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“Wake the volunteers,” Ryon tells her. “Give them their swords. Ensure that they wait on the edges of the Colony. Dawsyn and I will go now, while there is some night left.”

“We will await your signal,” Adrik says. “Good luck, deshun.”

CHAPTERFORTY-FOUR

Ryon nods, his agitation with the old male clear. “Come,” he says to Dawsyn.

He holds out his hand to her, and without hesitation, she rests her palm in his.

They streak through the winding paths between shacks and tents, Ryon ahead, and within seconds, she has lost all sense of direction. His light footfalls hasten, and she struggles to keep pace, her breath fogging in great gusts in her wake. She trips once on an upturned bucket so obscured by snow and ice that it seems part of the ground. Her bare palms catch her fall, and the frost bites into her skin, burning it. Ryon turns briefly, for as long as it takes her feet to find their stride and propel her from the ground. They run on.

She knows it when they reach the pure village. The divide between the mixed and the pure is so clear that there is no need for a line in the snow, but there might as well be. Ryon pulls her into the shadows, and they crouch. Ahead lies the stone-forged structures for the pure-bloods. High roofs slant in an exaggerated way. Fortresses. Imposing edifices that seem to loom miles above the makeshift homes of the Colony.

“Do you remember the passage we spoke of?” Ryon asks her, and she nods.

In the past few hours, Dawsyn has learned the scope of Ryon’s planning. He knows how one would gain entrance, how one would lead an uprising into its belly. He has learned how the Glacians move in their territory, how they guard it, how they protect it. Of the many in the Colony, it seems he is the only one to have ever gleaned the palace’s secrets.

“It will not be a clean entrance,” he reminds her, and she nods again.

The passage he speaks of is an old slaves’ route. It would lead the human slaves, slaves like Gerrot, from the palace to their own confinements – a kind word, Ryon believes, for the cells they are crowded into each night. The route is mostly unused now. The humans kept slipping on the ice and harming themselves, killing themselves. Now, they are kept below the palace when they are not needed. The slaves’ route leads to a tunnel, one that dives beneath the palace walls and straight into the palace itself, save for a few portcullises along the way, of which there is only one way through.

Ryon’s fingers are suddenly beneath her chin. They burn against the glacial air, and she meets his eyes, a hairbreadth from hers.

“Do not die,” he tells her, eyes searching her face.

She grins, running one finger along the line of his jaw. “I never do.”

As though he cannot stop himself, he pulls her mouth up to his. The curve of his lips, the feel of his rough jaw, it consumes her. She crushes her mouth against his, momentarily drunk on the way warmth seeps through his lips to hers. In painstaking degrees, they part, the wide span of his hand running from her hairline to her throat. She nods at him once more, lets one hand linger on his a moment longer, and when he moves, she bolts.

They run, snow spraying from beneath their heels. They sprint along the dark crevice between stone walls. They hurtle through the alley to an opening, where the lane widens. There are no windows or doors as they hurry past. It isn’t until they turn down a break in the wall that they see entrances, closed against the night air. The path is winding and long. It must be to avoid the sight of the Glacians, and so they backtrack and take wide arcs to reach the unused routes and roads less travelled. Ryon pants that they are almost there, almost there, almost to the tunnel that will take them to Vasteel.

Dawsyn’s throat becomes drier the farther they travel – from fear or frigid air, she isn’t certain. She only knows the closer to the palace they come, the more her resolve wanes. The fortitude that bid her to fight this battle seems diluted among these walls, the tallest she’s seen. She remembers the cold stone beneath her feet in the Glacian banquet hall, the oppressive mass of white Glacian flesh, the feel of Mavah’s blood spraying onto her skin. She remembers the glint of Vasteel’s sickening smile. She remembers the call of the pool, how inviting it seemed…

With bone-breaking suddenness, reverberations echo off the stone surrounding them. Dawsyn can see the opening to the tunnel ahead, so close, and before it are two Glacians, coming to rest with their wings at their sides, white skin matching that of the ice at their feet.

“Well, half-breed, you have lost me good coin. I wagered you wouldn’t carry a sack big enough to see you back here again.”

Ryon grips Dawsyn’s hand, crushing her fingers, enough to tell her to stay quiet. Which Dawsyn has not done a day in her life. Blood pounds in her ears.

The pair of white Glacians stand, jeering, talons curling into the ice beneath their feet. Talons that impaled her. Talons that ripped people from their village and dumped them across a Chasm.

“Do not worry, you translucent shit. I carry enough for us both,” she says, her breath fogging with bloodlust.

“Smart mouths usually get filled mighty quick where you’re headed, girl, and not by anything you’d enjoy.”

Dawsyn can practically taste the violence leaching from Ryon’s skin.

“I wouldn’t,” he says, his sight settling somewhere above the Glacian’s eyes.

“Wouldn’twhat, half-breed?”

“I wouldn’t speak about her mouth again. I have a plan I need to follow.”

They laugh in great, huffing barks.

“That plan has fallen to the pits of the fucking Chasm, Mesrich, right atop your father’s corp–”

The knife cuts cleanly through the Glacian’s forehead, embedded between his eyes, before his sentence is through. The hilt quivers as he falls, his body slackening onto the ice. Ryon’s hand is still outstretched in the place he let the blade fly, but now, he straightens and reaches for another.