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Yennes’ fingers dug into the ground. She could feel that strange biting cold coating them.

“If it was not fortitude that kept you alive, then it must have been something other. Yourwilesperhaps.”

Yennes stood. She faced Baltisse with glistening hands, laced in frost. The iskra pounded through her blood.

“No shame in it,” Baltisse continued, her fingers gracefully curling before her. A whorl of sea mist followed the movements, obediently led in the dance. “I’m sure there was many a man or woman who’d have lent you a side to their bed. One must find warmth somewhere in a place like that.”

“I bartered many things,” Yennes bit out, her voice shaking with vexation this time, rather than fear. “But never mybody.”

“Never?”

Yennes froze. In her mind, however, were not images recalled of home and any bedmate she may have taken. She did not remember a lost lover of the Ledge. But other memories assaulted her, and they melted the iskra from her palms in a matter of moments.

Baltisse could see those memories. Hear them. It was clear on the mage’s face. Her eyes widened, her lips parted ruefully, and she was immediately sobered. “Oh,” she said. Gone was the goading lilt. “Yennes… I–”

“I’ve done a great many things to stay alive,” Yennes begins, her voice louder than she had dared to raise it in a long time. “I’ve killed. I’ve taken food out of the hands of the hungry. I’ve cut dead flesh from my own body. I’ve lied and pretended and tricked my way to safety many times over.” Yennes lets the memories assault her once more, sure that the mage sees it too. She makes Baltisse relive what she had to endure.

The mage’s skin turns sallow as she watches and listens. When it is over, Yennes’ hands are trembling again. They seek each other, clasping and unclasping in a frenetic tumble. “If the opportunity arose for me to fuck my way to safety,” she says with more bravado than she feels. “Then I would have done so. I’d say there is a fair amount of grit to be found in that.”

Baltisse stares at her for a long while, and Yennes is loath to look away, but she does. Gone was the girl who would slash and cut the foe on her path. Gone were the ways she could shape her words into barbs that pierced skin. In the back of her mind, she could still hear the words sung to her inside the Chasm. Words that picked her apart and burrowed deep. They no longer rang with that fresh echo. The voices were just memories now, ghosts that she could not rid herself of. But they rattled her, unsettled her, just as they did inside the Chasm.

“You made it out,” Baltisse reminded her, laying a slender hand on Yennes’ anxious ones. “You are safe here.”

Yennes closed her eyes. She felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. “I should not be.”

“Yet you are.”

“My father,” Yennes muttered, tears dripping down her lips. “And…and my–”

“You needn’t cling to what you left behind,” Baltisse said fiercely, gripping Yennes’ wrist. “Those thoughts will consume you.”

Yennes shook her head. “I do not know how to forget it all.”

“There’s no forgetting I’m afraid,” Baltisse said, wiping the moisture from Yennes’ cheek. “But you can unburden yourself. You do not need to borrow blame. Your fate was not your doing, after all.”

Yennes thought she would very much like to know whose doing itwas.What cruel being had designed a path so impossible to travel?

“Not impossible,” the mage said, smiling sadly. Her eyes flitted over Yennes’ shoulder to where the Chasm’s opening swallowed the tide. “An unlikely survival is not the same as an undeserving one.”

Yennes and Baltisse stood on the beach a while longer, until the former’s eyes dried. The mage did not wrap an arm around the other woman’s shoulder to comfort her. Instead, she lifted her hand to the wind and manipulated the sea spray into beautiful spiralling patterns with her fingertips, and Yennes watched on.

She watched the sun sink into the sea. She watched the night bleed the sky of its spectrum. And only when it was dark did she lift her hand and close her eyes.

“Igniss,” Yennes said, and a small blue flame danced in her palm. Cold and strange.

“Well done.” Baltisse smiled. “As good as any mage-born.”

“Baltisse?” Yennes queried, letting the flame sputter out. “Will you teach me to fold?”

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

The fifth day passes with a fading sense of awareness. There are times when Dawsyn is wise to the path underfoot, the walls around her, the noises behind her, the ache in her feet and legs and chest and throat. Other times, she is only aware of the noise of her mind, sounds of a more soothing nature. Words and melodies that rid her of even the memory of pain.

But each time, that magic within her rises to the threat of invasion. It strikes, serpent-like, forcing that other inhabitant into silence.

And then the Chasm returns, and she finds herself stumbling down its spine again. All of the aches reawaken with a vengeance.

She thinks of the mothers carrying their children. She thinks of the husbands carrying their wives. She feels the burn of each cough that rings up the rockface and prays for this to end.