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“Yes. She was supposed to take us to Glacia.”

“So far?” Ryon asks. “Fool. She has not extended her magic in such a way for a very long time. She is unpractised.”

“I am not deaf, Ryon,” Baltisse says suddenly, her voice a whisper, eyes still closed.

Ryon sighs. “No, not deaf. Worse. Defected by your own arrogance.”

“I am merely depleted,” Baltisse murmurs, words bleeding together. “It has been an age since I folded into the realm.”

“It looks as though the realm spat you back out.”

Baltisse scowls weakly, one eye finding Ryon. “I will recover.”

“And then we will journey the rest of the way on foot. If you had any ideas of flexing your magic again, you can forget them, at least until you have built up a tolerance.”

But the mage has returned to sleep before he finishes and does not utter a word of agreement.

Dawsyn takes Baltisse’s hand, removing a thick glove, and then the other, spreading her fingers apart to check for frost. She does the same with her boots to check her feet and then returns the clothing quickly. Baltisse still has Dawsyn’s fur wrapped around her neck; Dawsyn removes it, laying it flat beneath her head.

Ryon’s voice suddenly fills the cave, and it assaults her – assaults because it is still difficult to believe that he is here, speaking at all. “She once told me that to fold, a mage had to sacrifice a piece of their power. She said it was like tearing a muscle each time.”

Dawsyn feels guilt wash through her. “She told me nothing of it. I didn’t know.”

“Fold?” Ruby asks from the cave entrance behind them. “Does she mean… disappear? Like in old mage lore?”

Ryon eyes her warily and then nods.

“Huh,” Ruby exhales. “A true mage-born.”

“And one that has been, by all accounts, outcast by the court you defend,” Ryon adds.

His hand brushes over Dawsyn’s as they both reach to adjust Baltisse’s cloak. The touch pulls her in two directions. It makes her feel ill.

Dawsyn stands awkwardly, the disquiet spreading within her, climbing her throat. With Baltisse now tended to, she suddenly feels the compulsion to flee Ryon re-emerge, begging her to create distance, to free her from torment. With her head lowered, she brushes her way past him and out of the cave.

“Dawsyn? Where are you going?” Ryon asks carefully.

“We need wood and kindling for a fire,” she says, the words disjointed. She pushes roughly past Ruby without acknowledging her presence. She cannot breathe for fear of vomiting. She cannot stop her heart from thudding. She hears blood crashing in her ears, ready to burst free from her.

She flees.

Dawsyn makes her away across the slope, one leg bent on the incline, the other aching with each sink into the powder. The ax is in her hand, and each time she rotates it, the steel glints menacingly.

She need not have come so far. Any tree would do, and the wind is picking up again.

She is a coward. Running away. Like a child. She stops before a small spruce and begins hacking at its trunk, without finesse, shame slithering through her.

She let him touch her. She let him get to her again.

So quickly circumstances can change. Swift as wind. Dawsyn has weathered its assault before, yet she is rooted in days that dragged with perpetuity. Days and weeks and months of sameness, the Ledge barely changing but for the patterns of snow drifts and the unlucky ones hauled across the Chasm. Days that looked no different to the ones before, or the ones that would follow, and Dawsyn’s limbs would grow impatient with the relentlessness of it. She would wish for something to break the unbreakable patterns.

But one day she awoke, and her grandmother lay wide-eyed and sightless.

One day the Glacians came, and Maya was taken.

One day Briar walked her to the Chasm, and Dawsyn watched as she slipped away.

One day, she met a hybrid.