Page 162 of Winter's Echo
I couldn't help looking at everything.
We moved in pairs. Baxley and Larana headed to the merchant, while Nicco and I went to a meeting point afterward. This was Nicco's arrangement, delivered in the same flat, no-nonsense tone he used for all arrangements. I didn't ask why he wanted us paired. I'd stopped asking why about most things. The answers either came in their own time or didn't come at all.
We walked through the upper city in the easy quiet of two people who had run out of things they were ready to say.
I was watching the street — the people, the stalls, the way the ice-light caught the towers above us — when I felt it.
Not heard it.Feltit.
The hum in my chestchanged.
Not dramatically. It wasn’t the same surge when I was at Iskaeld. Not that same pressure that boiled within me the weeks before, where I thought I had to let it out. It was just a shift inquality. The way the sound of the wind changes when something moves between you and its source.
I slowed, my eyes searching for the reason, my ears sharp, listening for the reason.
“What?” Nicco asked immediately.
“I don't know.” I looked around, taking in everything and nothing. The street was ordinary, filled with merchants, shoppers, and children running for reasons children run. There was nothing visibly wrong. “Something feels?—”
I slowed to a stop.
The building was three storefronts ahead on the left. Stone, like everything in Glassfyr, reached four stories high and spread wide. It had a stillness the other buildings lacked. A symbol above a large ornate wooden door, carved into the stone lintel, not painted, the kind of thing meant to last.
I didn't know the symbol, but I knew what it meant.
I'd never seen a Verei Kahn institution before.
I’d known they existed and was aware there was one in Glassfyr. The hum in my chest sharpened. Something inside that building was aware of the world outside it — something trained to be aware.
Or maybe it was the building itself.
My hand went to my sternum.
“Don't react.” Nicco's voice was very quiet, very even. His hand curled around my elbow. “Come on.”
I lowered my hand. “Nicco?—”
“Keep walking.”
“I am walking.”
“No. You stopped. Let’s move faster.”
We were past the building before I'd fully processed being in front of it, Nicco's hand at my elbow, not gripping, just present, steering slightly. The hum in my chest peaked and began to ease, the way a sound eased when you moved away from its source.
I breathed.
We were walking away when the door opened behind us.
Again, I felt it before I heard it. The shift in air quality, not wind or weather. Something else. The hum in my chest spiked, sharp and sudden, and my magic surged upward before I could stop it, pressing against the inside of my sternum with the urgent insistence of something that had found what it recognized and wanted to answer.
I pressed my hand flat against my chest. Hard.
Nicco stopped walking.
He turned, but not toward me, toward the street behind us. His eyes moved with that practiced, unhurried efficiency, cataloging. Then he looked at me.
“Walk,” he said, his voice low and commanding. “Now. Left at the next corner.”
