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A nod. “I… I have.”

“And is it true what my wife says? Do you regret the day you left your duties to follow Dawsyn Sabar up that mountain?” Alvira’s eyes narrow like a bird, eyeing its prey from a great height.

“It was a… moment of weakness,” Ruby murmurs. Cressida is surprised she talks at all with her face so bruised and swollen. “One I hope to rectify.”

“Well, little traitor,” Alvira says. “Pray that whatever information you might have for me on the Sabar girl proves useful.”

Ruby breathes slowly, her eyes screwed shut, either in pain or determination.

Cressida watches keenly. Her fingernails bite into her palm.Get up,she thinks.Tell her!

“Speak,” Alvira commands, and the walls encasing them rebound her voice until it fills their ears, their minds. Until it rattles them all the way through.

Ruby’s eyes open. She places the flat of her palms beside her head and lifts herself inch by torturous inch.

That’s it,Cressida thinks.Get up.

When the beaten and broken captain is as close to sitting as she can manage, she lifts her chin to Alvira, her ropey black hair shielding much of her face. “The Sabar girl is filled with Glacian magic,” she croaks, pinkish spittle bubbling from her lips. “She is imbued with it.”

The fine lines on Alvira’s jaw become taut, her eyes wide and dangerous, not with anger, or bloodlust, but fear.

“Guard!” Alvira calls, summoning the sentry by the dungeon entrance. “Open this gate.”

CHAPTERTWO

Inside our breast

Amid our walls.

Among the bones

We dealers call.

Dealt are ends

Of pain or peace

Of withered cries

Of sweet release.

Strangled pleas

Or tender falls.

Inside our breast

Amid our walls.

Somehow, the lament had filled her as she’d slept. It seeped inside her. An insidious melody she had never heard before. She fell asleep in the dark and awoke in that same darkness, brimming with verses not her own.

Dawsyn blinks sleep away and hears the song still. It drifts off slowly, fading into something insubstantial. It disappears into the blackness, becomes nothing at all. A dream. Intangible.

She rolls her head to the side, until her cheek meets the ash and grit. Particles of it drift into her nose. It smells of fetid earth, of damp decay. Something long ago buried, never meant for the surface.

Ryon lays beside her, his back to her front. He is unmoving in sleep.

Dawsyn lifts a hand. “Igniss.”