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Thaddius stood abruptly. His gaze had turned watery, and he looked at her as though she had thrust a sword through his chest.

Annika appeared through the draped divider and she gave Thaddius a wary glare. “Easy, Thaddius.”

“A child?” he asked, the word cracking as it released.

Annika levelled him with a cutting sniff. “Have you just thought of its probabilitynow, mighty noble? It didn’t occur to you when you were on top of her?”

“Stop,” he breathed, closing his eyes. Then, to Farra’s astonishment, he fell to his knees, as though they could hold him upright no longer and buried his face in his hands. “Mother above.”

“Doubt your prayers will help you now,” Annika said. “Though, I suppose there is little else to be done.”

“There must be something,” he argued, lifting his face, eyes pleading. He did not address Farra at all. Did not look her way. “You must know of some… tonic? Some method?”

“None known for their effectiveness, nor safety.”

Thaddius groaned, as though that sword in his chest had twisted, entrenched deeper.

Farra watched the scene unfold as though she were a mere observer and not the source of its anguish. Frowning, she rose to her feet. “It is not for either of you to decide the course ahead,” she said firmly, ignoring the wave of nausea that rolled through her. “Take me to the valley,” she said to Thaddius. “Now. Before anyone should see the pregnancy for themselves, and I will have the child there.”

But neither Thaddius nor Annika readily agreed. Neither would hold her gaze.

“I cannot stay,” she told them. “Surely, you both know that. If it is known Thaddius sired a child with me, they will kill me. They may very well killyou,” she said to him.

“Our deaths are already upon us, malishka,” he said, a tear escaping the corner of his eye. “No human can survive the birth of a Glacian child.” Finally, he deigned to look her way. “And I will not remain and watch you die.”

The child inside Farra grew, as did the gaps between visits from Thaddius. It seemed to pain him to see her, slowly swelling from her middle. He would blanch, his eyes dipping to her stomach, and then turn away. He did not dare touch her.

It had been many weeks since he last came to her, and she had begun to ache in the most unexpected places. The small of her back, the inner tendons of her thighs, the bottom of her ribcage. Her chest burned when she ate, or drank, or moved. It was as though this baby was punishing her for forcing its existence. She could not blame it. What a world she would bring it into, before swiftly departing it herself.

That admission had struck her like lightning at first – seared through her core and staked her in place. The baby would kill her. She could not survive it.

Annika gently described the way the baby would grow too large to be birthed, but that she would birth it anyway, and the trauma it would cause would take her life.

“If anyone should survive it, I’d rather think it would be you, Yennes,” she had said, clutching Farra’s hand.

“Yennes?” she murmured coarsely.

“A survivor,” Annika told her. “One who endures all.”

Farra hardly thought the moniker would save her now, yet she warmed to the name. The idea of being someone else was, at times, what she yearned for.

She became oddly at peace with her impending death. There was only so much time one could borrow, after all. Had her death not been secured the moment Thaddius’ talons pierced her skin? Every day she lived was a mockery to fate’s whims. Time would catch up with her – it was an enemy she could not fight.

She blamed herself. She had been a fool. It had been easy to forget the world, a reality outside of the room she’d been confined to in the Glacian palace. She had lost track of time in there, lost track of reason, lost herself.

For a while, however long time had stretched within those walls, she had begun to think the Glacianlovedher. That perhaps, she loved him.

But the Glacian’s absence stretched. And when he did come, she seemed to make him shrivel.

“There is good within him, Yennes,” Annika told her, more than once. “More so than any other brute you’ll find in that palace. But he was born in a world designed exactly for him and he grew believing the space he occupied was more significant than another’s. I fear that, for all the good in him, there is simply too much to unlearn. You must know he regrets his actions. He blames himself, even if he does not have enough sense to say it.”

“I am not without fault,” Farra said, not wishing to speak on the subject any longer than she had to. “What’s done is done.”

She tried to find consolation in the days that remained. The hut kept her out of the wind. She was kept fed and warm and safe. Others came to visit Annika, who mended their clothes and fashioned new ones in constant rotation, and soon, the visitors began to know her too. They called her Yennes and asked for tales of the Ledge.

She told them all she could recall – what reason had she not to? She spoke of the Selection Days, the pine grove, the tilt of the shelf down to the Chasm. She told them what it was like to fossick the Drop, the never-ending violence of the desperate. She told them of her parents, and her only friend, Harlow Sabar.

When there was no audience, Annika prodded her with questions until she thought of another story to tell – Harlow climbing a pine only to get stuck in it, the games they would play as children, the boys they would fend off as teenagers. She wondered where Harlow was now on the Ledge and how she was passing the days, without Farra to call on her.