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“His name is Ryon,” Dawsyn inserts, her brow furrowed.

“Ryon who?”

“Ryon Vesser,” he says. A fake name but a common one nonetheless.

Cressida appraises him, and Ryon feels her keen glare like a dagger to the chest. He knows what she is looking for. She sees his black skin and thinks him human, but some acute instinct tells her to look again. His Glacian blood cannot be seen, but it is in the wide set of his shoulders, the breadth of his hands, and the cut of his jawline. Her eyes narrow.

“Tell us the tale then, Dawsyn Sabar. How are you here? Not a soul has managed to flee from the Ledge before.” There is a sneer that coats Queen Cressida’s words, as though she believes her wife to be a fool, tricked by the immature stories of peasants. “Did you leap over the Chasm?”

Dawsyn’s stare turns to stone. “No,” she says, her voice free of fear. “I was selected and carried over by the Glacians.”

Standing there, a foot shorter than the rulers of the kingdom, in borrowed clothes not nearly as fine, Dawsyn holds the room in her hands. Her body has not been kept by the many servants of a palace, but forged in the ice of a prison. Her parted lips are red and raw from the wind of the mountain, not painted in wine from a lifetime of feasts. Still, she commands them. And Ryon sees her clearly.

The Queens, the guards, and he, they fall quiet, and they listen to her speak.

And she does. She relays how she refused to be part of the pool’s poisonous magic. She tells them of how she was made into a game, a trophy to claim on the slopes. She glances over the way she bested them, not bothering to describe how she cut down Glacians in her path, how the cold tried to claim her. She tells them that she reached the bottom alone to spare Ryon, maintaining his lie as promised. She says that she found gaps in the jutting rocks to clamber through the Boulder Gate, arriving in the kingdom on the other side. And then she speaks of kind patrons at an inn, who fed her, clothed her, and showed her the way to them, the Queens.HerQueens.

When she is finished, the ringing of her voice remains, encapsulated by the glass ceiling that seems to cradle it.

It is some time before the Queens react. Their lips hang parted, the lines around each of their mouths etched deeply.

“Well,” Queen Alvira mutters, “it is a miracle that you survived.”

“Yes,” Dawsyn agrees, “it is.”

“If it is true,” Cressida adds, her voice grim. “What is it that you want, girl? Why have you assaulted our guards to speak with us?”

“I wanted to see the people who live so luxuriously below while more of my people slip into the Chasm each day above. I wanted to see why it was us who had to live trapped like mice and not those who remain on the ground. I wanted to see what was so special about those people who escaped our fate.”

Ryon feels the guards behind him withdraw by inches, shrinking away from the accusation in her tone.

Dawsyn continues, “My family lived and died in a corner, a pinprick of your world, and I am owed an opportunity to speak with the rulers who left us there to freeze.”

Queen Alvira’s eyes flash. “Remarkable. She is as audacious as Valma was.” But her face gives way to something resembling remorse. “What did you expect of us, Dawsyn Sabar? We could not cross the Chasm to you any more than you could cross it to us.”

“And yet I have.”

“Yet you have,” Alvira nods. “And I am enamored. Not a single soul of the Fallen Village survived the pillaging of the Glacians fifty years ago. Let me assure you, there is not a person of Terrsaw that does not feel that loss each day of their lives.”

Dawsyn does not respond. Her expression remains stony, impassive.

“If you came looking for an apology, you may have it. I am truly sorry for the destiny you inherited when your grandmother was taken to the Ledge. I always looked up to her, and I grieve her, even now, so many years later. She was my friend, as were many of the villagers that were lost to us. I still cannot go there and see what remains. It only serves to remind me how powerless we were then and are now. Knowing that she survived the attack, that she bore children, brings me relief like none you will ever know.” Alvira steps forward then, her hands cautiously reaching for Dawsyn’s.

Dawsyn looks at the Queen’s spotted and veined hands with suspicion before slowly laying one of hers within their grasp. Queen Alvira clasps it and holds it to her bosom.

“My dear, let me show you something.”

Together, the odd grouping follows the Queen down a hall, up a white marble stairwell, and then onto a grand balcony. Here, too, the flooring meticulously lies in shining mosaic, but it is the view that commands attention, for all of the Mecca expands before them in every direction.

“There.” Queen Alvira points, leading Dawsyn to the edge.

Queen Cressida follows beside them, marginally less hospitable than her wife. She continues to eye Dawsyn with open hostility.

Ryon’s fists clench.

“Do you see the monument in the town square?” the Queen asks of both him and Dawsyn.

He does see it. He has seen it several times in his trips to the Mecca over the years. The stone monument stands twenty feet high. It is a woman, shawl waving in a breeze long gone and skirts hanging among the rubble at her feet. She stands upon a mound of broken rock, her hands holding loosely to fractured stone. Ryon doubts Dawsyn sees the details from this distance, but he knows them well. He knows the shape of the woman’s nose, the soft wave of her brows. He knows how the lids are shuttered to the world. He knows the full lips are parted in misery, her back slouched in defeat.