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“No!” Ryon shouts, already running.

The ax flies end over end, swooping through the air, racing Ryon to the guard. Ryon catches the ax handle mid-air as it passes in front of him. Then, he lunges.

When Ryon collides with the guard, he wedges the ax deeply into his exposed neck. The other hand is mashed against the Terrsaw steel, splitting the skin of his palm.

The guard chokes, his mouth seeping with blood so dark it looks like tar. “R… r–” he stutters, so softly that Ryon can only make out the shape of the word.

“Ru… by,” he mouths, the name a silent call into the ether. “Ruby.”

The guard’s body becomes slack in Ryon’s hold, staring unblinkingly into the sun.

“Fuck,” Ryon whispers down at him. “Fuck!”

But there is another sound brewing, and it drags his attention away from the blood on his hands, the body beneath him. The sound of wind, of a great inhaling. As though the oxygen were being pulled from the trees and lungs and the very pores of the earth.

Ryon turns quickly to see Dawsyn, standing over Gerrot’s still form.

And she is a vision of cold, endless wrath.

CHAPTERFORTY-SEVEN

Gerrot is dead.

A man taken from his home and returned, only to die, here on this road, at the hands of his own kingdom.

His lined face, still kind even in death, is eternally still, his soul now in the hands of the Mother. Finally free of a world that did all it could to grind him down.

Unhinged, unfettered rage. She can’t dispel it. It seeps from her heart and into every fibre of her. The iskra imbues it, solidifies it. She knows her hands glow without needing to look at them. She takes a breath and feels the way her lungs fill with air from every corner of this world, and the worlds beyond.

And when the breath in her lungs and the heat in her head will no longer be contained, she screws up her eyes, obliterates the image of Gerrot splayed on the dirt, and lets everything out.

Her wrath and hate and shock.

Her love.

Her weaknesses.

Her exhaustion.

She releases it back to the earth, the sky. She lets her knees fall to the ground, and braces her hands against the gravel, her own unbroken bellow ringing in her ears.

The ground around her goes cold, the magic finding its way into the dirt and seeping outward. It doesn’t retreat until her lungs are empty, her throat desiccated. She pants as it crawls back into her hands, back through her blood.

When Ryon’s hands grip her shoulders, she feels their trembling. His voice shakes too, calling her name and coaxing her to look at him.

She opens her eyes. The planes of his face are a reprieve. A place to rest.

“Dawsyn!”

“I can hear you,” she pants, surprised to hear how much her voice wavers, how raspy she sounds.

“We need to go. Now. There could be more coming.”

She nods. “Yes.”

“What was that?” Ryon asks, piercing her with his stare. It is all she sees.

“What was…?”