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Dawsyn finds the charmed necklace beneath the layers of her clothing. She runs her fingertips along its chain. She wonders where Ryon is.

Like a call answered, she hears a body moving toward her, coming ever closer. And then his voice is saying her name again.

She says, “I’m here,” and “take my hand,” and his fingers are back in hers. They rest upon the cold ground, side by side, her forehead pressed into the curve of his neck, where she can feel the pulse of him and nothing else. Not the rising panic in her gut or the weight of obligation. Just that who she loves and oblivion.

It doesn’t seem such a bad fate.

“We could stay here.” Ryon whispers, his mind aligned with hers, and she smiles.

“The very opposite of our objective, if you’ll recall.”

“Indeed,” he groans, for a moment not sounding noble at all, but more as though the presence of anyone else in their vicinity is a gross invasion. “Do you think these people will notice if I fly you to the surface for an hour or so?”

“An hour?” Dawsyn grins. “Would you need an hour?”

Ryon squeezes her waist in his hand, and she buckles beneath it, smothering her outcry in his chest. “You wound me,” he murmurs.

Dawsyn reaches up to trace his face, the skin beneath his eyes gritty. “Wounding you has become a favourite pastime of mine,” she tells him, her breath catching when his teeth graze the pad of her thumb.

Ryon chuckles, the same way he did when Dawsyn once held a knife to his throat. It brings to mind how his body felt beneath hers, coiled and tense, rigid with consuming anticipation, with brilliant desire. Just as hers had been.

The spark in Dawsyn’s mind – that shining zeal that encompasses her mage ancestry – suddenly doubles, pulsing heat throughout her. She feels it rekindle with Ryon beneath her touch, stroking the hair back from her face, as though he were its life source.Herlife source.

Think of a time you were happy… content,Baltisse had once bade her, coaxing Dawsyn’s mage magic to the surface. There had been only one memory powerful enough to conjure it.

Dawsyn lifts herself higher onto Ryon’s chest and his hands assist her, gripping her beneath her clothes. Hands that somehow find their way through to her skin. She leans over him, her face hovering above his, and waits for the dark to creep back, waits for her eyes to adjust, and find the finer features of him she has come to rely on. She needs to drink them in again. Needs to retrace them. Needs them to anchor her here, where nothing seems real at all.

Dawsyn presses her mouth to his and lets her tongue trace the curve of his lips. She drinks in the deep rumble that rises from his chest and cannot help but press in closer. It is all she can do not to push further. It is a torture not to let that resonating light in her mind expand, let it move her hands beneath his clothes.

She can feel the urgency in his grip on her ribcage. He holds on fiercely, his fingers twitching each time her tongue flicks into his mouth. She knows how badly he wants to move them. Wants to let them ignite that light in her mind. Wants to make it detonate.

Instead, she sighs. She lets her lips slow, lets them mould around his with something less desperate.

Ryon sighs too. “What I wouldn’t give,” he whispers, moving his mouth to her ear, “to fly you away.”

They wake again with no knowledge of how long they have slept. The thread of light above them appears grey. Dawn, perhaps. There is no way for them to tell. The mass of people rouses with reluctance, sluggish and haggard. They look at Dawsyn and Ryon with petulance, even bitterness, as though they were captives and Dawsyn their captor.

As Dawsyn passes with her lit torch, she hears whispers.

Should have remained.

Worse than above.

She can’t be sure if the voices are real or imagined.

Her fingers itch for her ax.

If possible, they forge ahead at a pace even slower than the day before, and the path keeps winding interminably onward.

“Sabar,” calls a voice at the back, accompanied by a hacking cough and the harsh clearing of someone’s throat.

Dawsyn looks over her shoulder, holding her torch higher, and illuminates Nevrak’s face.The Splitter.He wipes his mouth with the too-long sleeve of his cloak.

“Nevrak.”

“Slow down, girl. Ain’t all of us have kept our youthful gait.”

Dawsyn groans internally. Until now, she has kept any conversation to the likes of Hector, Esra or Salem, who keep close behind her, but now she sees that they lag behind. She has indeed made headway. Hector keeps hold of Salem’s upper arm. The older man has had no small number of tumbles on the trek.