Page 112

Dawsyn presses her hands to her eyes. “Surely, whatever needs to be said will grow no more dire come night.”

Ryon groans. “Baltisse,” he beseeches. “Do not delay any further.”

“Delaywhat?” Dawsyn asks, dark suspicion finally setting in.

Baltisse draws her gaze from the window for the first time since Dawsyn entered. “I believe I have uncovered the… the curiosities of your magic,” the mage confesses. “As well as your afflictions.”

Dawsyn stills. She feels her pulse jump into her throat, the hairs on her neck rise. “You know why it rejects me?”

Baltisse nods, but her hesitancy is clear. Whatever she means to reveal, Dawsyn doubts it will bode well for her. “I have suspected for a time, though I couldn’t be sure. There is very little about magic that is sure.” Baltisse bites at her lip. “I asked you to perform a very particular piece of magic today, in that clearing, for a reason. It was a risk, I’ll admit. I knew it may very well inflame that war that ensues inside you. But it gave me the answer I needed, despite the detriment.”

“Speak plainly,” Dawsyn says, her stomach churning.

Baltisse lifts her chin, galvanising herself. “The last reigning monarch in your family was a man named King Launce Sabar,” she begins. And Dawsyn is taken aback. What shouldthishave to do with the iskra?

“Patience,” Baltisse bids, hearing her thoughts. “It is important you know it all. King Launce married a woman who was murdered shortly after birthing his only child: Valmanere. This woman – theQueen –was killed by a group of zealots that fancied themselves witch hunters. They hadn’t taken too kindly to the King marrying amage,of all things.”

Dawsyn’s heart jolts. She forgets to breathe.

“Your great-grandmother, Melares Sabar, was mage-born, Dawsyn. Not a widely known fact, and the King had every single one of those witch hunters captured and hung, lest they go about wagging their tongues and inciting more hatred. The mages left in this valley are few, but we remember. I remember.” She pauses, watches Dawsyn closely, likely noticing the gooseflesh that has riddled her skin, the small shudder of her frame. “There has always been something elusive about you, Dawsyn. I felt it the first time I saw you. I can smell another mage a mile away, butyouwere harder to grasp. Do you remember the day we first met?”

Dawsyn remembers. Salem’s inn was still standing, and Dawsyn stood before the mage, who perused her bare body.I cannot decide what you are,she had said.

“It wasn’t until you were imbued with iskra that it awakened that other magic inside of you. Only then did I start to believe there was something else. Something that lay dormant in your grandmother’s blood. Likely in your mother’s as well. It doesn’t always catch, you see? But in you, I believe it did. Today, in the clearing, I found proof.”

“Dawsyn is a mage,” Ryon says, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Or something like it,” Baltisse returns.

Dawsyn swallows, tastes bile. Waves of questions compete for attention, crashing all at once. It is difficult to put them in order. She sits on her hands to still their incessant quaking. “What do you mean, ‘or something like it’?”

“I mean that there is mage blood in your ancestry,” Baltisse answers. “Albeit a few generations removed. Still, Melares Sabar was a force to be reckoned with. It is unsurprising that her power lingered, however meagrely.”

“The…spark?” Dawsyn says. “The one you asked me to find in my mind?”

Baltisse nods. “I first saw it when you healed Esra. I wondered if I was mistaken.”

Dawsyn turns away, hands scrubbing her face.

“It felt different to you, did it not Dawsyn? When you healed him? Or when you conjured that flame in your palm? I imagine it feels unlike the iskra does.”

Dawsyn addresses the wall rather than Baltisse’s open curiosity or Ryon’s shock. “It feels warm.”

“And the iskra?”

She shudders. “So cold that it burns.”

“Yes,” Baltisse mutters. “Light and dark.”

Ryon scrubs his face with both hands. “Two different magic sources in one body,” he says, shaking his head, disbelieving. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“No,” Baltisse says. “The two are kept apart for a reason.”

“And what reason is that?” Dawsyn asks. And here is where they will come to it, Dawsyn knows – this thing that curls Baltisse’s toes where she stands and bunches her shoulders. The deep, dark thing she has come to know.

“Light and dark – two opposite ends of the spectrum. They are not meant to meet. Not made to share pathways. I don’t believe that any one person could sustain them both.”

Dawsyn can feel them now, that dark compressed energy, curling away from the impeding light.Release me.