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Ryon thrashes, turning his head away, but it only tears at his shoulders and another moan escapes him.

“Easy, Glacian,” the mage says. “You’ll separate those arms from the rest of you.”

The substance works its way down his throat and makes his eyes water, but the pain coursing through his body quickly dulls. It makes it easier to think, to concentrate. His feet slip on the rocky floor, but he can focus on the mage, he can peer at the receding light from the entrance. Receding or dawning? He has no concept of time.

“How long have I been here?”

“Days,” the mage said. “You are stronger than I predicted.”

Ryon tries to steady the shake of his legs. “Please,” he says. “Let me go. I want no fight with you.”

“Ah,” the woman says. “Then you should not have wandered through our wards.”

“I wasbroughthere. I did not come of my own means.”

The mage tilts her head to the side. “And who delivered you? Surely not Baltisse. Unless she is in trouble?”

“No…” Ryon hesitates. “No. Not her.”

The mention of her name brings to mind the first time Ryon stumbled upon this clan of mages – of how they intended to kill him. Were it not for Baltisse’s arrival, her ability to read minds and find his intention well-meant, they likely would have.

“Where is she? She has not visited in a long while,” the mage asks now, her eyes burning fiercely.

Ryon cannot answer. Doing so will surely bring about a swift death. He defers instead. “Yerdos folded me from the Chasm,” he says. “She brought us here.”

It has the affect he imagined. The mage’s eyes widen – bright beacons in this dark cavern. Her hand reaches out toward his neck, as though she might squeeze it, but her fingers retract. “Yerdos?” she repeats, the name hushed. She says it with reverence. “She sent you here?”

Ryon nods once.

“A gift,” the mage utters. “An offering.”

The muscles in his stomach recoil. Offerings tend to infer food. From what he knows of this ancient clan, it would not seem undue for them to consume Glacians and call it sustenance.

“She showed us mercy,” Ryon says, his voice softer. So soft he fears she will not hear. “She returned us to the mountain.”

The mage only stares with that lopsided tilt, the flame in her palm dancing haphazardly.

“What is your name?” Ryon winces.

“Samskia,” she answers, gaze unbroken.

“Samskia… Yerdos had other plans for me,” he grunts, his eyelids drooping. “There is a woman on this mountain. She needs me.”

“Women do not have need of men,” Samskia rebukes. “It is only men who suffer and destruct when women withdraw their attention.”

Ryon closes his eyes, feeling Dawsyn reaching for him through the dark. He thinks of the way her eyes search and search until they find him and thinks that this assertion might have been true once, but it isn’t true now.

She needs him, just as he needs her.

“In two nights, the moon will glow red. Perhaps you’ll live to see it, night wing, and your lover will come to find you. Far stranger things have happened on a blood moon.”

Ryon looks to the cavern entrance, where the light has brightened the snow beyond. “And if she does not?”

“Then we will bleed you dry in Yerdos’ name,” Samskia says with a sinister smile. Her teeth glisten. “You and the rest of your winged friends.”

With that, she thrusts her hand sideways, and the flame that she had held bounces along the cavern walls, lighting torches as it goes. It illuminates the tunnel-like cave foot by foot, until the unfathomably long expanse is thrown into relief.

Tied by vine to the earthy walls are the wilting bodies of not just three Glacians – though Rivdan and Tasheem hang limply beside him – but many.