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Dawsyn contemplates. Though she does not have a favourable history with this river, it does, by all accounts, seem inviting today. She takes off her boots too, placing them alongside Gerrot’s. Then she eyes the water shrewdly. The last time she offered herself to it, it nearly drowned her. That water had been freezing then. She pulls up her pant legs and slowly lets the tips of her toes kiss the water.

It is cool, but alluringly so. She sinks her feet to the ankles and feels immediately soothed. She is abruptly overcome with the desire to submerge her entire body, despite the danger of the rapids. She has slowly broiled beneath all of her layers since the sun rose. “Thank the Chasm, that’s good,” she groans.

Gerrot grins at her but shakes his head.Not the Chasm,he seems to say.The Chasm is not to thank.

Dawsyn has not uttered those words in an age. On the Ledge, a person’s death would be considered fortunate if it escaped the clutches of the Glacians. A swift descent into the Chasm, illness, frost, starvation, and the people would bow their heads and thank the Chasm, not the Mother above. The people promptly forgot the spirit of the Mother when she failed to save them in their plight.

“I’ve never felt such simple relief,” Dawsyn says lightly, watching the water grow murky with the swish of her feet.

Gerrot sighs, his shoulders rising and falling easily.

“They will never know it, you know,” she says now. She finds it… easy to speak in his presence. “The children up there. Their parents, too. They will never know what it’s like to sit where we sit.”

The old man only watches her as she speaks. He does not appear saddened, as she expected. He is, of all things, hopeful. His lips purse, one shoulder lifts.

Perhaps one day they might.

Dawsyn frowns. “No,” she says. “I know now… they can’t be brought over the Chasm. Nothing will convince them to leave.”

His hope, she knows, is in vain.

Gerrot looks her in the eye, his confidence unflinching, and sends a pointed finger right to the centre of her chest.You can.

She shakes her head, looking down to the water once more. At the idleness of her feet the water has returned to its beautiful clarity, the dirt settled. Gerrot points to her toes, and Dawsyn sees a small fish meandering around her ankles.

Standing in the water, Gerrot reaches for Dawsyn’s hands. With his fingers around her wrists, he slowly guides them into the river. They wait, Dawsyn’s heartbeat accelerating, until the fish swims ignorantly between her waiting palms.

She slams her hands together, the slick tail of the fish escaping her clutches.

“Damn!” she hisses, pulling her hands out, feeling the spot on her thumb where the fish’s scales nicked her.

But Gerrot only pats her arm. He lifts a hand, signalling her to hold until the sediment falls.Wait for the water to settle.

When the fish reappears, still dallying in the shallows, he guides her hands into the water once more. He nods down to it.Try again.

She holds her hands steady, refusing to flinch when the fish brushes against her fingertips, and when it slides between her palms, she grabs hold of it.

“Ha!” she cries, holding it aloft. “I caught it!” The fish wriggles frantically, trying its hardest to return to the river.

Gerrot smiles widely, nodding. He points to the fish and juts his thumb at the river.Throw it back.

“Why?” Dawsyn asks. “I caught it.”

Gerrot’s shoulders shake with his amusement, and he takes the fish from her grasp. He throws it over the boulders that trap the water in these shallow parts, and it soars out and into the rapids. Back to where it belongs.

For a moment they both stare at the place where the fish disappeared, and Dawsyn hears familiar words in her head.All things find a way back home.

Gerrot smacks a withered hand to her shoulder, grasping it tightly, and then juts his chin up the river, to the colossal mountain that rises in the north.

Dawsyn looks too. It looks perfectly unclimbable, disappearing into permeating cloud. Stealing the sun and its wonder from all that live there. A fate no human was made to suffer. A fate none should ignore.

“I do not know if there’s enough left in me to try again,” Dawsyn admits.

Gerrot does not hear her. He is already returning to camp, boots in hand.

CHAPTERTHIRTY-NINE

There is notable distance between Salem and Ruby on the short journey to Baltisse’s cabin, and yet it doesn’t stop him from glaring back at her from the head of the party.