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“Why did they say nothing? There would have been some on the Ledge who remembered my grandmother… who she was. My own family did not deign to mention it.”

Ryon considers it for a moment, feeling the weight on her chest replicate in himself. “What would it have done to you – to know what was taken? Would it have helped or hurt?”

She scrubs her hands over her face – a gesture of weariness he has never seen her use. “I’m tired.”

“Of what?”

“Of being alone,” she says. “Of… being.”

He knows she does not speak of loneliness in its simplest form. She speaks of being alone in her struggle, in misfortune she cannot share with another. Like Ryon, who belongs nowhere.

Ryon – half-human offspring of a Ledge woman, and a Glacian noble.

And he knows very little about either of them.

He knows what it is to carry one’s own existence alone, and it is tiresome, relentless. The morning is a promise and a burden – destined to be just the same as the last. It becomes difficult to remember why it should be faced. But Ryon has not felt as such in recent days, not since he heard her name echo off the walls of the Glacian palace. Not since he promised himself that he would deliver her from that mountain alive.

“My mother’s name was Farra,” he tells her. The words leave his lips on their own. He does not give them thought, except to concede that he should keep nothing from her anymore, that he never should have in the beginning. “She was dead before I could know her, but she developed friendships with those in the Colony that kept her – with Phineas, too – and when I asked about my mother, they told me what they knew. They relayed all they could. Her last name was Julliard.”

Ryon pauses to await her reaction, and her eyes shift to meet his. She nods. She knows the name. Perhaps then… perhaps one day, she will help him fill in the pieces of himself that remain unknown to him – his mother, a woman of the Ledge, just like Dawsyn…

He swallows, and continues, “My mother, she was a close friend of Harlow Sabar.”

Dawsyn balks. Ryon has never heard her speak the name, but he knows it anyway. He knows what the name means to her.

“My mother?” she asks. “My real mother?”

“People in the Colony say Farra spoke of Harlow Sabar as though they were sisters. Our mothers… they were like family.”

Dawsyn’s eyes shift over his face, forever looking for deception.

“She told the mixed-bloods of how the Sabar family were once royalty, before the princess was captured and dropped on the Ledge. I asked for that story so many times that the name stuck with me. When I heard you say it to Vasteel, I thought I’d misheard. And then you chose the slopes, and it felt… like it was fate. That finally, a chance to leave Glacia for good had arrived, and it was a Sabar who had brought it. A small strand of my mother’s existence, still here.” His hand finds a place along her neck as he speaks, and it fits there perfectly. “That’s why I found you,” he tells her, and with every cell, he hopes she hears him. “That’s why I wanted you with me. I couldn’t leave you behind.”

Her skin warms under his hand.

“Some selfish part of me wanted to seek you out. I have only imaginings of the woman my mother was. But I know she was brave. I know she withstood great suffering on the Ledge and in the Colony, and I know that whatever good lingers in me, was made from her. I saw you, Dawsyn Sabar. And I had to know you.”

She stares at him unflinchingly, and there is no remaining accusation in her eyes. She looks exactly like the woman he first saw in the Glacian palace – like a warrior, like destruction.

Like she should be his.

Or he should be hers.

He cannot help the lowering of his head, or the way his nose slides along her jaw. He cannot stop his lips from finding hers, like missing pieces connecting. And in every second that he knows he should stop, leave her be, he also knows he cannot possibly let her go.

Because she is his.

And he is hers.

CHAPTERTHIRTY-FIVE

They stay within the confines of the cave until hunger and the basic needs of the living can no longer be ignored. It is, despite the circumstances, the calmest hours Dawsyn has spent in a long, long while.

Ryon listens to her endlessly as she tells him all of her – of her den of girls, of Hector. She relays, for the first time in her life, the very worst moments of her life and how they have taken up space within her like clutter, edging out the parts of her that are not shaped by fear. She describes how their family foraged and farmed and bargained for food. She speaks of hours and hours spent learning to use a weapon – to throw one, to kill with one. She tells him how often she was made to put her training to the test with those on the Ledge desperate enough to challenge a Sabar.

His fingers stay on her all the while, tracing the lines along her palm, her collarbone, strands of her hair. His hand claims her entirely, and she lets it. It has been days since she felt those fingers caress her, and though she was loath to admit it, she has yearned for them since.

And Ryon? He longs for her just as much. It is written in the way he turns his head to watch as she moves, in the way his hands brush against her whenever he can find reason, the edge of hunger he tries to hide.