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Dawsyn nods, allowing Rivdan to gently pull down her rolled-up sleeve. He takes the pack from her back and slings it across his own shoulder. “You walk with me now, prishmyr,” he says gently, taking the back of her forearm in his hold.

Dawsyn merely nods her assent.

In truth, she does not wish to walk alone.

CHAPTERTEN

Yennes stood on the beach and watched the sun sink into the Terrsaw sea. “It’s beautiful,” she said quietly. All her life, this sun had alluded her. Now she knew its hiding place.

Yennes stretched her arms experimentally, but they did not ache as they should. “You healed me?”

“Mm hm,” said the woman named Baltisse. “Though I suppose you’d rather I hadn’t,” she tsked and moved her wet, ropey hair over her shoulder. “If you wish to do away with yourself, there are far better methods, sweet.”

Yennes frowned. Her body might have been renewed, but her head remained sluggish. “Do away with myself?”

“I could hear your thoughts from the beach. Awfully loud, they were. Sounded like you were crooning yourself to death. Tell me, are you mad? Is that it?”

“What?” Yennes frowned. “N-no.”

“Only a simpleton would take joy in drowning themself.”

“I wasn’t trying to drown myself.”

“No?” Baltisse raised a slender eyebrow. “Your mind spoke otherwise.”

Yennes blinked stupidly, her thoughts too frayed to form quick retorts. “You… you healandhear thoughts?” she asked, looking the woman up and down. Had she not sensed something unnaturally elegant about this woman on first sight? Something entirely other? “Are you magical?”

“How kind of you.” Baltisse smiled and it was the first softening of her expression that Yennes had seen. While the woman’s body was supple and languid, her face was held rigidly, with a sort of practised dispassion. “I’ve been called much worse.”

Yennes returned a blank expression.

“I am a mage,” Baltisse said carefully. “Though I’d rather keep that information away from the palace, if you don’t mind. Unless you’d like me to toss you back into the wash.” Baltisse nodded to the sea, then gathered her sopping skirts into her hands. “Tell me, girl. What led you into the ocean, if not the promise of dying?”

Yennes’ mouth hung open for a moment, then she shook her head, putting aside the casual mentioning of palaces and mages. “I… I didn’t… I came from the Chasm.”

Upon the utterance, Baltisse froze, rendered still and silent by the word. She stared at Yennes anew. Shrewdly, intrusively.

It was only then that Yennes noticed the way the mage’s irises churned like liquid gold. “Say it again,” she said eventually, glancing over Yennes’ shoulder to the Chasm’s end, where the cliffs divided to allow the ocean passage.

“The Ch–”

“Mother above,” Baltisse interrupted, eyes widening. “And what, pray tell, were you doing in there?”

An answer fumbled around Yennes’ mind. It was mixed with the sounds of her own harsh breathing as she’d run through the Chasm, the voices that had chased her. She remembers the light that had shone from her hands in her desperation, some strange power creeping into her palms and lighting the way before sputtering out. She sees once more the vein of sky above her, impossibly far away. And in her belly, she feels a resurgence of the urgency that had driven her down the path, the desperate plea she had uttered over and over, that she had chosen the right one.

“What were you doing in the Chasm, girl?” Baltisse repeated. Her face had lost all lustre.

“I was escaping,” Yennes mumbled, voice trembling.

“Escaping what?”

But Baltisse didn’t seem to need an answer. Her eyes skittered across Yennes’ face as she remembered the Chasm, then before it Glacia, and before that…

“The Ledge.” Baltisse exhaled the name, as though it were some ancient myth. “You have come from the Ledge.”

Baltisse walked her up the shoreline, over the long stems of lazy grass stalks that bent away from the ocean. Yennes trailed her fingers along the tips, marvelling at their number.

Here, the cliffs tapered back and made way for a cove. In the cliffs’ shadow, a timber cabin stood. Its many windows were filled with glass, revealing the inside. It struck Yennes as odd. Cabins on the Ledge did not have windows.