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Her hands leave his face, only to intertwine his fingers with hers. “Always,” she promises.

CHAPTERFIFTY-ONE

“You look like your mother,” Farra tells Dawsyn, but it doesn’t steal her attention from Ryon, who breaks slowly from the inside out.

Dawsyn can see it behind his facade of coolness. It is horribly reminiscent of the way he stood in this very room months ago, crumbling at the thought he had killed his own mother, simply by existing.

Now, here the woman stands.

Dawsyn’s own mother had died before she could know her. The cold had taken Harlow Sabar just as it had taken them all, one by one. If she resembled her mother, there was no one left who could confirm it but Farra.

“She was just as strong-willed as you too.” Farra smiles sadly. “So unlikely, that the two of you should meet and fall in love. Harlow’s daughter. My son. Impossible. Destiny, perhaps. Do you believe in such things, Dawsyn?”

Dawsyn shakes her head. “Only fools trust the fates. Destinies are forged, not written.”

Farra almost laughs. “You have no idea how odd it is to hear Harlow’s voice from your lips.” Farra’s eyes had grown distant. “She would mock me my imaginings when we were children. She never dreamt. Never mused on what could be. I,however, have always thought the Mother places us on a map she drew herself. She takes us off when our time comes to leave. It has plagued me these many years to think I clung to the parchment when I ought to have let go.” She speaks to Dawsyn, but looks at Ryon, her eyes never wandering far. “Perhaps I clung on only to see you as you are now. As a man.” She seems to marvel, finally granted permission to look her fill. Then she deflates. “I would not have been a good mother to you, Ryon. Know that.”

Ryon laughs without mirth, running a weary hand over his face. “You have no right to speak to me of what might have been.”

Farra flinches and looks away.

“Tell me all of it,” Ryon says now, and when he speaks, it is not only to his mother, but to Phineas too. “Now. I am owed this much.”

Dawsyn does not drop her hand from Ryon’s as the tale is told. She needs to feel his skin, trace his pulse, mark the moments when his hand twitches and tightens around hers. She grips back just as fiercely.

They listen as Farra describes her arrival in Glacia, the bid for her life. They watch Farra’s eyes glisten as she speaks of Thaddius, and his promises to keep her safe, to help her escape. Her eyes shutter when she speaks of her months in the Colony, alone and waiting. Her belly slowly growing. She speaks of a woman named Annika, who nursed and housed her in those months. And eventually, she tells them of Ryon’s birth, and the chaotic moments that followed.

She turns to Phineas at the end of her account and the male is looking at Ryon with pity in his eyes. “Vasteel ordered me to throw her into the Chasm, but your father…” Phineas shakes his head sadly. “He had been willing todieto save her. All those months, I’d watched him deteriorate before my eyes. I’d thought him insane, then. How could one human, onewoman,make a Glacian so wretched? I will never understand why he wasted himself the way he did, but there wassomething I understood in all of it, deshun.” He sighs. “Your father loved her, and so I could not be the one to kill her.”

Dawsyn wonders about that baby in the Colony, opening his eyes for the very first time as his father was killed and his mother taken into the Chasm.

“It was Baltisse who found me at the Chasm’s end,” Farra continues. Her voice breaking at the mention of her name. “She pulled me from the ocean, brought me to shore.”

“Baltisse?” Ryon says, his first murmur since the story began.

Farra nods. “She taught me to channel the iskra, offered me her home in the bay. She warned me not to go to the Queens. She tried to prevent me. But…”

“But you went,” Dawsyn finishes for her, for she knows that madness well. Had she not stormed the palace herself, certain those within would want to help the people of the Ledge?

“I wanted myson,” Farra says now, her voice more forceful than Dawsyn has ever heard it. The words spit from her lips, saturated in anger, in despair. “But I was too cowardly to return here myself. Too weak. So I sought their help.”

Dawsyn can only imagine how easy it must have been. Alvira must have salivated to have a magical being arrive on her stoop, already so vulnerable, so malleable. “She threatened you,” Dawsyn states. She does not need to ask.

“She threw me into her dungeons,” Farra corrects. “And I didn’t have it within me to die then either.” Tears fall in earnest.

Ryon is silent beside Dawsyn in the moments that follow, but then his hand leaves hers and he walks toward Farra slowly.

The woman holds her gaze steady, as though ready to accept whatever justice he might impart. But Ryon stops a foot away. He holds out a hand.

Dawsyn watches as Farra places her palm in his, their skin matched in hue. “I’m sorry,” she tells him softly, her lips trembling, tears dripping from her jaw. “More sorry than you will ever know.”

Ryon lifts his free hand to her cheek, wiping tears aside with the backs of his fingers. He does not embrace her, does not afford himself to utter his forgiveness, but in this small way, he gives her solace. “There is not a corner of this continent that has treated you kindly,” he says to his mother. “You deserved more.”

Farra sobs then, as though every ounce of her existence presses against her chest and forces the breath from her. Her head falls forward and is braced by Ryon’s chest, and he lets her rest there. He lets her catch her breath.

When she raises her head again, it is with clear eyes. A steady tongue. “Go now, son,” she says, trapping his hand in both of hers. “There are people in the valley who need your help. Ledge blood resides within you, after all.” She smiles wanly.

Ryon sighs, his expression marred with determination now, his decision made. He pulls his hand from his mother’s and turns to face Phineas.