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“They do,” says the other man, coming closer.

The newest guard treads a path around the outskirts of their camp, and his quarry holds a collective breath nearby – nearby, but still unnoticeable somehow. So long as these guards come no closer. If that fine line between them is not crossed…

And it seems they won’t. The guards murmur quietly to one another, looking away, back through the trees.

Then, in a procession of cruel coincidence, several things happen at once, all with aching, serendipitous precision.

Salem steps backward, his bare foot hovering cautiously for a moment and then coming down, straight on top of that stray smouldering timber. He gasps in surprise, the sizzle of his skin heard from where Dawsyn stands.

The guards spin, swords drawn, eyes on the place where Salem hunches in pain.

Ryon immediately steps to the side, his wings shielding Salem. He trembles behind Ryon, eyes streaming, a fist between his teeth.

“Did you hear that?” Tawny murmurs, his eyes still skirting to every corner of the clearing and acknowledging nothing.

“Of course I fucking heard it,” says the other.

They shift forward, eyes darting around the camp, searching but finding nothing. The tips of their swords are only several paces away, pointed directly at Ryon’s chest.

Move!Dawsyn thinks. But he won’t and she knows it. He won’t risk the clamour and leave the rest of them behind. She feels the words she wants to shout to him and can’t. Fear seeps in. Its wicked hand claws up her stomach and behind her ribcage, into her throat.

The sword tips come ever closer. Ryon is forced to shift backward, his feet whispering.

The guards follow. And then suddenly freeze.

Dawsyn could draw that invisible line in the dirt, the one between Baltisse’s magic and the rest of the wood. The guards’ eyes turn wide and round as they cross it. Where before they wandered, they now stick to the form of winged man before them.

“What in the…”

“Fuck,” Ryon hisses, and whirls.

The hilt of Ryon’s short sword cracks against the temple of the guard named Tawny. The man’s eyes close before he hits the ground, unconscious, but not before the second guard lifts his own sword, swinging it toward Ryon’s neck.

The rest of the camp is a wild flurry of useless motion. Tasheem and Rivdan rush in. Salem reaches upward. Baltisse shouts. Esra cries Ryon’s name.

Dawsyn raises her ax.

They will all be too slow, of course. The horror, the fierce gravity of it fills her. The ax leaves her palm, flying eye-over-handle toward the guard.

But it won’t land before this other sword can.

It won’t save Ryon, and she will lose him.

Again.

No,she thinks.

And it is not a shout into the void. It is a simple refusal. Every cell in her body remembers the anguish of old grief. She remembers the misery of absolute aloneness on the Ledge. With perfect clarity she recalls the weeks in a stone room with flaking, dried blood, a dead rat, and the enduring pain. It is a simple acceptance of her inability to endure it again.

Heat and ice fill her, coalesce and burst.

Light and dark combined.

And the very air explodes.

CHAPTERFIFTY-TWO

First, the air rushes into Dawsyn, all at once, and everything stills. The ax halts in its path through the air. The guard’s sword perches on the very precipice of Ryon’s throat but doesn’t enter. The rest are frozen in their movement.