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But she has lost sight of it. The magic has retreated into her depths, and it won’t rise at will. She pants and shudders and continues gripping the iron, cursing and lashing and suffocating in her ire. She is aflame with it.

It’s a mockery, the way her cheeks flush and her palms sweat. She has rarely known heat her whole life – born and raised on the icy Ledge, grappling for warmth. Now she burns. Her mind is fire. It rages.

But this fire – theanger –is preferable. It is a distraction, at least. While it scorches her from the inside out, it keeps other thoughts at bay. She’d rather stay there, burning to ash in her own inferno, but the fire is short lived. It chokes out quickly, and without it, she is left in the wake of all that she knows. She has learnt this much in the past days of her imprisonment: when the fire ebbs, the drowning comes.

So it does now.

Her fingers, torn from their efforts on the lock, slowly slacken. Her shrieks become howls and her body folds to the ground again, her forehead resting on a wrung of the gate.

Ryon,she thinks again, only this time she is too weak to banish the name. Instead, she lets it come, she turns it over. Her howls turn to whispers; she feels the pain in her throat and does not try to swallow it. Tears make tracks through the blood on her face, and she barely notices how they blur her sight. She thinks of all the fights and enemies and words and touches and cannot make sense of them, cannot force them into straight lines or sequences she recognises. So, she drowns.

No wood to cut. No adversary to fight. No task to raise her from the bottom of herself. Just this unending cycle of grief. A different prison from the one she escaped.

She turns her gaze to the rat, red-eyed and rotting. “What can I do?” she whispers. “Please… tell me what to do.”

CHAPTERTWO

As a child, Dawsyn’s grandmother told her tales.

When the Ledge hosted those blizzards of the hostile season and even the most keenly tended fire could not curb the cold, the stories would. Dawsyn learnt to stay the frost by letting it claim her body, but never her mind.

Within the mind is where the cold wins.

“Still your teeth, Dawsyn,” her grandmother would warn her. “That mouth of yours rattles louder than a bag of coin.”

Another strange word she did not know. She used to make a list of them – alien words that came often yet meant nothing: coin, mouse, clover, Terrsaw, drug, mint, pasture, tide, iskra…

“Dawsyn, sit with me, girl. I’ll take those teeth out myself if you cannot quiet them.”

Dawsyn slammed her jaw shut and frowned insolently. Still, she scurried over the wooden floor and into her grandmother’s lap, the promise of warmth too great.

“There. Now, keep it out,” she said, tapping Dawsyn’s temple. “It isn’t alive, after all. Is it, now?”

Dawsyn pushed the finger away. “I want a story.”

“You’ve got some blasted manners.”

“Hush,” Briar begged from where she sat before the hearth. Dawsyn’s guardian – the only mother she knew – rocked a sleeping baby in her arms. Maya was only a month old and had already known a week of blizzards.

“All right then. Quietly now. Which story?”

“The one of the water.”

“River, or ocean?”

“The ocean!” Dawsyn called, and earnt a scowl from Briar.

“Again?” Valma groaned, yet pulled her closer. She let Dawsyn’s cold cheek rest against her chest. Dawsyn’s teeth were quiet now. “So be it. Close your eyes, my Dawsyn. How will you see the water otherwise?”

And Dawsyn closed her eyes willingly, awaiting the familiar tale.

“In the valley is a river, a great channel of water that flows off the mountain and over ground. It cut a path through the forest a long time ago. If you keep pace with the water, it will take you to the edge.”

“The edge of the world?” Dawsyn asked blearily.

“The edge ofourworld.” Valma said. “A great big bowl, so gigantic it stretches as far as the bird flies. You cannot see where it ends. And at the bottom of the bowl rests Garjum – the ocean’s prisoner. A huge creature with seven faces and forty arms.”

“You said fifty last time.”