Page 161

Valma sits on a cot. She is sewing something together and frowns at Dawsyn when she looks up. “What are you doing here, Dawsyn?” she asks, her fingers continuing to weave thread.

Dawsyn smiles to hear her voice again. It is unbroken, uninterrupted by wet, lung-deep coughs. It is coarse and abrupt, and it rings long after the last word leaves her mouth. “Am I not welcome in my own cabin?”

Her grandmother smirks, raising her eyebrow. “Yourcabin, aye?”

“Leave her be,” Briar grins, eyes sparkling as they regard Dawsyn. Those dark eyes seem filled again. Filled with love and warmth and peace. It has been so long since Dawsyn last saw them this way. “Let her stay.”

“Here?” her grandmother argues. “In this den? No,” she laughs. “She was never meant for this speck on the map, Briar.”

Dawsyn looks to her sister’s young face, untouchable in sleep; then to Briar’s, alive and teeming; then to her grandmother’s, lined with a lifetime of love and labour. Dawsyn had forgotten how her lips pinched together just so, and how her right hand always rose to scratch a spot beneath her ear, and how her left foot incessantly tapped an off-beat rhythm that matched the wind howling outside.

“I wish to stay,” Dawsyn says. And it feels strange that sadness should grip her now, where comfort and warmth is easy to come by. But she feels it. She feels every day spent huddled before a weaker fire, shivering beside them. She feels every moment spent stoking it alone, banishing thoughts of this den when it was filled with women. She learned how to tuck those memories aside, lest this same sadness steal her over the edge of the Chasm. But she lets it sink her now. Lets it fill her up and drown her.

Her grandmother rises and bends to touch her cheek. “No,” she tells her simply. “Not yet.”

“When?” Dawsyn asks desperately, her throat burning.

But Valma Sabar does not answer. She only smiles gently, brushing Dawsyn’s lips with her thumb. “All things find their way back home.”

CHAPTERSIXTY

Dawsyn wakes to the sound of a thousand voices, but hears only one.

It is the sound of her own name, repeated over and over.

It is the press of a forehead she feels. It lies against her chest. Wide hands pressed against her forearms.

Howls of pain – the kind that comes from the core of a person.

The thunder of feet.

The stillness in the air.

Lips against her cheek, the bridge of her nose.

The light in her mind, awakening at that familiar touch. It sparks feebly.

“Dawsyn,” she hears again. And the sound is so broken, it stirs the iskra in her belly, however weakly.

“Come on,” she hears. His voice. Ryon’s. He presses his head to her chest, where her heart tries to beat. “Come on!”he pleads with it.

Dawsyn opens her eyes and finds the sky empty of anything but stars. The moon.

She raises her weighted arms slowly and presses her hands to Ryon’s head. She intertwines her fingers in his hair.

And he jolts. “Dawsyn?” he says, lifting himself to look at her.

She finds his eyes, the universe expanding within them, and is home. “Ryon,” she murmurs. She does not know if he hears it.

His lips part with laughter. Still smiling, his mouth presses to hers and he holds them there, drinking her in, and she him.

Tears slip over the sides of her face, over the shells of her ears. She lets them fall freely. She wonders if anything has ever felt as good.

“It’s over, malishka,” Ryon whispers into her throat, his voice shaking. “It’s over now.”

But there is an edge to his voice, and it is not one of victory, of glory. The relief is diluted. It is tenuous.

Dawsyn’s chest tightens. “Will you help me stand?” she asks.