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But Ryon grits his teeth, widens his stance. His wings retract and vanish from view. And he appears like the mountain around him – immoveable.

“I meant what I said,” Dawsyn allows. “I believe that I can absorb the pool’s iskra. I believe I can contain it.”

Ryon shakes his head in disbelief. “You cannot possibly. Malishka,please.”He comes toward her. “Listen to me. It cannot be done.”

She cannot bring herself to become indignant or arrogant. Because she knows. She knows all of this already. And she owes him a thousand lives but can only give him this one. And perhaps they won’t survive each other, and the thought is unendurable. And yet…

“Ryon,” she says, “I have totry.”

He groans, eyes shuttering. Ryon turns away from her and even with his face hidden, his strain is apparent. Dawsyn hears him muttering to himself and she steps toward him, her fingers drawn to the places where his shoulders bunch and flex. But he suddenly rounds on her.

“The incantation!” The words surge from him, his eyes widening with some shallow sense of hope. “Roznier mentioned an incantation would be needed. An incantation wedon’thave.”

Pain lances her to see him clutch so desperately at anything that might dissuade her. She wishes it were possible.

She repeats the words that Samskia muttered to her. Words in a tongue she knows little of. “Vey ty sosud yerd iskra,”she recites. It is committed to memory. The old vocabulary may elude Dawsyn, but there are some terms she is intimately knowledgeable in. The phrase feels etched into her skull and Dawsyn suspects Samskia’s hand carved it there.

The utterance knocks the air from Ryon’s lungs, and he exhales in a gust. It deflates him. She can see the tenuous hope spilling from him, leaving him slack and empty.

“That’s the incantation. Isn’t it?” Dawsyn says, though she need not hear his answer. His reaction is confirmation enough. “Samskia whispered it to me, and I’ve heard it over and over since. I… Ifeelit,” she closes her eyes, and there it is. Waiting in the background. An ever-persistent pulse.

Ryon closes his eyes again. “It won’t work, Dawsyn,” he says, though his voice lacks conviction. “And you will die in the attempt.”

“You cannot know that.” She tries for gentle.

“The pool was created byfourpowerful mages. Each of them cutting away a piece of their power to procure it.Darkmagic. It cannot be contained by just one person!”

Dawsyn has already come to the same conclusion. She has already admitted to herself that her hopes of survival are slim.

But she does not need to confess her doubts to Ryon. “Baltisse once told me that I would decide what I was born for,” she says now. “I believe this was it.”

“You’re a liar,” Ryon growls. “You know it won’t work, and you will willingly throw yourself in hellfire. You’ll take yourself away from me.”

“I’ll destroy the Pool of Iskra.”

“YOU WILL TAKE YOURSELF AWAY FROM ME!” His voice rebounds off the rockface. It echoes across the mountain. He pants, his chest heaving, and the air before him fogs.

There is a crack in Dawsyn’s chest that spreads and spreads. She shakes her head. “Not willingly,” she says weakly. “I will do everything I can to keep that from happening.”

“Tell me this one thing, Dawsyn. Please,” he says, coming toward her, close enough to touch. “When we first met… when we walked these slopes together… did you feel what I felt?”

She swallows, her skin prickling. “What did you feel?”

His eyes trap hers. “I felt something cut its way into my chest and bind around my heart, and you’ve lived within me ever since. Wherever I go, it remains, and it seeks you out. Nothing feels right unless I can see you, hear your voice.” He looks down at her, and when Dawsyn tries to avert her eyes, he takes her chin and lifts it, so that she can see nothing but his glare. A glare that strips her, always. Turns her inside out. “Look at meand tell me that you were not carved apart and remade with a piece of me.”

She feels her throat tighten, her eyes sting. “I was.”

“And do you feel it still, that thing that does not allow you to sleep without me? The thing that demands satisfaction?”

Dawsyn swallows again, shivering to the current that comes to life beneath her skin. She nods.

“That’s me,” he tells her, slowing his words so that they puncture her skin, stealing pieces of her. “That ache that you feel in your chest… that’s me too. Don’t you crave me, Dawsyn?”

She nods, absently reaching up toward his mouth, rising to the tips of her toes.

“And have we not sacrificed enough of each other? Of ourselves?”

Dawsyn’s lips are a hairsbreadth from his, but he holds her chin away, and stares down on her, denying her this last inch. “Yes.”