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Ryon feels it when Dawsyn’s neck whips around to pin him with a stare. He feels it but does not look. “I have no idea of what you speak.”

One of the Glacians, a female, snarls like a mountain cat. “You run from the palace? You should have kissed the feet of your King for even deigning to glance your way, you thankless mutt.”

“Only the gods above know why he wants you back,” Oscka continues. “The bastard half-breed son of Mesrich. We should have thrown your newborn body to the pool so we could drink you.”

“Ah, but he does want me back, whole and well, does he not?”

Oscka grimaces. “Only to kill you himself, I’d say. He’s traditional like that.”

“How convenient for me.”

“Ryon,” Phineas says, imploring him, “this is the only chance you will get. Come back. Plead with the King.”

Ryon looks his last at the one who raised and then betrayed him. “I hope you’ve not spent all your time feasting and pleasuring yourselves. It’s a long flight back, and I will not make it easy.”

Fighting words for a battle he cannot hope to win.

The hunters’ talons claw the earth, unused to its yield. Their wings stretch and retract with adrenaline, and their teeth glisten threateningly, but they are weakened. Ryon sees it in the way their wings edge to the rock-strewn ground. It’s in their pallor – tinged gray where it should be ghostly pale. They pant. It might come from the exertion of flight, but Ryon is certain it comes from the rising temperature of their blood. They’ve stayed away from their mountain too long.

“So be it,” Oscka says. “Snap the girl’s neck. I won’t have her scratching me with that ax while I’m otherwise occupied with this traitorous shit.”

With that, the Glacians draw their short swords.

Dawsyn’s stance changes, her eyes snapping to the movements of the nearest Glacians. Without looking his way, she throws her dagger to Ryon, and he catches it.

He watches, entranced, as resolve settles over her features, stilling the tremors. She rolls her shoulders back once, twice, and then locks her sights on the nearest Glacian, one who has stalked closer from her side. She ducks as he lunges lazily for her throat, spins her torso under and around, and with an earth-shattering crack, she embeds the heel of the ax blade into the back of his skull. The Glacian’s eyes go wide and unseeing, and he topples to the stones. Without delay, Dawsyn digs her heel into the back of the dead Glacian’s neck, hefts her weapon from his split skull, and turns to the others, who stand aghast, awed, just as Ryon is.

Dawsyn raises the butt of the ax to rest on her shoulder. “Next,” she says, her eyes stone cold.

One of the females shrieks, her cry breaking the stillness, silencing the river.

In the second before they charge, Ryon recognizes the tendrils of thrill stroking at his nerves, sparking heat in his icy blood – the kind he feels most keenly in flight, the kind that sets him on fire. He almost smiles. He forgets to fear.

The first opponent rushes him and finds the blade in his throat and out again. The Glacian topples over the bank and into the river. Ryon meets the next as the Glacian’s sword rises. He shunts the pure-blood’s forearm away, digging Dawsyn’s knife as far into the side of the Glacian’s ribcage as possible. The attacker roars and falls back, stumbling. His sword clatters to the roots and rocks. Ryon snatches it before it can settle, while hurling the dagger into the chest of the female. She falls with a shriek, and makes to pull the knife from her body, but Dawsyn comes before her, her face spattered in Glacian blood. She lets her ax fall with a thud into the hilt of the dagger, the iron clanging, driving the knife to irretrievable depths, and the female falls silent.

Ryon smiles in earnest as he slides the clean edge of the sword along the throat of the fallen male, his too-warm and bleeding body no match for a half-Glacian on the ground. Ryon turns and sees Dawsyn parrying with both Phineas and Oscka, the iron of her ax blade sparking where it deflects the thrusts of their swords. Phineas pants in earnest, his movements sluggish, weary. Oscka attempts again and again to catch Dawsyn off guard, but her footing is sure, and she moves around them like it is a dance well known.

The ax comes down onto Oscka’s sword a final time, and it clatters out of his grasp. With a singular step, Phineas repositions behind her, as he taught Ryon to do a thousand times, and Ryon runs for him. He jumps, his taloned feet finally breaking free of their confines, and the sharp claws catch Phineas’s side, sending him careening, bleeding, across the bank and into a heap.

“Vasteel will cleave you in two and drain the iskra from your heart himself,” spits Oscka from the ground, Dawsyn over him.

She has one foot on his outstretched hand, one on the lengths of his white hair, pinning him. She is squatted unsteadily behind his head, her body swaying. The ax blade sits heavily upon his throat, already drawing beads of pure Glacian blood.

A smile pulls at the corner of her lips. “To avengeyou?” she asks. “I doubt it.” Then, she wrenches the ax back, leaving a clean line to seep from his neck.

Ryon and Dawsyn both stand to watch Phineas struggle to rise from the ground. He looks like a strong wind would finish him.

“Ryon…” he pants, his hands outstretched.

Ryon throws the short sword. It slices the air, and lands with a thunk in a wide trunk beside the traitor’s head. The breath flies from Phineas’s lungs, his chest heaving.

“Do not speak my name again,” he tells him. Ire becomes Ryon as he stalks closer, scanning the places of Phineas’s body that he will strike.

Phineas’s wings spread wide and high, and before Ryon can lurch for him, he is airborne, rocketing into the open sky above the river.

Ryon’s own wings rise, ready to launch. He’ll capture him within seconds, as weakened as Phineas is.

From the corner of his eye, though, Ryon sees a streak of black hair fall past. He turns and watches as Dawsyn falls to her knees.