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When Gerrot and Page finally stand, their duties done, the Glacian named Jorst addresses the four remaining prisoners. “Come,” he says to them, that insipid grin appearing again. “We go to dine with the King.”

CHAPTEREIGHT

New sacks are placed over their heads before they cross the first portcullis. Blind and shackled, they shuffle up steep steps and along cold slate floors. Dawsyn’s bare feet are numb, so too are her fingers, but her mind races. With the threat of death so near, it has awakened a surging need to escape. Blood pounds in her ears, behind her eyes, screaming for her to break away. Behind her, Deidre is outright screaming. The girl wails for her mother to save her – a mother long since dead.

Dawsyn’s breath quickens and her stomach turns to lead. Her stamina, her years of surviving alone, it amounts to nothing. It has brought her here – to die alongside those she never bothered to really know. She whispers an apology to those she shirked, not wanting to accept help or comfort. She whispers her regrets to Hector, who she should have married if she weren’t such a coward. And finally, she whispers to her den of girls and prays they’ll be in the next world, waiting.

The sound of heavy doors on stressed hinges fills the air, and with them, so do other noises.

The sound of cutlery, of clinking glass. The sound of many, many voices rising to a cacophony of festivity.

The sack is removed from her face and she blinks at the sudden flooding of light. It blinds her from every wall, every corner of the vast space – a hall, it seems. The parallel walls are lined with long tables, dressed to perfection. Torchlight glints off the finery that tops them – knives and forks and bowls and plates and innumerable amounts of glassware, full of some ale or other. Each place but a few are taken by Glacians, their great wings flaring as they collide with a neighbor’s. They are served by none other than humans.

The breath whooshes from Dawsyn’s lungs at the sight of them. They carry trays of goblets, boards of bread and fruit. Immediately, she scans each and every face for one she recognizes – for Maya’s.

So consumed with the thought of her sister, Dawsyn fails to notice the most extraordinary thing in the room. Between the two lengths of tables and sunken into the stone floor is a pool, perfectly circular and filled to the brim with a substance that shines as brightly as any torch flame. It is this glaring shine that finally pulls Dawsyn’s attention away from the slaves.

It is liquid and yet… not. The peculiar contents churn, though no elements influence it. Silver and bronze intertwine with azure and emerald. The colors collide and combine and then separate again – a lulling dance. So entranced is Dawsyn that she startles when a voice rings out across the hall, the sound reverberating through the astoundingly high ceiling.

“Welcome, guests of the Ledge!”

Dawsyn’s eyes focus on a figure at the very back of the hall, behind the pool. A Glacian – even larger than any she has seen so far – has risen to stand before a throne.

So, this is the King, Dawsyn thinks.The devil himself.

Barefoot, like the rest of them, he steps around his lonesome table, set just as grandly as the others. He appears young, not nearly middle-aged. His ashen hair sweeps down to his shoulders. His arms are bare, though his chest is covered in armor – the same formal attire the other Glacians wear, but only the King’s is gilded.

“Make room for the humans, you foul animals!” he shouts in jest to his court, his arms outstretched. The Glacians’ raucous laughter pounds in Dawsyn’s ears.

Her hands shake as the manacles are removed from her wrists and ankles. Shoved from behind by the ones named Jorst and Ryon, they are all led to the spaces at the far ends of the tables and made to sit. Jorst pushes cruelly on Deirdre’s injured shoulder, cackles when she cries out, and then nods to Ryon. “Go and fetch the lame ones.” He leans across the table and snatches up a goblet, ambling away to join the raucous crowd of Glacians, while the other, Ryon, heads for the arched doors once more.

Dawsyn repositions as he passes, unwilling to have her back turned to him now that she is free to move. She will let none of these creatures dig their fingers into her wounds. She picks up a fork from the table and readies herself.

The movement makes his eyes snap to hers, and he halts.

Surprise lightens those eyes. Not the surprise of quarry, but the bemused kind, the intrigued kind. A small dent of mirth appears in the corner of his mouth, and over the din, she hears his muffled amusement.

Dawsyn narrows her eyes. There is a heavy shadow along his jaw and chin that she cannot help but notice. It reminds her of the men on the Ledge, rather than the face of a Glacian. He does not wear the same armor as the others, but a gray tunic that does nothing to conceal the mass of his shoulders and chest. He eyes the fork in her hand, and then shifts his gaze back to hers.

“I wouldn’t, girl,” he says in a low voice, his smile disappearing. In its place, if Dawsyn isn’t mistaken, is something like… pity. “You are all out of luck,” he mutters, and then stalks away, leaving the hall quickly.

Seated along a bench, Dawsyn now looks to the goblets and glasses before her and snatches one without a second thought. Her thirst is as bad as her hunger and she guzzles the amber ale within, the burn of it stinging her throat but quenching it still. Her fellows alongside her do the same.

No one comes to slaughter them. The Glacians barely deign to look their way. Dawsyn and her fellow captives sit and drink quickly, bewilderingly still alive.

And while they still live, there is still a chance. In her life, Dawsyn has been cornered with her back to a tree, held to the ground with her face in the snowdrifts, caught between the Chasm and a knife.Tight places, her grandmother taught her,need more thought than force. There’s a way out of here, it’s just hidden.

Suddenly, the arched doors swing open again, revealing Ryon once more. Following him, in two neat rows, are more humans.

Dawsyn and her companions stop their frenzied drinking.

These selected people of the Ledge – at least twenty of them – shuffle slowly into the room. They wear identical garb to the one Dawsyn wears, but they are… different.

She recognizes most, of course, but it is harder than it should be to put names to faces. These faces are vacant. No expressions on any of them. One’s posture and gait does not differ from the next as they obediently walk to the opposing table.

Ryon calls to them, “Sit.”

They do, as submissive as puppets. They sit but do not drink. When food is brought out and set before them, they do not eat. They stare instead into nothing.