Page 16

Baltisse continues to watch her, study her. “Is it easier, Dawsyn? To hate him?”

The light finally dissolves into Dawsyn’s hands. With it, her body sways, spent. She is exhausted. She goes to the bed and sits on its mattress uninvited, feeling the magic beat its last in her fingertips before it retreats back into the recesses.

The mage watches Dawsyn’s shoulders curl inward, her blinks lengthen. The blood that heated her cheeks in her outburst is gone, her face now void of any colour.

Baltisse tsks. “You do not have a hold on this magic.”

Dawsyn laughs weakly. “I do not have a hold on anything.” Already Dawsyn’s head is slipping sideways to the bed, her eyes wide and far-away. “I trusted him,” she says, to herself it seems. “Stupid of me.”

Baltisse kneels beside her. She takes the hand that hangs off the side of the bed and inspects it, turns it over like a map. “You do not fool me, Dawsyn. I saw something in you and something in him. It stumped me. I’ve lived many years, seen many things, but I have never seen a tether between two souls as sure as the one between you and that Glacian.”

“I don’t want it,” Dawsyn whispers, a tear slipping free. “I do not wish to be tethered to anything.”

Baltisse squeezes her hand as her eyes shut. “It was never for you to decide.”

A shuddering sigh, and then Dawsyn slips into a fitful slumber with Baltisse watching on. The mage sees her eyes roll wildly beneath their lids, watches her breath catch and stutter. She watches the frost creep into her palms and recede again and again, and wonders at its intentions.

With one finger, Baltisse touches the centre of Dawsyn’s palm. She feels again that strange muddle of power and iskra and hate running over each other like cascading waves.

She shivers. “So many battles still to be won,” Baltisse murmurs to the girl of the Ledge, and it sounds like a curse.

CHAPTERNINE

Through the windows, Dawsyn watches the morning sun cast its light through the forest canopy. The mage sleeps and Dawsyn has no need to wake her. She leaves the cabin, closing the door lightly behind her, and steps out into the dappled glow. She notes the way it warms her eyelids when she raises her head, the way she sees gold even with her eyes shut.

She thinks of the people on the Ledge, who will step outside as she has just now and feel nothing but cold, all the way to the bone.

When she re-enters the cabin, it is with arms full of tinder.

Cut the wood, light the fire. Boil the snow, let it cool.

Her hands feel useless without their usual purpose, but she can at least light a fire. She can find water. She can do the next task, and the next, and maybe she can occupy her mind enough with menial busyness that she’ll forget all the bad things that have happened, and all the bad things that will come.

“There is no need for kindling in a mage’s house,” Baltisse mumbles from her bed. She sits up slowly, hair spilling across the mattress. Dawsyn is momentarily mesmerised by it; when she looks back to the hearth, a fire spits and flickers, with no wood to feed it.

Dawsyn frowns at it. “You can conjure fire, but we must drink water from a puddle?”

“Fire consumes. You must replenish it constantly,” the mage yawns. “It takes from the earth. Water is different – we will eventually return the water that we take.”

Dawsyn scowls. “Yet you could blink water into existence, ready to drink?”

“I could, but no mage ought to conjure more than they need. The Mother gives us more than enough.”

“How spiritual of you,” Dawsyn mutters. “How old are you, Baltisse?”

The mage stands, letting her skirts fall to cover her feet. “I do not know.”

“Hundreds of years?”

“Perhaps.”

Dawsyn eyes her warily. “Is it only obstinacy that keeps you living, or something else?”

Baltisse smirks, dipping a clean rag into a full basin upon the bench. “I do not drink iskra, if that is what you mean.”

Dawsyn hadn’t thought of iskra, though it would make sense. “I find it odd that a mage can halt aging just as the Glacians do. Do you sacrifice humans, then? Eat their organs? Drink their blood?”

“Only the ones that annoy me.”