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Groaning, half-conscious, Redmond strains drunkenly for his knife, where it fell from his grasp, a foot away.

“I’m embarrassed for you,” Dawsyn mutters, spitting into the snow.

She takes a step to retrieve the knife and bends down, close to Redmond’s face. She watches his eyes open and shut blearily and holds the knife to one of them. The silver tip aligns with his pupil.

Instantly, he sobers. His lips tremble.

“If it wasn’t for that rude remark about my mother, I could have let this go,” she tells him, her words fair.

“Please,” he mumbles. “Please.”

Dawsyn rolls her eyes. “Why do men only use their manners when there’s a knife to their eye? You weren’t such a gentleman a minute ago.”

His eyes crumple in fear before shutting altogether. His jaw goes slack and he faints.How typical.

Dawsyn supposes she could leave him this way, let him waken later with a thumping head and frostbite.

She cannot.

“You fucking coward.” She stands, pockets the knife, and returns the ax to the strap against her spine. She places a boot against his side and shunts him until he rolls. She does it again and again until he hits the ice and watches, with no small amount of pleasure, as his body slips away, gliding down into that great yawning mouth of the world.

What does it mean that she does not cry or collapse? That she feels sated instead of remorseful? She does not crave killing, never seeks it, but it tends to find her. Briar taught her to always take life when it threatened hers.

Dawsyn isn’t certain this is what she meant.

CHAPTERFIVE

The Selection will come at dusk – a cruelty. A day she and the villagers must spend lingering, making the most of their time but not delighting in it. It always slides away in unpredictable patterns. The morning crawls and then suddenly, the light dims, the shadows lengthen, and the time comes.

Dawsyn spends it doing very little and it does not serve her. Each time, she finds herself almost wishing for the eleventh hour. Before it comes, she hides a weapon along her thigh. Her ax, sharpened and oiled, is secured to the strap against her back, the heel of its blade resting on her scapula. Briar and her grandmother, Valma, favored knives, but Dawsyn favors something more familiar, if less practical.

As the light fades from the Ledge, Dawsyn and all the others leave their cabins. Her boots sink into the snow as she pulls them to a spot she loathes – the head of a family long gone. She takes a shuddering breath, the icy air stinging the back of her throat. Looking to her side, her eyes track the path of the Face to Hector’s cabin, where he stands ahead of his mother. He raises a hand in a small gesture and she nods back, swallowing hard. Then she turns her eyes to the sky.

The granite clouds swirl in slow whorls, at home here on their mountain. As the beating of her heart quickens, so, too, does the mist. She isn’t fool enough to pretend not to fear what’s coming. Fear, however, will not help her if she is selected, so she straightens her spine, shakes her hands and waits.

A disturbance appears in the blanket of cloud, the whorls skittering.

The Ledge holds a collective breath. Whose last will it be?

The first Glacian comes, gliding into a slow arc. A female, with pale skin and imposing mass. Her wings, skeletal and transparent, span the length of a cabin. Her hair whips in the wind, ashen gray – the same color as the other five who swiftly follow her through the cloud. They drift together now in a wide circle above the Ledge, eyeing their prey, vultures stalking a carcass. She realizes how those creatures must see her, waiting below. A thing as good as dead.

Dawsyn begins to count. How many circles will they make before they descend to take their share? Or will they rampage first? Is there someone who neglected to show before their cabin?

On the sixth circle, the female’s eyes stop searching. She has locked onto her prey. A speck upon the mountain top, free for the taking.

Dawsyn stares back at her. She watches the Glacian’s lips pull back over her teeth, eyes alight with challenge. At once, she swoops and the others follow. Their wings tucked close to their sides, they fall to the earth.

Dawsyn knows she’ll be taken before the Glacian reaches her.

She sees the female’s taloned feet stretch midair, mere seconds before they collide with her flesh.

She has time to glance to her left, to lock eyes with Hector, before she feels the first bite of those claws in her skin. His eyes close, unwilling to see the talons slice through her flesh, beneath her clavicles. She whimpers at the sudden, hot pain lancing through her shoulders, but it does nothing to erase her last image of the Ledge – Hector’s knees hitting the snow, his hands to his face. Her den of girls falling away from her, growing miniscule.

She is lifted and carried away.

CHAPTERSIX

The pain makes it near impossible to think. She is propelled through heavy mist and it blinds her. She cannot twist, cannot move her arms without her bones grinding against those talons. She tries and fails to reach for the blade on her thigh. Briar’s words fill her head, telling her to fight, to cut, to let herself fall rather than be taken, but she cannot reach. She cannot. She cries out in frustration.