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The girl’s auburn curls quiver as their eyes meet – hers wide, fearful, and full of the firelight that consumes Wes. The boy who, not so many hours before, had been her assailant.

“Abertha?” Nevrak pants, peering up at the girl suddenly, his voice quieter. “Abertha.” His jaw tightens. His eyes vacillate between his son and the girl.

Dawsyn can practically see the conclusion being drawn in the man’s mind. She can hear the cogs of his thoughts turning in one direction.

“Nevrak,” Dawsyn warns, pulling her ax handle against the man’s throat. “Wait–”

Nevrak goes to lunge for Abertha, slowed only by the pull of the ax handle against his windpipe. Dawsyn wraps her arms around the man, wrestling him back onto the ground.

The breath is pushed from her lungs as he scrambles back on top of her.

“BITCH!” Nevrak shouts, despite the pressure against his throat. “SHE KILLED MY SON! SHE KILLED MY–” the sentence is swallowed by the strangled sounds of his cries.

“Calm yourself, man!” Ryon is shouting somewhere above. Dawsyn can barely see around Nevrak’s body atop hers. “The girl did not do this.”

“My son!” Nevrak wails. “He… he…”

“He is gone,” Ryon finishes for him. “He’s gone.”

“We were going to get out of here,” Nevrak rasps, the fight finally beginning to leave his body. Dawsyn knows he will be unconscious in moments.

“The girl didn’t do this,” Ryon tells him again, but Dawsyn’s grip against Nevrak’s throat has stayed too long, and the man’s body slumps.

Dawsyn groans as she releases her hold, the weight of the man nearing unbearable. Ryon takes Nevrak’s shoulders and lifts him off her at once and deposits him on the ground, then he looks down at her anxiously, turning her chin in either direction with his large hand to check her over. He mutters something fierce in the old language.

“He’ll come to in a few moments,” Dawsyn pants, looking for Abertha and finding her. “Go. Now.”

Abertha scrambles to her feet, stumbling away into the dark, face stricken.

Ryon holds out his hand, then heaves Dawsyn to her feet. His eyes run over the length of her. “Do you believe what she said?”

Dawsyn doesn’t know. She is assailed by the smell of burning flesh.

Nevrak’s son slowly disintegrates in the unnaturally vehement flames, and she cannot imagine anyone choosing this as their end.

But then she hears again that silken voice that wheedles and worms its way into her mind.

Take up the reigns and belie your fate.

Climb the walls of Mother’s gate.

Rid the ache.

Rid the ache.

CHAPTERTWELVE

Ruby paces the servant’s corridor, biting her fingernails as she waits – only two remain. The rest were pulled by the shaking hands of a guard so green he might have passed as her son.

The curtain that separates the servants from the dining hall suddenly stirs, and Ruby holds her breath, but no one emerges. It settles once more, and Ruby resumes her pacing.

One week, the Queen had given her. One week to yield the impossible. Ruby cannot begin to venture where Dawsyn Sabar might be hoarding a hundred or so humans. When last she saw her, Dawsyn had been merely grappling with the quandary of it.

Ruby had given her what she saw as the only possible solution: to parade the survivors through the Mecca, to force the Queen to publicly accept their arrival.

Dawsyn had, at the time, seemed to have considered the idea. Yet not a single new arrival had been sighted across Terrsaw, much less a hundred of them. The forests and villages were teeming with guards, and if Dawsyn meant to stash them somewhere in Terrsaw, she imagines they would have been found by now.

No,Ruby thinks.They’re not here.