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“Move it?” Dawsyn repeats, her confusion apparent.

“Yes.” Baltisse nods. “Or the magicinsideit, anyway. Another feat that has never been duplicated.”

“How could it be moved?”

“We absorbed it back into ourselves and–”

“What?”

“Yes,” Baltisse says simply. “The pool’s magic – that voice that calls to your soul when you’re within its grasp – it came from us. A piece of our own power. We carried it inside us and brought it to a place of Vasteel’s choosing; high up on the mountain, where no one would dare go.”

“Glacia,” Dawsyn says.

“Or what it was before it became a kingdom. Vasteel had a palace built around the pool eventually, but before that it was simply a place where he and his noblemen could go with their victims, drink their iskra and stay a while before we mages folded them back into Terrsaw.

“But in the valley, a revolution was beginning to stir. The people had long since prayed for a new monarch. King Vasteel had sired no heirs and he was mysteriously alive and well after far too many years. He was cold, cruel, often absent. The land around him was being laid to waste. And he did nothing to stop it.

“I wanted to find a way out of the mess I’d helped create. I met a man in a tavern who was heading the resistance aiming to bring about Vasteel’s downfall. The man’s name was Cazriel Sabar. He would soon become the very first sovereign of the Sabar reign.”

The name reverberates in Dawsyn’s mind. She needs to remember it, but before she can test it on her lips, Baltisse continues.

“He was a good man. An honest one. He came from the fringe, and he’d made it his life’s mission to care for the poor. He could speak well, too. He was rallying people for the usurping of the palace with impressive speed. There was not one self-serving corner in his mind when I heard it. So, I told him when and where we mages would fold Vasteel and his noblemen back into Terrsaw. Cazriel Sabar was to be there waiting with his battalion of rebels, ready to kill their King who had become more creature than human.” Baltisse pauses a moment. Dawsyn watches the colour of her eyes shift infinitesimally darker, more foreboding.

“Indriss, my mother, was the one to foil the plan,” Baltisse intones, her voice deadened. “She could listen to minds, as I can, and I hadn’t been careful enough. Of course, I never supposed she might become so intent on protecting Vasteel. By then, I’d tried to make the other mages see the harm we had done, the destruction of nature’s ways. I was sick with guilt, and I could feel that same sickness in the minds of Grigori and Roznier. Gone was the vengeance against a race who had hunted us, burned us. There was only shame left. But my mother, she felt nothing but pure obsession. Like Vasteel, all of her was tied to power, and the need for more.

“So, my mother informed Vasteel of the ambush, and I folded off that fucking mountain within an inch of his sword. I found Cazriel Sabar and told him to prepare for battle. Grigori, Roznier, and I went to the base of the mountain and put our hands to the ground. We pulled every scrap of our magic to our fingertips and lured colossal rocks from the earth to form the Boulder Gate. We hoped it would be enough. And then we waited.”

Dawsyn reels. She pictures the Boulder Gate, towering above her. She cannot imagine the measure of power it had taken to conjure such a thing.

“It took seven days and nights for Vasteel and his merry men to descend the mountain. Cazriel’s band of rebels fired arrows at them before they could find a way through the Boulder Gate, and they quickly retreated. All except Vasteel. The former king only smiled. He was a ghost now. White as snow. He closed his eyes, and we watched in horror as wings unfolded from his back. The first Glacian.

“Vasteel flew over the Boulder Gate, and we could do very little but watch in terror. He plucked a rebel from our battalion and flew him skyward, talons buried in the man’s shoulders. ‘Tell them their King will be back!’ he called out. ‘And I will take as many as I might carry.’ He flew away, back to his mountaintop, and the battle was both won and lost. Cazriel Sabar led Terrsaw from that day until his death, and he did all he could to protect his people from the Glacians, as we came to call them. Those cold, winged men and women who would swoop into the valley every so often and steal its citizens away. They couldn’t be stopped, couldn’t be conquered, and the people of Terrsaw had one righteous place to turn their blame, their wrath.”

“Mages,” Dawsyn says. She remembers once asking Baltisse if she hated the people of Terrsaw for the vilifying of her kind.No,she had said.I do not hate Terrsaw.And now Dawsyn understands the shame she’d sensed from her then. She senses it tenfold now. The mage is permeated with it. Made of remorse.

Baltisse’s glassy stare won’t meet Dawsyn’s. Instead, she looks to the tabletop, her finger following the circular grain of the wood. For the first time in Dawsyn’s recollection, she appears… old.

“And so, there it is, Dawsyn Sabar. A very good reason to cut off my hands, weight my feet, and sink me to the bottom of the ocean. And you’d be right to do it. I only ask that you let me undo some of the wrongs I was party to beforehand. In the meantime, you can trust that I’ve had many lifetimes to soak in the worst of my sins. I’ve laid still while the guilt has peeled each layer of skin from my body. Every morning, I rise knowing I was born for destruction, but I continue now to choose a different course,” Baltisse presses her lips together. She looks at Dawsyn, and her eyes reveal every ounce of remorse, of self-contempt. “You are not like me, Dawsyn Sabar. You were born as Cazriel Sabar was born, and I see his unflinching mind in your own. You were not born for destruction, or for the Ledge. You were born for Terrsaw.”

Dawsyn feels her fingers aching with cold. She feels the iskra stirring darkly while the light in her mind grows warm in response. She is too filled with revelation, too filled with inherited duty. Dawsyn feels she could combust. A million pieces of Sabar and Ledge and Terrsaw and iskra and mage and Dawsyn, spreading farther and wider while divided than she ever could whole.

A hand comes over her shoulder, encasing it completely. It is warm and firm, attached to someone who knows all the sides of her. Perhaps the only living soul who does. It helps her to remember herself.

“You are wrong,” she says to Baltisse, ignoring the roiling within, the pull in so many directions. “I am Ledge-born.”

Baltisse first looks wary, but then she hears Dawsyn’s thoughts – the tenor of forgiveness. “And Iamlike you. I will rise each day and choose my own course.”

CHAPTERFIFTY

Ryon’s hand remains on Dawsyn’s shoulder as they all await the heavy silence to unburden them. His palm grows steadily cooler with his mounting tension.

“Baltisse?” he finally says, unable to delay it a moment longer. “We must make a plan. Dawsyn has only worsened in your absence and–”

“Yes,” Baltisse nods. “I have thought much about it these past days. About the balance of the two magics, and their coexistence alongside one another.” Her eyes travel to the window, as though the forest beyond might provide her the answers.

“Enlighten me,” Dawsyn says, her tone even, though beneath Ryon’s hand, her body tenses.

“The Pool of Iskra’s magic is dark,” Baltisse tells them. “Cursed, in a way. We mages traded much of ourselves to procure it. Blood, bone, and more insidious things. It is, in its essence, the worst of us. Your mage power, however, is light. It is of the place it came: nature. Pure and unadulterated life. These opposites, they are not compatible in one body. I believe they battle within you, the iskra alternating between hiding away, or seeking freedom, and the mage magic trying valiantly to trounce the iskra when it feels threatened.”