Page 27

Take up the reigns and belie your fate.

Climb the walls of Mother’s gate.

Like a balm, the words come. Smothering out any other noise, tampering the sights and smells around her.Mother’s gate,Dawsyn thinks, or perhaps it slips past her lips. Her grandmother told her of Mother’s gate. The realm of spirits in the afterlife. A place of eternal peace.

Rid the ache. Tear it out.

How her throat burns. She wishes she could rip the sickness from it.

Tear it out.

“How?” Dawsyn asks, the word slurred. She can barely see. Her torchlight is a haze of orange in her periphery, not real at all.

Cut it from the skin,that silky voice says, and though something deep within quails at the thought, this voice makes violence sound gentle, welcoming. She imagines how simple it would be, to part ways with all that makes her hurt and ache and suffer. She could surrender to Mother’s gate. She could…

All at once, the iskra within her awakens. It meets in her chest with the mage magic and combines – light and dark.

She hears a keen screaming. It fills every crevice of her mind, so loud that it pains her, and then it is stifled all together. The magic suffocates it, flooding her mind with light and darkness both.

“Dawsyn?”

A hand comes down on her wrist. Squeezes it so tightly that her fingers are forced to open, forced to drop the knife she holds. She hears the sound of its clatter as it hits the rock beneath her feet.

Her vision swims. She coughs in a great hacking stream. Something dark comes loose from her throat and she spits it onto the ground.

“Prishmyr?” comes Rivdan’s voice. His hands are on her sides, preventing her from falling forward.

Dawsyn retches. Loose hair falls from her hood into her face.

“Breathe,” Rivdan says calmly. “Just breathe.”

She gasps at the air, taking in great lungfuls of it, and with each breath, the urge to heave lessens. She feels a stinging at her arm and sees that her sleeve has been rolled to her elbow. There is a shallow cut on her wrist.

“That’s it,” Rivdan is telling her, pulling her upright. “Steady.”

She blinks up to where his face should be, struggling to make it out.

“Shall I help you walk?” Rivdan asks quietly, urgently. His head turns to peer over his shoulder. Dawsyn realises that others must be close behind, waiting for them.

But Dawsyn’s wits are scattered. She cannot completely rid herself of the fog that clouds her mind. Instead of answering, she simply stares stupidly up at Rivdan. “I –” she stammers.

“Do you need to rest?” he presses, eyes skirting over her face.

Dawsyn shakes her head, and just this small movement dizzies her. Iskra retreats deep into her core. The glow of her mind is dulling. She looks once more to the small slice along her arm, then to the knife on the ground. Her knife. “The voices,” she says. “There are voices here.”

Rivdan’s eyes, full of alarm, widen. “Voices?”

Dawsyn closes her eyes. Nausea brews in her stomach and the Chasm tips on its side. She tries to shake it back into place. They cannot stop. There is no time for rest. There is only the end of this unending path, or the surrender to it.

That is all it wants,Dawsyn thinks to herself, hearing again the echo of that slippery voice.It only wishes to see us all fail.

“I – I forgot myself,” she tells Rivdan, finally meeting his eye. He has never looked more disturbed. “Lost my senses for a moment, I think.”

“You haven’t eaten,” Rivdan allows, though his expression tells her that he is not the least bit mollified. “And barely rested. All this healing, it has addled you.”

Dawsyn nods, hardly vindicated.

“The others are waiting. Can you continue?” Rivdan asks.