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This magic confounds her.

“Are you all right?” he asks. His eyes track down her arm, and Dawsyn follows his stare, finding where the veins have become prominent, the muscles strained, the flowers crushed in her fist.

She promptly releases them.

“Fine,” she says mildly, though she feels anything but. “I was finding some plants for Baltisse and her concoctions.”

Primrose could be poisonous, for all she knows. It likely is.

“I don’t mean to disturb you,” he defers. “I heard your shout as I was passing.”

Dawsyn nods, discomfort prickling her skin.

“You need not be so harsh with yourself,” Rivdan says then, and he sounds hesitant. “I hope I don’t speak out of turn. We do not know each other well. But Idoknow Ryon. Known him since he was a wayward urchin running about the Colony. He would not follow someone he did not believe in.”

Dawsyn does not answer. The truth is, she has wondered whether Ryon, whetherallof them for that matter, were merely delusional for following her.

“I’ll leave you be, prishmyr.” He turns to leave, his size casting shadows over the forest around him.

“Rivdan?” Dawsyn calls.

He pauses. “Yes?”

“What does prishmyr mean?” she asks. Dawsyn has only heard the man use that name with her.

Rivdan smiles. “It means ‘princess.’”

If it were another, Dawsyn would assume it an insult, a sneer. But Rivdan, with his quiet manner and gentle temperament, seems incapable.

“I’m no princess,” she says quietly, not wishing to scold him.

Rivdan only shakes his head. “I’ve never seen another princess in the flesh,” he admits. “But I imagine they’d pale in comparison.”

Dawsyn feels that same discomfort once more, making her skin feel too small for her. “May I ask something else?

“Of course.”

Dawsyn sighs slightly and meets his curious gaze. It is a kind face. It invites others in. Dawsyn notices the green flecks in his eyes and struggles to imagine him as an Izgoi warrior. He does not seem at all menacing if you can look past his bulk.

“Why did you agree to come with us?” she asks bluntly. “Flying over the Chasm was… hasty, at best. Dangerous. Why would you wish to join such a cause?”

Rivdan’s lips quirk, his beard with it. “I would have thought the answer obvious.”

“Not to me.”

Rivdan sighs. “Well, the first part of my answer is that I did not agree with the Council majority vote. It seemed a very great cruelty to leave people trapped on the Ledge, where they were no longer needed for Vasteel’s fodder. It sat quite badly with me,” he murmurs darkly. “Pitting our own existence above theirs. It felt similar to the ideals of the brutes, when we had fought so hard and long to dispel notions of status in the Colony. For years we had preached about equal opportunity. And then when we had what we wanted, the entire slogan was set aside at the mention of the Ledge,” Rivdan shakes his head. “A people just as oppressed as us – more so. I reassured myself that at least they would not be stolen from their side of the Chasm and stripped of their iskra. It was the only thing that made leaving them there tolerable. A passive kind of cruelty, at least.” Rivdan gives her an apologetic shrug. “But Adrik snatched even that much away. After Ryon revealed it, it felt as though all other choices were lost. I didn’t think so much about my options, prishmyr,” he says. “There only seemed to be one. I won’t live under the rule of another tyrant.”

Dawsyn purses her lips. “I think therewasanother choice,” she says. “Though, you, perhaps, are too noble to venture it.”

Rivdan bows his head at the compliment. “I’m yet to prove myself, prishmyr,” he says. “But if you lead the way, I will try to live up to such a compliment.” With that, he leaves her on the path, his frame disappearing around a bend.

Dawsyn is left with his voice ringing in her head, right next to the waning echo of the iskra, and the stain of primrose on her palm.

“Mage? I need you to teach me how to use this godforsaken magic.”

Dawsyn stands in the open doorway with her ax in hand. The door, which she’d opened without announcing her arrival, had given such a loud crack against the wall that Esra shouted something that sounded like “holy mother of dick.”

Esra sits naked in Baltisse’s wash tub, his knees extended from the water. At Dawsyn’s entrance, he sloshes water over the side, narrowly missing Baltisse, who in turn curses and glares viciously at them both.