Page 161

They slide faster and faster, down the icy slope toward the Chasm’s edge, while the sky above them is obscured by descending Glacians.

Ryon roars as he tries to use his talons to clutch the ice. They do not catch. They are slipping away too quickly.

The Glacians are diving toward them.

It is an end so very like and unlike Briar’s.

An end filled with ice and fear.

But better this. Better they go into the Chasm, than die at the hands of the enemy.

The lip appears before them, and Dawsyn shuts her eyes. She waits for the feeling of weightlessness, waits for the world to fall away and take her with it.

But suddenly, impossibly, a hand clutches her wrist. And then the Ledge disappears.

CHAPTERSIXTY-THREE

She is suffocating, being crushed from all angles. Her entire being reduced to a pinprick.

And then she is unfolding. Not slowly, but all at once.

The air whips her face and Dawsyn hits solid ground with startling force, the breath pushed from her lungs.

Her wrist is still trapped in someone’s grasp, though the fingers have become loose.

“Dawsyn?” someone calls. “Ryon? Baltisse!”

And then again. “Baltisse?”

Again. “Baltisse!”

“Help her!”

Dawsyn’s eyes open.

Black earth beneath her face. Its particles scurrying into her nostrils when she inhales. Darkness presses in all around. There are only a few weak flickers of light – torch flames, she realises. They throw into relief the hand clasped in hers: Baltisse’s long, elegant fingers, the nails crusted in soil. She can make out the curve of Baltisse’s profile, her face so close to Dawsyn’s. Close enough to feel the mage’s hair against her cheek. Close enough to smell her skin.

“Bring a torch,” Ryon rasps. “Baltisse?”

Dawsyn groans and heaves herself upward by degrees, enough to see the face of the mage who saved her. Enough to look her in the eye and thank her properly.

But the mage is sightless. Her eyes are already far from here, staring up, up into the snaking light above them. Those roiling, ever-changing eyes, now still and human, turned grey.

“Baltisse?” Dawsyn murmurs. And the mage doesn’t stir. She won’t turn derisive eyes to hers and lash a cutting word.

I know my limitations,she had told them.

Dawsyn lays a hand to her chest and closes her eyes. “Ishveet,” she says out loud. Then again, “Ishveet!”

Nothing stirs.

“ISHVEET!” Dawsyn shouts. “FIX HER!” But it comes breathless and cracked. She is no sorceress. No great and powerful wielder of magic. She is spent. She is useless.

Neither side of her magic rises to her call.

A hand comes to rest on Dawsyn’s shoulder. “She wanted to go back for you,” Yennes’s voice says. “She couldn’t leave you there.”

“Fix her,” Dawsyn wheezes, her head lowering. Her vision spins in tightening circles, bile climbing her throat.