"We will talk about it after we leave here," I said, setting aside the experiment and focusing on the more immediate problem.
We completed the quest at the guild, handed over the herbs, and earned a little extra from the monster meat and materials Kierra had collected. She had been quiet the entire walk back, still carrying the guilt.
We ended up at an inn called The Sleeping Stag, an upscale place that charged forty copper per night per room. Unfortunately only a single room with a double bed was available. We took it.
After washing off the blood and mud I returned to the room to find Kierra sitting on her bed in the inn robes, looking out the window. She had no change of clothes of her own.
The view outside was genuinely something. Open plains stretching toward a dense forest, and beyond the forest, mountains. But calling them mountains felt insufficient. These were something else entirely, formations so immense they had pushed themselves through the cloud layer, their upper halves swallowed completely by white. Half the mountain simply did not exist in the visible world.
They were called the Hollow Heights. The forbidden mountain region bordering the Arkenfall kingdom. Never scaled, never conquered. The forest standing between the city and those peaks was dangerous enough on its own, every monster within it operating at a level that discouraged casual exploration. Nothing in the books I had read mentioned what lay beyond the range, or whether anything lay there at all. The mountains formed a near-perfect circular formation, which only added to how little sense they made geographically.
I walked over and stood beside Kierra.
"What are you thinking about?"
"The mountains," she said. "One day I will climb them."
"You want to climb those?" I looked at her. "Why?"
"On the other side there is something I need."
"You mean there are people living beyond those mountains." None of the books had mentioned that either.
"Yes."
"If you have never climbed them, how do you know that?"
She looked at me with a briefly confused expression, then stood and closed the window. The cold that had been drifting in was cut off. The fireplace pushed warmth back into the room.
"Nolan," she said softly, her voice dropping like a secret already half given away. "Can I trust you the way I trust the princess? Will you keep what I tell you?"
"Yes," I said. I meant it. "Whatever it is."
She was quiet for a moment, her fingers working together in her lap. "I need to reach the other side of those mountains before next winter. There is something waiting there, something that can bring my clan back together."
I moved closer and sat beside her. "How?"
"I do not know the path yet." Her shoulder nearly brushed mine. "Only that we will find it. My ability showed me that much."
I looked at her. "You saw us there? Together?" A beat. "You can see the future."
She nodded, not quite meeting my eyes.
"Anyone's future?"
"One person." Barely above a whisper. "Once every three years." She finally looked at me. "That day in the kitchen, when we first met properly. It was you, Nolan."
Something shifted in the room.
"What did you see?" I asked, quieter than I intended.
"Think of it as the only thing you can do to repay me for everything I have done and will do for you."
She was not asking lightly. Whatever she had seen, it had made her certain that I was the only path to it. And given how smoothly things had gone since I arrived, I already knew how much of that was her doing quietly from behind everything. I could not walk away from this.
A knock at the door interrupted us. The food had arrived.
The innkeeper's wife set everything out on the table and left without a word. We ate slowly and the conversation continued between bites. I told her I would help, but she needed to tell me more about herself first.
She was born into the Golden Foxkin clan. The other clans were the Ember Foxkin, Dusk Foxkin, Wild Foxkin, and Ash Foxkin, each carrying their own distinct ability passed through bloodline. The Golden Foxkin could see the future. The cost was their lifespan. Each vision carved years away from whoever used the ability. Fewer than a hundred Golden Foxkin existed in the entire world.
Kierra had used the ability twice. Once for the princess, and once for me.
She had seen the princess's future first and understood that someone would arrive to heal her. She told the princess enough to prevent her from acting rashly when I appeared, but kept the details vague so as not to disturb what was coming. When she saw my future, there was something in it that completed a gap left open in the princess's vision. The two were connected in a way she had not expected.
She had been careful not to let anything specific slip about either future. A careless word in the right moment could unravel everything.
The thing she was seeking was the Crown of the Foxkin Queen. A relic that allowed its wearer to see futures without sacrificing lifespan. More than that, the one who wore it would be recognized as queen of the foxkin and would begin a transformation into something longer-lived by centuries. The previous queen had died in the Hollow Heights. The location of the crown had gone with her, and only the maiden chosen to be the next queen could find the original path.
The chosen maiden was always born with two tails.
I looked at Kierra.
"If the previous queen made it there," I said slowly, "then a path exists."
She looked back at me with an expression that said she had been waiting for me to reach that conclusion on my own.