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“Release me,” Dawsyn whispers. It is so quiet Ryon can’t be sure he hears it correctly. “But neither can win,” Dawsyn says quietly. “Neither can lose.”

“Youcan lose, Dawsyn. If you cannot guide it, teach it to live peacefully inside of you, it will shred you to pieces. Sooner rather than later.”

Ryon closes his eyes. His stomach turns.

And what will he do then? What will he become in the aftermath of her nonexistence?

“And if I can?” Dawsyn asks. “Teach it, I mean?”

Baltisse gives a small smile. A shadow of something eager and wistful. “Then you will be a most powerful being indeed.”

Ryon returns, though his expression is deeply clouded, wrecked with fright. “This person you’ve brought with you. The woman of magic. Can she cure Dawsyn?”

“Magic isn’t something to becured, Ryon. Only endured,” Baltisse corrects. “But she offers an insight I do not have.”

“And what is that?” Ryon bites, the tension getting the better of his control.

“Glacian magic,” Baltisse smiles. “They call her the iskra witch.”

Both Dawsyn and Ryon freeze in their places.

“Dawsyn, I’m sorry to tell you that you were not exactly theveryfirst person to escape the Ledge. Therewasjust one other before you.” With that, Baltisse walks to the door, and pulls it open. “Come with me,” she says, pointing out into the bright daylight.

They allow Baltisse to lead them into the forest, rounding scraggly roots and shrubs as they go. A short distance from the cabin, Baltisse ducks behind a copse, and reappears a moment later, a taller woman in her wake.

“Yennes,” Baltisse says to her. “This is Dawsyn Sabar of the Ledge and Ryon Mesrich of Glacia.”

The woman is statuesque. Ryon would put her at age fifty or more. She wears her tightly curled hair high on her head, tied with a scarf. Layers of thin shawls cover her frame, draped elegantly over her shoulders, around her hips. She stares at them, her interest plain. Her eyes sweep over Dawsyn first, and then they find Ryon and stick there.

Ryon’s jaw flexes. “I don’t bite,” he says lowly. His impatience is clear.

The woman’s eyebrows rise. And then, despite Ryon’s surliness, a smile appears on the woman’s face, small and soft.

“Yennes?” Ryon asks. It is a word from the old language. A word still used in Glacia. “Survivor?”

The woman speaks. “It is what they called me,” she says, and her voice is as soft as her smile.

“They?”

Yennes does not answer. She only continues to stare at Dawsyn and Ryon both in equal measure.

“Baltisse says that you escaped the Ledge,” Dawsyn offers, unsure whether it could be true. “Can you tell us how?”

Yennes nods a little, her fingers twisting together in a gesture that gives away her nerves. “I don’t speak of it often.”

“Perhaps today warrants it?” Dawsyn’s tone is uncharacteristically soft. “We can trade tales.”

Yennes stares at her a moment more, then sighs, resigned. “Let’s take some warmth?”

“It is already stifling,” Ryon says, confused. But the words make Dawsyn smile.

“She means tea,” Dawsyn translates, and Ryon understands that these are words of the Ledge. “Let’s make some tea.”

When they are settled around Baltisse’s table, a lethargic flame licking the sides of a pewter kettle in the hearth, Yennes begins.

“I was selected and taken to Glacia when I was little more than a girl,” she says shakily. “It was terrifying. It still wakes me in the night to dream of it. That place…” Her eyes go distant for a moment, then she shakes her head as if to clear it.

“When I was pulled before the pool, before the King, I… I knew I couldn’t let that magic have me. I had seen what it would do. Perhaps, though, it would have been wiser to let it take my soul after all. I still wonder sometimes…” She trails off again, her fingers tumbling over each other. “I went into the pool, and when it tried to lure me to sleep, I did the opposite. I fought. I panicked. I tried to breathe. When those Glacians scooped me out, I was still me,” she smiles a little, lips twitching. “I suppose everything that happened after was worth it, just to know that. To know they couldn’t best me.”