Page 31

Dawsyn grins, despite herself. “I don’t suppose you have a brush?”

The mage points to a cupboard below a small window. “You should bathe, too. If you’d be so kind. It’s bad manners to smell as you do in one’s home. I prepared a bath while you slept,” the mage gestures to the large basin in the kitchen, big enough to sit in. “The water is still warm.”

Wearily, Dawsyn undresses in the mage’s cabin, peeling the soiled fabric away like shedding skin. It has been a while since she saw her body. It feels smaller, somehow. Less significant. She takes the washcloth Baltisse hands her and steps into the bathing basin. She rids her body of the feverish sweat that coats her skin, cups water in her hands and douses her hair. The water is fragrant, smelling of the same blossoms that perfume the woods around them. The sudden feel of bristles against her scalp makes her stiffen for a moment, but it is only Baltisse who kneels behind her, sweeping the brush from Dawsyn’s crown to the middle of her back methodically.

“Your hair is a thicket,” Baltisse grunts, running the brush through the tangles over and over, until they relent. “My mother used to brush my hair this way as a girl.”

Dawsyn too can conjure a thousand memories of Briar, standing on the wooden floor beside a wooden bucket not large enough to sit in. She would rub oil into Dawsyn’s hair to free the tangles, cursing softly when her fingers could not free the more stubborn knots. “Mine, as well,” Dawsyn murmurs, unease spreading through her chest because, if not for the green forest through the window, this could be a cabin of the Ledge, and the brush might be the fingers of the woman who raised her… and then left her.

“Did your mother not die when you were an infant?” Baltisse asks, the strokes of the brush slowing.

“She did. I was speaking of Briar. My mother’s sister.”

“What did your birth mother die of?”

“The cold,” Dawsyn answers simply, cupping water in her hands. She watches it dwindle away through the breaches. “As most of them do.”

“And Briar?” Baltisse asks, the brush pausing.

Dawsyn sighs, throat tightening again. “She gave up.”

Dawsyn lifts herself from the tub, taking a scrap of towel from the bench to pat herself dry.

Baltisse passes Dawsyn a fresh pile of clothing, clean and dry. “Not a common trait,” she mutters.

“Amongst mothers?”

“Amongst Sabars,” Baltisse corrects, not bothering to turn her back as Dawsyn dresses. There is a tone in the mage’s voice – one of… disappointment, perhaps? And it chafes.

“You say you’ve lived a long life,” Dawsyn says mildly, hiding the anger simmering beneath the surface. “But I doubt you endured a mite of Briar Sabar’s suffering.”

“And this suffering… it led her into the Chasm?”

As Dawsyn relives the memory, she knows Baltisse must see it too – Briar pressing her lips to Dawsyn’s forehead and then lurching herself onto the ice, over the lip. For a moment, Dawsyn feels herself there again, alone on the Ledge for the first time. Unsure if she shouldn’t just follow that slick, promising path over the edge. Unable to rise from the snow and journey back to her den of girls. Unwilling to live out the rest of her days on the Ledge by herself. She remembers how very desperately she wanted them all back. She didn’t want to be alone. Now she doesn’t know how to be anything else.

“Briar answered the call and followed it into the Chasm,” Baltisse says, and Dawsyn suddenly realises how close the mage has come, how her hand hovers over Dawsyn’s but does not hold it.

“She was tired,” Dawsyn murmurs, and she can feel it too – that tiredness, handed down, bone-deep. Her shoulders curve downward with the weight of it. She has only just awoken, and already she wants to return to sleep, as she does every day. Her body aches with a phantom exhaustion, with the expectation of what awaits. Each morning steals another share of her stamina, the pressure slowly sinking her. She knows that before she carried this millstone, Briar must have carried it too, and her grandmother before that. It is no wonder that Briar only wanted to rest. She only wanted to sleep.

Seal your eyes and sleep.

Baltisse’s hands are on Dawsyn’s cheeks now, pulling her face around to meet her molten gaze. But the mage is blurred. She can’t find her. And Dawsyn feels her cheeks grow wet.

“You will not follow that call, Dawsyn Sabar,” the mage says slowly, firmly. “You will not listen to it.”

It is not in either woman’s nature to embrace, but Dawsyn imagines this is the extent of Baltisse’s affection – stroking her cheeks with the pads of her thumbs, taking away her tears until Dawsyn’s head is clear. Until the howls of the Ledge fade.

Dawsyn lets the mage’s strength imbue her – the truest power between women. In Baltisse, she can see the sliver of connection she still reaches for, after all these years. That tether of solidarity. Her den of girls.

“There are things to be done,” Baltisse says, and the words are firm, bolstering.

Dawsyn nods. “Yes, there are.”

“We start today,” she proclaims. “We need to see Salem and Esra. They’ll have what we need.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“That depends, sweet.” The mage grins.