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She grimaces at the mention of morality. After all, should she wish to, a flood of barely vindicated brutalities could be conjured from her memory wherein she was left with a bloody ax and a hollow chest. If morality is a requirement of royalty, then a crown will likely burst into flame should it ever meet her head.

“I’ve rarely seen fairness and morality meet at the same table and not come to blows,” Dawsyn says. “Balancing the scales of fairness often requires… immoral acts.”

“You are right, Dawsyn dear, as you so often are.” Esra nods morosely. “Morality might well be a faraway dream. But fairness, Dawsyn… ‘the balancing of scales’, as you say. That dream, I believe, is far closer to you than anyone else. And a pariah like me,” he says, taking Dawsyn’s hand and squeezing her fingers, “can only hope to be led by a queen, even if she were a goat.” He smiles at her, but another boulder catches his toe, and he lurches forward, breaking the moment. “Fuck me!” he shrieks.

“I’ve rarely seen one person stumble so often,” Dawsyn remarks dryly.

“Princess, I walk cobblestones in a gown with a three-foot train while villages throw rotten lettuces at me, and I don’t miss a step. I’m fucking blind in here.”

Dawsyn laughs again, thinking it must be a person of truer magic than hers to make light of a place so grim.

They stop earlier than Dawsyn intended. She raises her hand to call for a halt, too tired to raise her voice, and hears the resounding relief from the mob behind her.

They follow the same routines as the previous nights. Hector, Salem, Esra and Ryon ration out the last of what little food they had managed to bring. Dawsyn and Yennes comb through everyone in search of any that might need aid, and the people of the Ledge drink from the slow-moving creek. They try to find quiet corners and crevices to sleep in along the rockface.

Dawsyn drags her feet. With each expenditure of magic, no matter how small, the fatigue worsens. She finds herself longing to find Ryon, to seek in him that strange sense of renewal.

“Miss Sabar?” comes a voice from the ground. Dawsyn peers down, letting her torch reveal a woman huddled, a child in her lap. The small boy appears waxen in the low light. His lips horribly dried. His eyes are closed with something that resembles sleep and even though he gives a small cough it does not rouse him.

“My son,” the woman says. “He grew ill throughout the day.”

Dawsyn frowns. “Does he have a fever?”

“No,” the woman says. “Only this cough. And he complained of tiredness, though we are all tired. I carried him most of the way.”

Dawsyn grimaces. The boy looks to be about seven years old. It can’t have been easy to carry him. She crouches next to the woman. “Diedre, isn’t it?”

She nods. “And Leon,” she looks down at the boy.

“I can try to… fix it,” Dawsyn tells her, grimacing at her choice of words. “But I am a novice with this magic. It may not be completely effective.”

“Please,” Dierdre begs, the lines in her forehead deepening. “We’ll fall behind if I must carry him another day.”

Dawsyn readies herself. Slowly she places her hand to the boy’s throat. “Close your eyes,” she warns Deirdre.

Palm to the site of disrepair,Baltisse had told her.

“Ishveet.”Dawsyn encourages the waning magic torid the child of whatever ails him. She feels it flow through her to him, feels it move through his blood.

The small boy startles as the magic touches him, clutching tightly to his mother in fear. Too soon, the magic pulls back, thinning into something insubstantial. It flees back into her palm.

The child, wrapped in furs, stares wide-eyed at Dawsyn, but his cheeks hold their colour, he appears alert. When he coughs, it is faint and innocuous.

“There we are,” Deirdre sighs, gripping her son tighter. “It’s all right, you are well.”

But Dawsyn fears he won’t remain well for long. She nods to Leon, then to Dierdre, and forces herself to stand.

The limitations to her magic are endlessly frustrating. She coughs into the crook of her elbow and wipes the wetness from her eyes, wincing against the pang in her throat and chest.

Still your lips… cease your breath… amid our walls… we dealers call…

Dawsyn stills.

Lie where sorrow dares not be… amid our walls… inside our breast.

A tangle of verse, over-lapping and intertwining as it breathes into her ear. She whirls in a circle, bringing her ax forth. But as with each time before, there is nothing that embodies the hissing. A trio of women seated a foot away stare at Dawsyn warily, disquieted only by her, and not by the bodiless voices only she seems to hear.

“Dawsyn?” Yennes calls to her, the glow of her torch bobbing steadily closer.