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Baltisse chuffed derisively. “A fair few more.”

Yennes nodded. “The people on the Ledge… the ones that lived in this valley before they were taken, they do not like to speak of it.”

Baltisse’s head tilted to the side. “Oh?”

“My mother and father… they did not like to reminisce on what was lost.”

“Whatdidthey tell you?”

Yennes fell quiet again. In truth, she could only remember half-stories. Mentions of forests and streams and music and festivals that fell from her mother’s tongue when the yearning softened her, but the sentences were always cut short, always followed by abrupt reproach.

No point in longing for what is lost, pet,her mother would say, shaking her head.We keep our eye on what we have now, lest someone snatch it.

Her father was worse, falling into fits of rage at the first murmurings of the valley.They ain’t coming to fetch us,he’d thunder, throwing what little crockery they had at the walls. Trinkets they had fought so hard to scrounge from the Drop.They ain’t deigning to cross the Boulder Gate. And we ain’t deigning to remember them.

Whotheywere had remained a source of mystery to Yennes. Though she’d gleaned some knowledge, she’d dared not question either parent further.

Baltisse seemed to have heard Yennes’ answer, despite her silence. She nodded now, and Yennes garnered that this woman did not often make a show of compassion or sympathy. Yet Yennes felt it in that cabin. The woman’s eyes grew glassy as she stoked the hearth.

“Well,” Baltisse said slowly, quietly. “Best you know it all, then.

CHAPTERELEVEN

The fourth night comes without seeing the end of the Chasm and the people slump to the ground, forfeiting the pretence of conversation. Dawsyn sees their faces and feels their defeat, and the guilt in her gut screws deeper.They’re dying,she worries.And they don’t yet know it’s by my hand.

Yennes and Dawsyn walk amongst them for a time, as they’ve done each night before, but they find very few they can help. More than half are now plagued by whatever cruel affliction the Chasm has meted out. They splutter in their sleep as she passes, the force of their coughing still not enough to rouse them. They have not paused to catch their breath all day.

“Miss Sabar?” says a voice in the dark.

Dawsyn turns to her left, holding her torch out to reveal a woman sitting cross-legged on the black earth, an infant in her lap. The woman has bundled the baby in layer after layer, and even so, the child’s cheeks are reddened by the chill.

The mother’s own cheeks are leaked of colour. Her eyes are haunted, forehead marred by the dust that has collected in her frown lines. Her cracked lips part, and she coughs soundly.

“My son,” she finally says when the coughing abates. “I have no more milk for him.” She touches her chest as she says it, her eyes glistening. “There is nothing left.”

Nothing left.

Nothing left.

“There is always something,” Dawsyn says to herself, to the woman, to the voices that hound her.

The baby stirs in the woman’s arms but doesn’t open his eyes. The small whining he utters sounds listless to Dawsyn. It chills her. “Has he taken ill?” she asks, praying as she says it.

“Not yet, but he needs milk.” The woman’s voice shakes as she says it, her eyes too dry to release tears. “He needs me.” And then she coughs again, and something wet and dark loosens from her chest, spat out onto the rock-strewn earth.

Dawsyn feels how stretched and thin her magic is, how huge the resistance, but it matters very little. What is her magic for, if not this?

She looks down at the sweet face of the baby in his mother’s arms, disturbingly still in sleep, breaths rapid and uneven, and she turns to the mother.

Dawsyn places both hands to the woman’s chest, above her heart, and with every ounce of her might, she coaxes whatever vestiges of her power remain, intending to ring it dry if she must.

“Relencia,”she says clearly, bidding that the woman be replenished. “Ishveet,”she says next, repairing something unknown and unseen, knowing full well that it will not do. It won’t be enough.

But the woman’s cheeks have pinkened when Dawsyn opens her eyes and looks up. She breathes a deep sigh of relief, her shoulders slumping.

“Drink as much water as you can,” Dawsyn tells her, knowing the risk it may hold. “Feed your son.”

Dawsyn passes the woman a waterskin, then lingers while the mother latches her baby, her own weeping now replacing the sound of her son’s. “Thank you,” she tells Dawsyn, shaking her head in disbelief. “A walking saint.”