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She spins. The poker flies from her hand. It spears across the room and through the only window that wasn’t already shattered, splintering the stained glass.

“Where is my blade?” she hisses at Ryon, stalking past him. He makes to grab her hand, but she slips from his hold. “Whereis myblade?”

Salem and Esra look outwardly frightened. Esra’s hands are on his mouth, muffling his distress, and Salem bows his head.

Ryon follows Dawsyn again, trying to speak, trying to console – trying and failing.

“Shut up and give me my BLADE!”

Ryon’s hand goes to his hip, and he withdraws it from a sheath. “I can’t give it to you until you tell me what you intend to do with it.”

But Dawsyn strikes his palm with a kick, and his fingers loosen reactively. She swipes it from his slack hand and bounds through the door and out into the dawn, not deigning to glance back. “I intend to do whatever the fuck I want with it.”

And she is gone.

CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE

It is two hours to the Mecca and another through it to its center. Dawsyn does not speak the entire way. First, Ryon tries to talk to her, tries to persuade her to turn back, but his attempts are met with stone-cold silence, and eventually, he gives in. He is unwilling to attempt stopping her by any physical means, and instead falls back a step behind her, resigned to follow.

The whole way, she fights not to scream. She fights the urge to slash the knife at every long blade of grass, at every low hanging branch, at Ryon. She cannot look at his face, can no longer bear the sound of his voice, the feeling of his presence.

She can hardly bear herself. Did she not suspect his lies? Does she not know the true nature of men? The taste in her mouth is so bitter that she wants to spit. She knew far better than to let the words and hands of a man – any man – compete with her sense.

Did he think she wasn’t watching?

Did he think she could not hear?

If there was something she learned from the Ledge, it was patience, calculation. It was waiting for the layers of bark to flake from the tree’s trunk before cutting it down; it was stretching the food, the water, the wood to last and last. It was waiting and watching and timing one’s attack to the exact second. It was listening to the gaps in sentences and hearing what was really being said.

The Mecca thrums with activity as they stalk quickly through, and this time, the glances in their direction turn into stares. The common people do not pass over them, as they did the first time Dawsyn visited; instead, their eyes linger, lips start to whisper. Some of the men pull off their hats and bare their heads to the cold as she passes. They seem not to notice the hulking man who shadows her. Word has reached them, she guesses, that a girl escaped the Ledge.

Does she only imagine the shame that warms their cheeks and turns their eyes to the ground, or is it what she now knows that colors it differently? The farther they travel from the outskirts, the more the Mecca bustles with activity, and the widened eyes and low whispers become more prominent.

No one speaks to her. No one dares to approach. The blade in her hand warns them away, and mothers pull their children behind their skirts. A pathway seems to carve itself between the people as they let her through.

Lucky, she thinks. She isn’t willing to speculate how many she’d cut down if they got in her way.

She deviates from her course when they reach the marketplace. The rows of steepled roofs end and open out onto the town square, where the tradespeople spruik their wares. The shrine can be seen beyond, the one Queen Alvira pointed to from the palace balcony. The shrine she used to describe her deep regret. Dawsyn thought she was describing an observer’s regret – the kind Dawsyn had felt for those who slipped into the Chasm. She wonders how it would feel to lead an innocent to the edge and watch as they fell in.

She hoped it felt painful.

Dawsyn cuts a path through the center of the town square and does not check if Ryon follows. She leads the way into a short and narrow alley. At its end is the shrine to the people of the Ledge.

It looms above her, at least three times her size. At the statue’s base are hundreds of unlit candles, the dry folds of wax teetering to the stone steps. Dried and dead flowers are strewn between the stubs, and unlike the town square behind them, the open space around the shrine is empty of people, of anything at all. It is quiet. The wind whispers through and lifts the withered petals of the flowers. It raises the hair on the back of her neck.

Dawsyn slowly rounds the statue’s base until she can see the statue clearly –The Fallen Woman.

Her pulse quickens with each step and stutters when she finally lays her eyes upon her. The woman’s fine shawl sweeps past her with phantom wind, frozen in place. Her lips are parted, her eyes shut, and even though the color of stone diminishes her, Dawsyn can still taste her misery, her defeat. The woman’s hands are clenched at her sides, rubble crumbling between her fingers, and it all feels wrong.

She wishes she could speak to this statue’s maker and tell them that this woman’s chin should be raised, her eyes open and keen. She wants to paint the cheeks red and burned. She wants to carve a weapon into the grip of the woman’s hand. She wants the tendrils of hair dipped in tar until they glisten black. She wants to tear into the stone and peel it away until she finds the true woman’s form beneath its rendering, so much bigger and stronger than the statue has cast her.

Ryon steps toward Dawsyn’s still form from behind, and tentatively, he lays his hand on her shoulder.

Dawsyn shudders at his touch, wanting it but not wanting anyone to touch her ever again. Inside her is a knowledge that has grown from a seed. How she wishes she could ignore it. She should have squashed it when she first felt it, ensuring it didn’t grow into the insipid vine that grips her now. It hurts to know. She imagines it is why she was never told in the first place.

“Ryon,” she says, swallowing hard, “why did they carve my grandmother into stone?”

He pauses for a long moment before he answers, “She was their princess, Dawsyn. The crown princess of Terrsaw.”