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She grins, sated.

Esra’s cheeks have tinged to a deep pink, his head lolling back and forth. “Another will not kill me.”

“No, but I might,” Salem says, kicking at his stool. “Now, go sleep it off. Yeh’re due back here at sundown. It’ll be a busy night.”

Dawsyn’s eyebrows rise. “More patrons will come?”

“Aye.” Salem nods, snatching a bottle from Esra’s hand. “‘Tis the anniversary of the Queen’s crownin’. The Mecca will bear the brunt of celebrations, but it’s too far fer most who live out this way. They’ll gather here instead.”

Salem attempts to shoo Esra and Baltisse from his dining room, and when he fails, he yells until they roll their eyes and saunter away. Dawsyn follows.

Esra heads toward the stairwell, his feet dragging, while Baltisse strides out the front door without any words of parting.

Dawsyn is left with a day ahead to do with what she wants, but what she wants, she should not have. She wonders where Ryon is. Has he left the inn? He promised to stay far from her, but she imagines it to be a risk, walking among humans who would flay him alive if they discovered the truth. So, perhaps he has taken to the woods alone.

She follows Baltisse’s steps over the stoop and looks out to the dirt road, the shadows of the trees. The mage is nowhere, and neither is Ryon. Dawsyn rubs her chilled hands together and steps forward, telling herself lies about how she wants to explore the woods, wants to be alone to think.

Her feet find a well-trodden path through the forest, and she stays on it, lest she lose herself here. She wonders how she would have fared had she entered the Mecca alone yesterday without Ryon to guide her through and carry her back out. She wonders if she would have stormed a palace without knowing he would follow. And if she had, would the guards have listened?

The memory of the Queen’s keen stare invades her thoughts. How astounded she was. Dawsyn tries to imagine her own grandmother, a woman of the Fallen Village, acquainted with royals, and cannot. Of all the tales she had spun, why not one as astonishing as this? Was it too painful to speak of?

Dawsyn allows her conversation with the Queens to replay in her mind, contemplating the sharp, territorial asides from Queen Cressida. She remembers squinting to make out the monument dedicated to the people of the Ledge, a shrine. Dawsyn’s family withstood the reaping of an inherited curse, and what did those in Terrsaw do? They prayed. The people on the Ledge will continue to starve, freeze, fall, and have their souls harvested from their very bodies, and the people of the valley will fall to their knees before a stone carving in thanks.

Dawsyn cannot think of a thing less helpful.

She comes to a stop, not fifty feet from where she started. She sighs at the leaving of lightness that blessed her for a few hours and grits her teeth at the return of new gravity.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE

There is nowhere for Dawsyn to go, nowhere she wants to go, but back to the inn. By afternoon, she has found a vantage point by a wall in the dining room. She watches, entranced, as one by one, patrons of Terrsaw waltz through the door, taking to the chairs and stools and then the empty spaces in between. It isn’t sunset before the dining room is full and raucous.

Salem and Esra pour multitudes of liquor for the patrons, all of whom seem in contest to drink the most, to fall down first – and indeed, some do. Their friends only drag them outside and into the night air, leaving them to sober.

Baltisse looks bored, her lips a deep red. She holds court in a dark corner of the room, people nearby shifting their eyes to her and quickly away. Some are brave enough to approach, their backs bent in submission. Whatever it is they say, she flicks her wrist at them, dismissing them one after the other.

“They ask for her to heal them,” a voice says in her ear.

Dawsyn startles. She feels rather than sees Ryon behind her and swallows. “What happened to keeping your distance?”

She hears his deep sigh, feels it skitter off her ear.

“I’m finding that to be increasingly difficult.”

A burn climbs her spine. She should move away from him.

“Would you like a drink?” he asks.

Her nose wrinkles. “No. I’ve had my fill for a lifetime.”

His quiet laugh rumbles in his chest, and she feels it in her own.

“I’ll leave you to your thoughts then,” he mutters.

He skirts past her, weaving among the humans, as though one of them, no trace of wings or talons. And the humans do not notice, except for the predatory stares from some of the women and a couple of men. A few are not immune to the thrill of him, but the rest drink and eat and joke as though he couldn’t rip them to ribbons in a moment of ire.

Dawsyn keeps to her corner, approached every so often by those whose eyes glance over her body and simple clothing and see opportunity. She shakes her head at each offer of liquor, hardening her glare in the way she learned to on the Ledge when men called at her door to offer their “help”. The thought of allowing these men – some of whom are not unkind or unattractive – to touch her body brings her no sense of thrill. She imagines herself entangled with them and feels nothing. But when her eyes wander to Ryon, occupying a high table by a grime-crusted window, her thighs clench, her stomach tightens, and she feels… it all.

He is accompanied by a woman – a magnificent one. Her red hair folds over her shoulders to the middle of her back, which is mostly bare. Her lips are full, painted, inviting. With every given second, her face inclines closer to his, her chest dipping nearer to the tabletop. And it will only be a matter of moments before Dawsyn knows he will take the bait, before he gives in to her magic, and Dawsyn will not blame him.