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“You’d never marry me, Dawsyn. If I thought you would, I might ask after all, peace be damned. It would be better than knowing I’m leaving you alone over there, in your cabin.”

“You do not leave me alone,” Dawsyn says, biting into her pear. “I choose my solitude.”

“You know what I wonder?” Hector muses, his pear untouched. “I wonder if perhaps youwishfor Selection.”

Dawsyn’s mouth stills. She thinks of the nights she cannot sleep, the days of labor that creep relentlessly toward each Selection, all weighted in dread. She thinks of the silence of her cabin and wonders, too, if perhaps shedoeswish for the wait to end.

Perhaps she is tired.

Perhaps there are worse things than death.

* * *

Dawsyn succumbs to sleep that afternoon, and the daylight outside is swept away by the squalls of frost. Hector and Dawsyn lie in separate cots, and she is comforted by the soft sounds of his breath – his little piece of companionship. Before her eyes close and her mind travels away, she thinks of those Glacian talons piercing through skin and wonders if the pain would be all that bad.

CHAPTERTHREE

The woman who raised her used to call the cabin “the den of girls”, the only one like it on the Ledge, where the hostilities do not end with the weather or the Chasm. They do not end with scarcity of food either. After those things are the threat of men and the lack of places for a woman to run. Dawsyn supposes that living the way they did – a household with only two women to protect it – they might have been an easy target. But her mother slept in her cot by the door each night, a sharpened carving knife beneath her pillow and the villagers all knew it. Some found out when their throats were pressed against it. Dawsyn does not know when, but eventually, the men stopped gracing their threshold.

A long time ago, there was a father, too. The man who built this cabin and kept them fed. Now, he lies somewhere at the bottom of the Chasm, heaped upon those that fell before him, buried beneath those after. He and another had brawled too closely to the lip. And just like that, his wife, Briar, was widowed with a baby in her womb.

Dawsyn remembers Briar stepping into their cabin, her belly preceding her.

“It took him,” she muttered to the room, to herself, to no one.

It took several moments for them to realize that she meant the Chasm.

“Is he truly gone?” Valma, Dawsyn’s grandmother, asked.

Briar’s knees hit the wooden floor and she nodded, but she did not break. Not then.

At night, Dawsyn would wake to the sounds of quiet sobs, but in daylight, the woman never faltered. A layer of steel blanketed their den of girls from that day onward and Briar raised her children, stayed the frost, watched the Chasm, and never let an intruder come farther than the stoop.

Dawsyn presses her pink hands to a dry cloth by the basin and turns to the cabin. Here, her younger sister, Maya, would run in circles, would shout rather than speak, her tumbling black hair a bird’s nest. Her grandmother would sit on her cot by the wall and mend the clothes, a pot of water over the fire always bubbling, a constant stream of warnings flying from her mouth to Maya’s unhearing ears. Eventually, Briar would ask Dawsyn to take her sister outside and let her run wild. How Dawsyn hated that chore. She was loath to lace up her boots and don her coat and step away from the warm hearth. Her sister would beg for games and run away when Dawsyn called for her. Frost would begin to collect in her eyebrows and she would curse Briar for sending her out with Maya day after day.

But just as the pine grew, so did Maya and Dawsyn, and the games grew tolerable, less exhausting. When Dawsyn was fifteen, her grandmother finally succumbed to the wretched cough that had plagued her for a year and four became three.

Even without their grandmother, the den of girls managed well in the years that followed. Briar protected Dawsyn and Maya, kept them warm, kept them fed. Miraculously, they survived each Selection, unscathed. Dawsyn supposes she had become complacent. Back then, in the sixteen years of her life, not once had her family been rendered smaller by the Glacians.

Their luck did not stay.

Upon the changing of seasons, the people of the Ledge bunched before their doors, the winds signaling the arrival of the hostile months ahead. Dawsyn held tight to Maya, the cloak she was cloistered in frayed and two sizes too big. It had been their grandmother’s. Ten paces in front of them was Briar, face to the sky, shoulders squared, her knife hidden along her spine.

“They might take her this time,” Maya said to Dawsyn, her voice low, scared.

“They won’t.”

“They might… I’m not a child. You don’t need to lie to me.” She scowled, eyes blinking away the small snow flurries.

Dawsyn said nothing at that.

“If she is selected, we have to fight it off.”

Dawsyn’s head whipped to her sister. “Do not be stupid. You’ll be killed.”

And she should have known. She should have known that Maya, who had never listened to a damned thing that was said, would not change her ways when it mattered.

The Glacians came.