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Even as she shakes her head, her eyelids droop. She can feel the void of her mind reaching out, claiming her by inches. She will not last an hour before she falls. It’s been too long since she last ate or drank, too long since she rested.

“There is no need for you to die, girl, but if you insist on it, I will not save your frozen corpse from this mountain. They will find you and throw your body into the pool, just like the others.”

“And what need do you have of me?” she asks. Her words blend and hitch as she fades.

“I already told you,” he says, his hands lowering, eyes on her shaky legs, “I do not need you at all.”

She knows it when she falls, though she does not feel her body meet the ground. Perhaps she never reaches it. Perhaps the wind deafening her ears is the sound of falling and the blackness is oblivion.

CHAPTERELEVEN

The smell of smoke is what wakes her, not the steady thrum of blood pulsing behind her eyes or the stretch of her skin against stitches. In the fissure between sleep and awareness, she believes she is home, huddled on the dusty floor before the hearth. But her head is too heavy, her shoulders pinched and tender. Her feet are so compacted that she winces. The sound and smell and sight of the slopes return to her in a rush, and then she is awake, she is sitting, she is reaching wildly for her knife, for anything, eyes wheeling through the haze of sleep.

“Relax, girl. You are safe.” The rough voice reaches her before she sees him.

The Glacian, Ryon, squats before a small fire. His face is dimly lit by the embers. The smoke warps him, liquefies him.

Her heart still galloping, she looks around but barely sees. “What is this?”

“It’s a warren, much better than the one I found you in,” he says, stoking the fire.

And indeed, Dawsyn now makes out the roots overlapping and weaving to the earth.

“There is only so far I can fly in a blizzard. But at least while we rest, we know the others must be idle, too.”

It is then that she notices the change in the Glacian before her, the thing missing. “Your wings have gone.”

“Not gone,” he says. “Just sequestered for the moment. There is very little space in here.”

Dawsyn frowns. “You can make them disappear?”

“We can all summon and vanish them as we please.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

Ryon grimaces. “Glacians tend to carry their ego on their wings.”

“You are stifling the fire,” Dawsyn says warily, eyes watching his hands work.

Ryon frowns. “Be thankful I lit one at all, girl. You’d be a pretty blue corpse without it.”

She frowns back. “And what of you?”

“I prefer the cold.”

Glacians. Dawsyn’s grandmother taught her that the ice beasts were impervious to the cold, that they were the cold itself.

“Does the heat not bother you?”

His expression remains unchanged, his eyes on the low-burning embers he snuffs. “It is uncomfortable, but it does not hurt me to be close to it the way it would a full-blooded Glacian. So, if you were thinking of sticking me with a fire poker, I would reconsider.” Beneath heavy brows, his brown eyes shift then, meeting hers. “Though I suppose you have other skills, do you not, girl?”

Dawsyn’s eyes narrow. “I haven’t been a girl since my first blood cycle, hybrid, and I was an early bloomer.”

His head tilts, brow furrowed. “‘Hybrid?’” A smirk threatens the corners of his mouth. “I’ve not heard the term.”

Her eyes slip from his crown to his boots and back up. “On the Ledge, the seeds of sitka and hemlock trees fall and the saplings grow too closely. It is difficult to tell them apart. We call them hybrids.”

He grins. “Is it difficult to tell me apart?”