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Once more, a feeling wholly unsavoury… unfamiliar. And indeed, Ryon looks confused by her reaction. It takes him a moment to answer. “The Kyph.”

“A Glacian word?”

Ryon nods absently. “Means ‘hell’.”

“Ah,” Dawsyn says, trying to ensure her tone is measured, not sharp. “What do the mixed do here?”

“Mostly they whipped me,” Ryon answers. “Or cut, or burned, or whatever cruelty they were ordered to enact. If not me, then there were others.”

Dawsyn’s eyes trail up the post at his admission, finding the marks and scorches that adorn the wood, and seeing them with new understanding. She remembers Ryon describing the way the brutes would order him punished, and demand that the mixed administer it. A useless bid to create animosity between him and his kind. Her teeth grind. The etch marks start low to the ground and then rise in increments, stopping where she imagines Ryon reached his full height.

“Only you?” she asks. Her voice more controlled than she feels.

“No,” he shakes his head. “As I said, others were found guilty of some crime from time to time.”

“But mostly you,” Dawsyn finishes for him.

“Mostly me,” he agrees.

For a long time, Dawsyn stands, Ryon sits, and neither says a word. Dawsyn cannot turn and leave, and Ryon does not seem inclined to either. He only stares and stares into a depthless nothing.

Eventually, he looks back to her and says, “Did you know you are the only one I’ve ever… cared for?” he confesses, stumbling over the words. “Truly cared for, I mean. Worried for. Longed for. I thought of you… endlessly.”

Dawsyn knows a little of this same madness. It hurts to hear it voiced.

“I failed you,” he tells her, though Dawsyn gets the impression that he doesn’t say itforher. He says it for himself, to vent his thoughts, release some sort of inner haunting. “I found you,” he murmurs. “Finally, I found you. Someone just like me. And then I failed you.” He lifts a hand to his face and scrubs it, eyes pained, tortured. He looks like a man crumbling under the pressure of the world. “Tonight, I failed you again.”

With no mind to do so, Dawsyn moves. Her feet carry her across the snow and onto the dais, and she sinks down to Ryon’s level. Her arms go around him, her chest to his, and as though he were waiting for her, had expected her, his arms slide instantly into her cloak, over her shift. “You’re hardly wearing enough,” he says into her hair, voice muffled. “You’ll freeze.” He tightens his hold around her waist, pulling her closer.

She says nothing in return. Dawsyn isn’t entirely sure she wants his hands on her, but she wants hers on him. She wants someone to bring him solace. She is made of opposing forces pulling her in opposite directions.

His face buries into her neck, breathing warmth to the skin beneath her ear, and one half of her wavers. She wonders if it would be so bad to stay here, small and bound with the illusion of safety… even if she cannot trust the binder. She feels the pain in his grasp. The quiet remorse. Dawsyn feels the cuts to her soul that he rendered and knows that he feels their ache as she does.

“Please,” he whispers to her, and it is just barely discernible above the beating of her heart. “Find a way not to hate me.”

She lets her lips glance over his shoulder, just once, and pulls back, standing once again, lest she begin making vows that won’t keep.

CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN

When the wind begins to pick up, Dawsyn and Ryon make their way back. He does not reach for her hand, and Dawsyn is grateful. There is careful distance between them instead. They are in a state of imbalance, and it is clear to them both. Dawsyn does not know a great many things, but she knows the two of them are not fixed. There can be no reparations.

Dawsyn steals glances at him as they traipse toward the palace, eyes lurking on his stubble, his eye lashes, the curve of his cheek bones. A small, irrepressible part of her wishes she could be careless and stupid and forget every misdeed, every secret, and let them both fall back into their places of old, where the world did not seem like one vast deadly trap. But they are not children in the throes of play fights, and the frays between adults are rarely resolved with one embrace.

However,Dawsyn muses,the embrace ought not be repeated.

It would be best if Ryon remained in Glacia, Dawsyn has already concluded. Their attempt to free the Ledge, for now, has failed, and though she knows Ryon thinks he holds a stake in this quest, the truth is that his own quest has already come and gone. Glacia has been conquered. Ryon has delivered freedom to the Colony. He has earnt his rest.

They could let this be the inevitable conclusion to a sad story, one of unlikely allies who dallied in the prospects of love, and learnt they were destined for war. He needn’t follow her all over this mountain in a bid to win back her favour.

A shiver courses down her spine. She readies herself to say what she must. “I will return to the Ledge,” she says, hollowed and sure. “If you’ll fly me there.”

Ryon halts. Lines appear in his furrow. His mouth opens, aghast. “What?”

“I cannot return to Terrsaw, Ryon,” she continues calmly, her reasoning already prepared. “I cannot look over my shoulder every second of the day, wondering when the Queens will come for me, and I do not want to.” She expects him to argue with her, to claim that she belongs in the valley, in the sun. But perhaps he sees the danger she sees, becoming an outlaw, a vagrant in a place where she knows very few.

She can see him reaching desperately for an alternative. “Stay here,” he bids.

Dawsyn shakes her head. “I cannot.”