,” I said. “At home. We do. We just make them out of ice.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Baxley raised his cup. “To ice,” he said, with complete sincerity.
Larana raised hers. I raised mine. Nicco looked at his cup for a moment, then raised it too.
“To ice,” he said with a pensiveness I didn’t like.
We drank.
They explained to me that Glassfyr was separated into two cities. The upper city, where all the wealthy lived, and obviously, the king in his castle. Then there was the lower city. Where we were now was where the less wealthy lived.
They all looked wealthy to me. Larana mentioned avoiding the upper city, and the others nodded. I didn’t ask.
Later, when Baxley and Larana had gone up, and the common room had emptied almost to nothing, Nicco and I sat at the corner table with the fire low, the lute player gone, and the familiar quiet of a large space that had been full and wasn't anymore.
I should have gone up, but I stayed.
“What's Darysia like?” I asked. I hadn't planned to ask.
He looked at me sideways. “Why?”
“The column showed me green leaves and blue skies, the land of summer. I don't know if that's what it actually is.”
He was quiet for a moment, watching the fire. “Hot,” he said. “The kind of hot that feels like pressure. Like the air itself is pushing down.” A pause. “It’s loud. People talk more when they're warm.” Another pause. “The sky is?—”
He stopped. He looked like he regretted being so open.
