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Dawsyn lunges forward, slipping the grasp of Ryon’s outstretched hands as he makes to stop her. Her ax flashes as she spins it in her palm and heaves it over her shoulder.

Dawsyn is a woman burning. Ruby cannot find another way to describe it. She is made of rage. It exudes from her every cell. It is trapped in her eyes and building. Soon she will combust, obliterate them all.

But while her hands glow hotly with whatever sorcery she commandeered from that Glacian pool, Dawsyn does not explode in the way Ruby expects – in the way she once saw her do on the Ledge.

The guards raise their shields regardless, forewarned and ready. Ruby pulls the reigns of her skittish horse until it collides with the Queen’s and raises her own shield to conceal them both. Ruby only just hefts it upward in time for Dawsyn’s ax to clang against its steel, the force of the reverberations felt all the way to Ruby’s marrow. It makes her teeth shake.

Her head ducked, Alvira emits a shriek.

But no white light follows. No blast of divine power.

Ruby looks over the ridge of her shield to see Dawsyn’s hands dulling, the fine ice lace receding back into her palms. Dawsyn stumbles over jutting rock and barely catches herself.She is weak,Ruby realises, then looks around at those she knows – Ryon, Tasheem, Rivdan are closest.They all are.

She reads it in the stoop of their shoulders, the drawn lines of their cheeks, their dark-circled eyes slowly blinking. She would say they were all near death itself.

Dawsyn, always so intrepidly fierce, so war-weary and unflinching, now so cruelly thwarted. It physically pains Ruby to see how far she has crumbled. “Dawsyn,halt, please! You cannot win.”

“Get away!” Dawsyn says in a voice not her own. It is deranged. Nonsensical. “Get away from them!” Tears course down her filthy cheeks.

Ryon comes to hold her, tries to whisper to her but she seems beyond reach.

Ruby hears Alvira’s muffled laughter. It is a close-lipped murmur, but still Ruby hears it. It fills her with fresh disgust. How callous a person can be, to look upon this shattered woman and find humour.

“People of the Ledge!” Alvira cries now, her voice unmarred by sufferance or starvation. It rings higher than Dawsyn’s had. It drowns out her rabid outbursts. “You are weary. You’ve travelled down this path for many days, following the word of this girl.” She does not look at Dawsyn, who tries to escape Ryon’s clutches with increasing desperation. “And her Glacian comrades. But I’m afraid each step has only led you even further into the mouth of this mountain, further from your home. Yourrightfulhome.”

Ruby can see the Ledge people beginning to converge, as she has so often seen the men and women do in Terrsaw – drawn by the surety they hear in Alvira’s voice, magnetised to the majesty of it.

“A kingdom of your own people, waiting for you. Ready to rejoice when they hear of your return. Long have they prayed to be reunited with the ones we lost all those decades ago, when the Glacians shattered our kingdom and took you away–”

“Because of YOU!” Dawsyn bellows, though her cracked voice dissipates, the force of her anger not enough to sustain it. “Because of–”

“Archer,”Alvira calls, her voice flat with careful propriety, and before any can react, an arrow is shunted from a dark corner, and lodges into Dawsyn’s shoulder.

She is thrown backwards, hits the ash.

Ryon’s face twists in horror at the sight of blood spilling down her sleeve. He roars. The Chasm is suddenly filled with its sound.

“Dawsyn!” Ruby urges her mount forward.

But like a call to battle, Tasheem and Rivdan’s wings emerge. They advance with weapons in hand, Tasheem’s teeth bared and ready. One leg held aloft. “Back!” Rivdan calls. His eyes affixed to Ruby’s. She has never seen them look quite so deadly.

But it is incomparable to the ungodly wrath that consumes Ryon, who turns his sights on the Queen. His wings unfurl with horrific suddenness. Their magnitude unnerving.

He is inhuman. Made of blackest anger.

And Ruby can see the end before it comes – Alvira’s plan aligning perfectly. The Glacians will attack, the guards will overwhelm them in numbers alone, if not with their swords, then with their archers and arrows set ablaze.

The arrow in Dawsyn’s shoulder was only the catalyst, the first flame to ignite the inferno. When the smoke clears the Ledge people will be at the mercy of the Queen, in territory they do not know.

“RYON! STOP!” Ruby thunders, thrusting her voice into the air the way she would to command an army, to lead a battalion to war. She hopes it is enough now. “HEAR ME, RYON!” she roars, bringing her horse between Ryon and the Queen, directly in the line of his ire. “YOU CANNOT WIN!” She looks to Rivdan, to Tasheem. “Not inhere,” she pants. Imploring them. Pleading for them to see. “Not in this place.”

Ryon shakes from head to toe, his bloodlust a tangible thing, pulling at its leash. But his eyes oscillate from Ruby to the guards, their number reaching both sides of the Chasm and disappearing back into the gloom. Surely, he knows he cannot fell them all.

And that Dawsyn would die among the fray.

See it, Ryon.Ruby begs him silently. Refusing to let her eyes lift from his.Do not give this bitch what she wants.

“That was a warning to you, Miss Sabar,” Alvira prods, her gaze not on Dawsyn who lays on her side on the Chasm floor, desperately trying to get her feet beneath her. Hector hunches over her, trying to stay her movements. Instead, Alvira pins her glare on Ryon, baiting him. “You have led these people astray for the last time.”