Page 49

“And who will carry me? I merely need a day’s rest or two, Dawsyn. There is no need for dramatics.” But her voice slurs and her body gives a delicate shudder. When Dawsyn lays a palm to her forehead, she finds the skin slick and hot.

“What if the hybrid could fly you back to the valley? Would you go then?” She deliberately refrains from addressing him directly, though she knows how close he is, listening.

The sound of his answering voice rumbles within the small space. “Need you be reminded thatthe hybridhas lost the use of his wings?”

Dawsyn continues to stare ahead. “Perhaps the hybrid can use that iskra inside him to put it right. If it was enough to bring him back from the dead, then it might as well bring back the wings too.”

A pause, and then, “It can’t.”

“No?”

“It is gone.”

Dawsyn finally turns to face him. He lounges in a corner, the long lines of his body stretched out, showcased perfectly, like some artist’s depiction of a god. “What does that mean?” Dawsyn snarls. “It can’t be gone, surely?”

He can’t seem to meet her eye. “It was spent healing a rather large hole in my chest.”

“Spent?” Dawsyn wheels back to the mage, the woman’s eyes just barely opening. “Can iskra magic truly be spent?”

“It can if you only drink it,” Baltisse says.

“He inhaled it.”

“Did he?” she asks, her voice fading. “Or did someone press their mouth to his and shove the iskra down his throat?”

Dawsyn grits her teeth. Indeed, she had just replayed that woeful memory in her mind. “Stop watching my thoughts, witch.”

“They are hard to ignore,” she mumbles, eyes closing again, not truly awake at all. “So loud now, since Ryon returned.”

At the mention of his name, Dawsyn makes the mistake of sliding her eyes over to the hybrid again. Ryon now scrutinises the cave floor with studious indifference. But there is a lift at the corner of his mouth. Slight, but visible.

Dawsyn abruptly returns to the slope for more kindling.

She spends much of her time doing this over the next two days. Though the threat of Glacian hunters is gone, she cannot help but look to the skies often as she goes about her work.

Within the stretch of those hours, she plans, though she knows very little about what has become of Glacia since the battle. For all the turmoil Ryon’s presence brings her, she knows he will be of some benefit once they reach the kingdom’s palace. Ryon is the leader of the Izgoi – the mixed-blood resistance. If she wishes to ally with them in her quest to free the people on the Ledge, she will need Ryon’s influence there. The likelihood that they will listen to the pleas of a human, even one such as her who led them to their victorious revolution, is scant.

Dawsyn finds an outcropping of snow-laden boulders to perch on as she continues to plot, devising the right words, said in the right way to convince the mixed-bloods in possession of wings to fly the Chasm.

Admittedly, words have always presented a challenge for her.

“Miss Sabar?” comes the voice of the captain.

Dawsyn does not deign to glance over her shoulder. Minutes ago, she heard the unmistakable trudging of someone inept on this terrain, so she is not surprised by Ruby’s arrival. “What do you want, Captain?”

Ruby approaches, carefully lowering to her backside in the space beside Dawsyn. For a moment the woman only looks out to the expanse of the forest around them, stretching in all directions.

Dawsyn wonders what a sight it must be for her, someone born of the Mecca. The towering pines, trunks as wide as a house. The perfect, undisturbed blanket of pristine white that covers it all. The quiet, dampened sounds. It snows now, but only lightly. The wind makes the flakes perform stunts in the air.

It is, Dawsyn supposes, beautiful in its way.

“It rarely snows in the Mecca,” Ruby voices, soft and undulating. “We are too close to the sea. I’ve only ever seen it when I guarded the Boulder Gate.”

This gives Dawsyn pause. “You guard the Boulder Gate?”

“Not any longer.” She shakes her head. “The day I was proclaimed a grown woman, I was sent to the Gate to guard it with the other novices. It is part of initiation for the Terrsaw battalions.”

Dawsyn frowns, looking back to the view ahead. “And at what age were you a woman?”