Page 91

The sound of wings – a single pair – continues for a time but comes no closer, and then it ceases to be altogether. Dawsyn turns her face to Ryon. She raises an eyebrow.

“Sentries,” Ryon whispers. “There are sentries guarding the perimeter. That’s new.”

“Waiting for you?” she whispers back.

He nods. “Come,” he says faintly. “Stay low to the snow.”

Her back screams as they move onward, but her eyes crane to see what she can of the Glacian kingdom, and it is far greater than she imagined. The strangely steepled rooftops turn rounder, gentler, lower as they pass, growing nearer to the Colony, and then they disappear. She can now see nothing from her vantage point low on the slope.

“Have we reached the end?”

“No,” Ryon whispers back. “This is where the Colony begins.”

She can do nothing but trust he knows where he is and how to get in. The sound of wings does not reach them again, and Dawsyn wonders if Vasteel is stupid enough to neglect placing sentries in the Colony, where Ryon grew to be a man.

“Wait,” Ryon hisses.

Dawsyn drops to the snow again, but Ryon shakes his head.

“Do you see it?”

She pushes her front off the snow and slowly lifts her chin. As her eyes breach the rise, she can make out the distant outline of a white-haired Glacian, stretching his wings wide, as one would their arms upon waking. A sentry.

“We will have to kill him,” Ryon breathes into her ear.

“Won’t it alert Vasteel?” Dawsyn whispers back, her breath fogging.

Ryon sighs. “Yes. But how long will it take them to notice? My guess is at least several hours.”

Dawsyn feels the weight of his forehead rest briefly against her shoulder, and then it is gone. She looks for him, but in his place is the sack of metal that he carried upon his back and the place in the snow where his feet last touched.

“Fucking impatient–” She sees him ahead, darting down from the sky, his wings held back.

He is a thing of the dark. There is a glint of his sword as it enters the crook of the sentry’s neck and sinks to the hilt. Ryon’s feet land heavily a second later. Blood spills from the sentry’s mouth, his faded eyes wide in shock. Ryon grips the sword hilt again and wrenches it out, and the Glacian topples forward to the snow.

Ryon heaves the body to his chest, and faltering slightly, he hefts him back into the sky, flying low into the woods, past the spot where Dawsyn waits. He disappears with the dead Glacian down the slope, and when he returns, there are small specks of blood on his front, and his short sword is back in its sheath.

“We need to be quick.”

The sound of their feet is softer than the sound of wings, and so they run. They run as they did in the opposite direction, away from Glacia and now to it. Ahead, the slope tapers and becomes flat, and Dawsyn’s feet quicken.

There are shadows ahead, hundreds of them. Misshapen and nonsensical. A looming crowd of black shapes. As they grow closer, her breath turns to wheezing and Ryon grabs her hand. He hauls her faster. The shapes ahead become poles, timber struts, flags, tents. They become bent, oblong lodgings, crudely made huts. Row upon twisted row of patchwork shelters crammed too closely, leaning upon each other.

Ryon pulls her down one narrow path, and he barely slows his pace. It is eerily quiet here, but for their panted breaths, the spray of snow off their boots. The frigid air is like ice lancing down her throat and into her lungs. It feels and tastes like the Ledge.

A sickness descends into her stomach, and she has to bite back the bile. The violent urge to run from this place is pronounced, consuming. But she is not alone. This one time, she is not alone, and so she stays the frost. She knows how.

Ryon slows. His hand is a vise on hers. His eyes lift to the skies above, darting warily. He slips into the impossibly narrow gap between a collapsing pine-branch wall and some flailing tent cloth. She has to turn her body sideways to slip through the small space. Ryon lifts the rough fabric of the tent cloth, creating a gap to crawl through along the snow.

She looks at him incredulously.

“Trust me,” he says and guides her down onto the ground.

Too many times in the past weeks, Dawsyn has been made to crawl through small holes and into unknown places, like a brainless animal to a trap. She pulls off her gloves and feels her pulse thrum as she moves her body through the opening, into darkness.

She first notices the absence of snow. Splinters glance off her fingertips instead. She scrambles to stand, to get her feet beneath her, and as she does, she hears a voice, deep and roughened. It stills the very blood in her veins.

“And who, might I ask, are you?”