I smile at him. I worry that Cain’s worried, but he does know how to make me smile. I just hope he’s not using it to cover up his own concerns.
“We’d better get going then,” North says. “Let’s pack and move out. You said it was cold?
“Yeah, and the kind of snow that means it’s cold year round.”
“You’re going to help us make the portal this time,” North adds.
“What? I’ve never helped make a portal before! How many times do I have to tell you guys that I don’t know how to do magic?”
“You don’t have to ‘do’ magic, Kiara,” North says calmly. “Youaremagic. It’s just who you are. You’ll be able to do it, don’t worry.”
I don’t understand how North can have such faith in me and my natural abilities and no faith in himself. I want to tell him that, but I doubt that right now is the time for that particular conversation to come up.
I’ll just hold on to it for later.
We get all packed and prepared for the cold this time. I’m not about to go onto Mt. Everest again in just my ‘ready for Las Vegas’ outfit.
We get equipment too. No telling what might come at us. This mage is powerful, obviously, and he didn’t seem to be doing this against his will so he probably won’t be all that pleased to see us. Or give up Roanac’s secrets.
Once we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be, Cain helps me to open up the portal. He grabs onto my hand with one of his, and then stretches out his other hand toward the center of the room.
“Think about the room that you saw,” he instructs. “Think about where it was. What it looked like, felt like, smelled like—and where you feel in your bones it would be on a map. In the world.”
I nod and close my eyes, picturing that exact spot. I try to conjure up the feeling of it, not just the way it looked but the way it felt, the cold, the sound of the howling wind.
Cain’s grip tightens in mine, and I feel a tug inside of me, like energy is flowing from me, up from my stomach down my arm and into Cain and out the other side of him.
The air shifts with the tell-tale feel of a portal, and the room grows colder as a blast of cold wind hits us. I open my eyes.
In front of us is the portal. It’s just like all the others, but in a way it feels special to me. I know that’s probably stupid. But I’ve never used magic like that before. I made this portal, I helped to do this. It makes me wonder, for a brief moment, what else I could do with a little training.
We bundle up and grab our gear, then step through the portal out into the snow. It snaps shut behind us, taking us away from the safe house, our one safe haven, and we’re left in the middle of a white, cold world.
“We’re on Mount Belukha,” Cain says, looking around. “Or toward the base of it, anyway.”
I peer through the snow, and see what seem to be unusual dark lumps up ahead. “North, Raven? Can you guys see this?”
Raven and North stride up to join me and follow my gaze. “It’s a village,” Raven says.
I knew that between the two of them, one of them would have enough superior vision to see what all of those lumps were.
“Could be good,” North says. “Could be bad. They might be innocents who could help us, or they might be people in on it.”
“They’ll be suspicious of us,” I point out. “Either way.”
“Then we’ll be prepared,” North assures me.
I look around, trying to see if there are any signs of other people having opened portals to get here. Now that we’re out of the safe house, we can be tracked. Roanac can find us. And he has to be tracking us, right?
“Would Roanac be able to tell I used my Sight on him?” I whisper to Cain as we tramp through the snow toward the village.
The footprints we leave are deep, but the snow begins to cover them up almost immediately. Give it an hour and the tracks will be obliterated. That’s kind of reassuring in case of anyone trying to follow us later, but makes me worry if someone came here ahead of us to plan an ambush. We wouldn’t be able to see their footprints to warn us.
“What if he was tricking me and showing me something so that we’d come here and be trapped?” I continue.
Cain shakes his head. “That’s not how the Sight works, babe. Whatever you saw, you saw. It’s real. And he can’t tell.”
“So could someone be using their Sight on me?” To learn my past the way I’m learning Roanac’s?