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When he thinks she cannot see, he watches her. But Dawsyn feels his eyes on her every time. It is possessive. It rattles her. She resents it. But she knows if he were to look away, she would hate that more.

This will fade,she tells herself in the night, where his presence is most potent. There in the impenetrable blackness of the cave, it is easy to forget that Baltisse and Ruby exist at all. It is just him and her, as before. She hears his breaths, and they are in time with her own. She shifts to find comfort, and so does he. Even with the captain sleeping between them, the world might as well fall away. The distance between them dissolves. She imagines moulding her lips against his once more. Staying silent, detaching herself from him, does not curb the need.

A hollow in her chest burns and burns. The iskra stirs insidiously, curling cruelly in her belly, telling her what she really wants. She wants him to find her in the dark. She wants him to take away the burden of indecision.

In the day, she is a fortress. She will not be dissuaded. But her will always wanes with the light.

“This will fade,” she whispers to herself, aloud this time. Then she sends a silent bid of thanks to the sky for the safety of night, because the tears come now – and they come, and they come.

But she will never let him see.

CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO

When the sun rises on the third day, Ruby awakens before anyone else.

The last few nights, she has not slept well. The cave floor is frozen to an unforgiving degree, and though they keep a fire lit and burning throughout the night, tending to it every few hours, Ruby still cannot find comfort enough to allow for any deep rest.

Today, though, she awoke to warm stones between the layers of her chest and stomach. Dawsyn must have placed them inside her furs during the night. She feels more rested than she expected.

There hasn’t been a day since her initiation into the Queen’s guard that Ruby did not rise early – chores to perform, drills to lead. But, as it is, there is very little for her to do here, and falling back to sleep would be an impossible task. The fire still smoulders gently beside her, and Ruby supposes she could stoke it, set it alight once more, and boil some snow for water.

Thanks to the mage’s supplies, there is a small iron bucket with which to pack the snow. It is with this that she sets out into the dim morning, the night only just beginning to yield.

She has not grown used to the sheer brilliance of it – the mountain forest. Her mother told her stories of the slopes as a child that made her imagine a menacing landscape, a plane of nightmares. But Ruby’s mother had failed to capture the purity of this place in her tales – the absoluteness of the cold, the blankets of perfectly fallen snow, the pines that soared endlessly into the clouds.

A short way down the slope, a tawny hare traverses the snow drifts, expertly avoiding the deeper pockets, furrowing only in shallow depths as it searches for food.

Ruby stops to marvel at it. Such an insignificant creature, surviving with much more grace and resilience on this mountain than she. The captain smiles.

A sudden whistling sound whips past her ear. A knife soars downhill, and the hare falls lightly to the powder, a small spray of its blood fanned across the snow.

Gasping, Ruby turns to see Dawsyn approaching her.

“He might come in handy,” Dawsyn says.

“You startled me.”

The black-haired woman says nothing back, only tracks the span of the slope below them, perhaps searching for other game.

“What was it doing out here?” Ruby asks now. “Shouldn’t it be hibernating?”

“Hares do not hibernate,” she answers simply. “And even if they did, it is the fertile season. The weather is warm.”

Ruby gives a huff. “Warm?”

“Yes,” Dawsyn says turning back to her. “You’ll need to get your wits about you, Captain. You have not known the cold yet.”

The very idea that it would get colder worries Ruby. Upon leaving Terrsaw, she had donned extra layers beneath her furs and guard’s uniform, doing away with the hindrance of the armour, but it seems she had severely under-estimated the fierceness of the mountain. Already, she is struggling to keep her gloves and socks dry from day to day. Dawsyn keeps reminding her to ‘stay the frost,’ but she does not know how to walk on the slopes in a way to stop the snow from slipping into her boots.

Dawsyn begins trekking down to where the hare lies, her back to Ruby. This, at least, is a positive development. The woman is lending her a modicum of trust. If only Dawsyn knew the true lengths to which Ruby went to ensure she lived. The intricacies of the planning, the risks Ruby took to see her freed. She has betrayed her Queen, her kingdom. Her family will likely be told she is dead, and they will suffer. Such steep costs for the sake of honour.

And yet Ruby knows, whether sensible or not, that she will not live alongside herself without it.

“What is your plan, Miss Sabar?” she calls to her now, voice trailing down the slope.

Dawsyn pauses, perhaps weighing the risk of confiding in Ruby, but then she takes the hare by its feet, letting it dance by her side as she begins to retrace her steps upward. “We go to Glacia,” she calls back, panting slightly. “We negotiate with the mixed to help us free the people on the Ledge. I had hoped to offer them entrance into your Queen’s territory in return–”

“She is no longer my Queen,” Ruby reminds her, and the words are… freeing.