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Perhaps it is a quarter century of instinct. The sky and snow look no different when she turns. But the hair rises on the back of her neck. Her hand reaches for the ax.

The sound of displaced air fills her, the way it always did in her youth on the day of Selection, when the white-winged Glacians filled the sky and began their circle, picking their prey long before they swooped.

As one, the Ledge people that remain look not through the pine grove, but to the sky above.

The ink-black clouds turn to whorls, churning as wings descend from their midst. Six, seven, eight, nine of them.

Nine Glacians. Pale, but not yet bleached of all their colour, circling above.

“Adrik,” Dawsyn breathes, spinning her ax once in her hand. Then she turns to her people. “Run for the grove.”

They comply. As one, they sprint across the drifts to the treeline ahead, disappearing in the neat rows of pine and becoming lost in their maze. Dawsyn feels the sting of wind on her cheeks as her hood falls back. Her footfalls are slower than the rest. She remains just behind, watching them scatter like field mice around the trunks, down the tilt of the Ledge, closer and closer to the Chasm.

She hears the snapping of branches above, and then the reverberation of feet falling to the ground behind her. Dawsyn spins.

The nine Glacians sink into the drifts, the disturbed powder throwing them into mist. Adrik himself is before her; he is much changed.

Gone is the scruff that once covered his jaw. In its place is smooth, pale skin. His cheekbones are pronounced, his brow more prominent. His grey hair has lightened to bone-white. The most startling of changes, however, are the two wings now fanning out from his spine.

“Dawsyn,” he says. His voice is coloured with the same grating lilt as she last heard it, but his expression reveals what is left of his soul. His lips curl back to reveal his teeth, glinting with their hidden poison. His skin pulls taut along his collarbone as he poises his wings for attack. He is a creature of the cold, more beast than not. “You,” he says, “are not what I expected to find.”

“Adrik,” Dawsyn says, planting her feet a little wider, ducking her forehead a little lower. “Little early for Selection, aren’t you?”

He pauses momentarily, then smiles. “Well, I won’t deny it. I never much saw why Vasteel felt the need to set a date. Why should a king,” he says, grinning at the word, “appease the stock?”

Slow-moving wrath builds inside her, the iskra with it. Despite it, Dawsyn laughs through her nose.

“Something amuses you?”

She clicks her tongue, as though blood-lust is not consuming her where she stands. “I’ve seen men do a lot of strange things to make peace with a small cock,” she jeers, pointing her ax at his crotch. “But I’ve never seen one grow wings and demand to be called aking.”

His lip twitches. A small reaction, but one that doesn’t escape Dawsyn’s notice. “Where is Mesrich, girl?”

Dawsyn’s hands become ice. The spark in her mind burns. “Hoping to compare?” she defers. “I wouldn’t.”

Adrik smiles in response. Dangerously. Promisingly. “Where is he?”

“You need not concern yourself,” she says clearly, enunciating each word. She rouses the iskra and mage magic both. Light and dark, intertwining. “You won’t live long enough to reunite.”

Adrik’s sneer falls, and Dawsyn waits. She waits for him to do what all the weak ones must do when a girl with an ax challenges them.

He rushes forward.

Dawsyn falls to the forest floor as he dives for her. Her knees hit the snow and she bends backward, watching as his wings sail over her body, watching her ax slice a hole through the translucent leather. His cry rings out through the forest.

Adrik’s men, no longer awaiting their master’s orders, come for her.

She runs. She hopes she has stalled them long enough. Long enough for the remaining to be taken into the Chasm.

She breaks through the treeline, the snow turning to ice before her.

Six humans remain before the Chasm, including Hector. All of them stand with their blades and axes and swords ready.

Too many. Too many to save.

CHAPTERSIXTY-TWO

“There’s nowhere to run, Dawsyn,” Adrik calls tauntingly, dragging his feet through the grove.