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“I thought we were avoiding hacking them down along the way?” Dawsyn asks him lightly, drawing her own blade from her belt. “I specifically recall the words, ‘No hacking, slicing, or gutting until we get inside’.”

“Yes,” he concedes. “This was a special case.”

The second Glacian hasn’t bothered to draw a weapon; in fact, he looks rather bored as he says, “You do nothing to help your cause, Ryon.”

“I help all who walk and breathe by putting down that brute, Iman,” Ryon says in return.

“Perhaps. But when the King holds his sword to your wings, how will you claim penance?”

“And who will capture me and bring me before him? You?”

“No,” the Glacian named Iman says. “Us.”

At that, the sound of wings fills the air.

Glacians – many of them – are perched and waiting on the spires above, and as Dawsyn looks to the sky, she has enough time to see the wave of white descend upon her before it hits.

CHAPTERFORTY-FIVE

The Glacians swarm them, overwhelm them. There are a dozen of them.

A flattering number, Dawsyn thinks, and in the same moment, her face is pushed into the icy ground.

The weight of a Glacian crushes her as their knee finds her back, pushing the breath from her lungs until she is dizzy, gasping. She feels hands along her back, her sides, feeling for her weapons. They find the blade she held aloft moments before and nothing more.

He is blurry, but she can see Ryon on the ground beside her, several Glacians with their talons holding his arms, his back. Where their claws puncture his skin, blood slides over his forearms and into the frost.

“Bring them into the tunnel,” Iman says in his tired way.

Without warning, Dawsyn and Ryon are yanked from the ground, their arms now pinned and shackled behind their backs, the iron chafing already. Ice sticks to Dawsyn’s cheeks and ears, searing the skin as effectively as a fire poker. She turns her head to the Glacians at her back, hulking over her, and spits at their feet.

A white hand connects at frightening speed. The blow startles her, leaves a scorching burn across her cheek and temple. She stumbles but does not fall.

Ryon lashes out, launching his heel into the offending Glacian’s leg. The male howls into the night air, cursing savagely, and the other Glacians pin Ryon to the wall, shackling his ankles now, landing their own blows to his stomach, his ribs.

Dawsyn struggles against the Glacian who holds her. “Ryon! If you defend my honor each time someone slaps me, you’ll live a short life.”

“But still an honorable one,” he grunts, spitting blood to the ground.

“Enough!” Iman calls. “Move them – now!”

The cold hands that wrap around Dawsyn’s forearms heft her forward, and she is shunted over the ice, down the alley, and into a hole. The steps are narrow here, steep, falling away into oblivion. On the last few, the Glacian behind her pushes her away and lets her plunge to the floor, her cheekbone catching her fall. She curses in a low voice, groaning at the burgeoning pain erupting along her face.

“Come now, little vermin.”

Laughter, and then she is hauled to her feet.

She groans, pulling at the restraints around her wrists. She wants to be rid of them, but without a blade or her ax, there is very little to be done. There are too many of them with skulls as thick as walls, and there is no hope of subduing them.

The tunnel is wider than she expected and pitch-black. The air is painfully cold but still at least. She can hear the shuffling of Ryon behind her, his steps smaller than the rest. She can feel him, even with the brutes between. She can feel the way he seeks her out, listens for her steps, her breaths, just as she listens for his.

The Glacians halt. Dawsyn sees nothing ahead or anywhere, but she hears the rattling of iron. A portcullis, she assumes, one of several that Ryon described.

A white light forms in the dark – small and glistening at first, and then it grows, becoming painfully bright. The light wraps itself like a vine around a Glacian’s hand, from wrist to fingertip, becomes a web of brilliant, luminous frost. Whatever magic it is, it moves from the Glacian’s hand to the iron lock. She hears the metallic click as the mechanism heeds to its instruction.

The portcullis lifts, rattling into the ceiling, and with a shove, Dawsyn is forced onward.

She feels when the tunnel begins to climb. The procession continues past yet another portcullis, unlocked with the same Glacian magic, before light begins to leak through the tunnel, lifting the unending dark by degrees. The light intensifies as they turn a corner, and Dawsyn sees it – the arched opening, the bleak, gloomy halls beyond it, brightened by light.