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…They are no different to the ones I outran when I was last here. And they have haunted me since.

These voices,Ryon thinks, looking ahead to where he imagines Dawsyn might be, dragging her feet along this cursed path.These voices can be beaten.

CHAPTERFOURTEEN

Yennes found herself on the beach once more, hurling shells into the whitewash. “Where does this ocean end?” she asked the mage beside her – a woman who seemed content to stand immobile, staring at the horizon for hours at a time.

“It is not known,” Baltisse answered. Her face was turned up to the sun, her eyelids turned pink from its heat.

“Have you never wondered what lies beyond it?”

“Of course,” Baltisse said, her lips flattening with annoyance at the interruption. “But I am not stupid enough to seek ends I am not ready to meet.”

Yennes frowns at the tumbling waves but quietens. In the last few weeks, she has swallowed more words than she has spoken.

“Try again,” Baltisse ordered, not bothering to open her eyes. “If you’ve finished taking your anger out on the waves.”

Yennes huffed. They had been working for hours. The sun was near setting. Yet she lacked whatever audacity she once possessed that bade her to argue. She lifted her palm instead and concentrated on it. “Igniss.”

“Find the source first,” Baltisse reminded wearily.

Yennes groaned but closed her eyes. She found that strange, dark mass in her belly. The one that seemed content to slumber within. “Igniss.”

“Coax it out,” Baltisse said, her voice bored now.

“I am trying.”

“Barely.”

Yennes gritted her teeth and bit back a retort. She addressed the iskra instead, angling her thoughts toward it.Will you come?The iskra rolled but did not rise.Please… come.

“You sound like my first lover,” Baltisse said conversationally. “He had the very same whine in his voice.”

Yennes rolled her neck. The mage was beginning to grate on her nerves.

“A little assertion goes a long way, sweet,” Baltisse instructed. “Convince it. Do notbeg.”

Yennes steeled herself.Come out.

Leave me,the iskra replied, vapid and listless.

Come!

A lance of pain sliced a path up her spine, and Yennes fell to the sand, gasping. As quickly as it had struck her, the sizzling pain was gone.

“Too much assertion,” Baltisse tsked, not bothering to offer Yennes a hand.

Yennes let loose a frustrated growl, pounding the sand with her fists. “I can’t reach it.”

“Odd,” Baltisse remarked. She was busy intertwining her hands with the wind, as though it existed to dance between her fingers. “I’d have thought that one such as yourself would have more dominance, more grit.”

“One such as myself?” Yennes queried. She could feel the iskra stirring to the call of her rising temper.

“Mm,” Baltisse assented. “A Ledge-born. I can’t imagine someone so faint-hearted would have survived as long as you.”

“You’ve little idea what was survived and what wasn’t.”

“I’ve some idea,” Baltisse rebuked, tapping Yennes’ forehead once.