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“How?”

“Show it.”

“How?”

“Can you call both to your palms again?” Baltisse asks.

Dawsyn laughs at that. Her voice shallow and weak. “No.”

When Yennes and Baltisse had suggested it the first time, she’d thought it a joke. Calling both powers to the surface that way? Asking them both to dance? It was sure to incite a battle. A minute later she was on the wooden floor, writhing and gasping.

“Rest a moment, Dawsyn,” Baltisse says ruefully. “When your strength returns, we will try it again.”

“To what end?”

“The one that ends with both sides of power learning to cooperate.”

Dawsyn rubs her face. “Perhaps it is not possible.”

Baltisse looks down at her with an expression that says she fears the same.

“I think it is,” Yennes interjects quietly. “After all, we are each filled with darkness and light. We must always learn to balance the two.”

Dawsyn lets her eyelids drift shut. “Poetic,” she mutters.

The two women leave her be for a few minutes more, but when she opens her eyes again, they are still watching, still waiting. Dawsyn nods her head.

She stands and guides both the light and the dark, the warm and the cold to the surface, without a clue of how to combine them.

It continues for days. While the others are cast outside and forbidden to enter, Dawsyn, Baltisse, and the woman called Yennes remain inside. Dawsyn invites the magic of Glacians and mages to the battlefield and asks them not to fight. The only progress made is in managing to untangle the two when they come to blows. Despite her exhaustion, Dawsyn is learning to push the pain aside for long enough to scold the tussling masses like a harried mother. The more frustrated Dawsyn becomes, the easier it is. The iskra wins, sending that warm, white light back into the safety of her mind, and the pain dissipates. Baltisse’s furniture takes further loss.

Yennes watches the progress with grim disapproval. “Allowing anger to dispel the pain won’t be enough in the end,” she says. Dawsyn can’t help but find that prophetic. Alas, she is hopeful.

“I’m separating them faster,” Dawsyn tells Yennes and the mage. “At least there’s that.”

“It isn’t enough,” Baltisse says. “So long as they are at odds, you will be vulnerable. The iskra may wait until you are exhausted, injured, sick. There will be a time when you are not strong enough to break them apart.”

It is the middle of the night, and Dawsyn has had very little to eat. She already feels that exhaustion the mage speaks of.

“Perhaps the combined magic could be used for different means,” Yennes mumbles, pacing around the cabin, eyes far away. “A common… purpose?”

“What is she saying?” Dawsyn asks wearily. She has learnt over the last few days that Yennes prefers to confer with herself, rather than the room at large.A lone woman’s occupation, she had said by way of apology.

Yennes turns back to her in her hesitant manner, eyes flitting to Dawsyn and away. “I wonder if perhaps the two sources would work together, if you gave them common ground,” she says softly.

Baltisse’s eyes roil. “Ah,” she breathes.

“And what exactly would constitute common ground?” Dawsyn asks.

“You,” answers Baltisse. “Both sides of the magic share the same objective, and that issurvival. The most common rule of nature. All things do what they must to survive.”

“And to survive,” Yennes continues, “both sides of the magic needyou.”

“So, what? Try to kill me, and maybe the iskra and the mage magic will work together to save my life?”

“Maybe,” Baltisse answers. “But we need not resort to that. All we really need is thefearof dying.”

“Oh,” Dawsyn drawls. “Wonderful.”