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She steps out into the last vestiges of night and disappears. She has her weapons, her meager coins, and the clothes on her body. She raises the hood on her cloak and slinks onto the path that will take her north to the Mecca. If she cannot make do elsewhere, at least she will have the promise Queen Alvira made to accommodate her, should she need it.

She keeps to the cover of trees. The path runs alongside her, but she does not risk setting foot onto it where the white bats might fly over. Her ears reach for any sound that will alert her to them, but the only noise comes from the ground – the crunch of leaves and twigs, the clicking of insects. Weak sunlight gradually replaces the dark, and she ventures deeper into the dense forest, where the branches of the tallest tree reach to caress their neighbor’s, tangling like the threads of a blanket.

But all too soon, the sound of wind in the distance makes her freeze. How well she knows it, so different from that of a coming storm. It is the sound of her upbringing, of her home’s gatekeepers. Like it did on each Selection Day, the sound makes her stomach give way, the feeling of falling into the Chasm.

She runs.

The familiar fear claws at her heels, but she no longer needs to subdue it, to remain still and compliant. She runs in the way her instincts have always begged her to. The sound of swooping grows closer, and she digs the balls of her feet into the earth, straining to propel herself farther, faster. She has to find a warren, a hollow, something. If the Glacians decide to land in the forest, they will hear her footfalls echo for miles.

She is swallowed in panic as the sound of snapping branches comes from above, and she turns her head, looking away from her path.

And then she is falling, falling.

Her arms windmill, clawing for purchase but finding only air. Her stomach leaves her body, and a silent scream fights its way from her lungs to her throat.

She manages a small glimpse of the raging white river before it swallows her. First her feet, then her stomach, and then all of her.

Worse than snow. Worse than ice. The river water thrashes her around and around, blinding her, deafening her, filling her nose and throat. It finds every follicle, every cell. Her arms and legs flail for the surface, but she does not know where it is, and she is racing, being hauled and tossed like something weightless. Snow and ice can break and burn, but water… water pulls and drags its prey down its path, stealing sense, stealing breath. She can stay the frost, but there can be no rising above a creature she cannot hold.

She cannot think around the piercing cold. Worse because even when her mind fails, her muscles remember how to move. But she has never been taught to swim, so her legs wheel, her arms reach in every direction, her head breaks the surface of the river over and over – too quickly for her to draw breath – and no lingering vestige of her body can save her. Twice, her torso is struck by something solid as she is hurtled downstream, and so she tucks her stomach, her chin, and waits to die.

Better to have let the pool steal her iskra. Better to have fallen into the Chasm than to have seen the world below the Ledge, held it, and then have it ripped away. The edges of her mind blacken.

Another strike to the stomach. Something – a fallen log perhaps – thrusts into her abdomen and curls around her. Where the water spun and tore, it now only carries. She is suddenly wrenched sideways, and her head breaks the surface.

Not sideways then. Upward.

She cannot gulp at the air while the water pours in torrents from her mouth, but she does not go back under.

There is a ragged breathing in her ear, and though she feels nothing on her frigid skin, hears nothing past the roaring of the river, she becomes aware that Ryon has her.

He has me.

And then she slips into the folds of her consciousness.

CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT

He cannot vanish his wings – they are slick with river water. Though they helped him guide a path through the rapids to a narrow bank, their weight drags him and her back down into the current over and over. With a roar, he throws her over the eroded ledge of the bank, and her back slams hard into the thick, twisting roots of an oak tree, the water in her lungs spewing from her lips. But she does not wake, and her chest does not move with breath. Ryon crawls up and over to her, his hands hitting her chest, panting in raking gasps. He presses his palm to her sternum again, again, watching trickles of water seep from the sides of her mouth.

Open your eyes!

Ryon has watched many die, held their hands as they took their last breath, or else held the knife that silenced them. So why does his throat close now? Why does he throw his fist into the earth in an ungodly rage? Why do his hands run over his hair and face like he wants to rip it all away?

Don’t leave.

Her eyelids flutter.

“Dawsyn?”

She splutters, river water spraying from her, but then there is a gasping inhale – one to rattle bones, to disturb the dead – and mercifully, Dawsyn returns to him.

Her eyes roll, unable to claim a hold, and her limbs shake violently. But she lives, and Ryon feels the cold slip away from his blood bit by bit, returning a warmth that he has learned comes from her and not from him.

“I knew you were too stubborn to die,” he tells her, but his voice shakes. He feels sick.

She finally finds him, her eyes stilling, and a tear falls. “As it happens, I am not a skilled swimmer.”

“I saw,” Ryon says, a grin spreading widely under his growing stubble.