CHAPTER FOUR
C HAPTER F OUR
If Dawsyn believed the slopes above were a test of great endurance, they now appear child’s play in the wake of the Chasm’s path.
It seems to her that this middle world was made torturous by design. The graphite walls narrow and widen without warning, giving Dawsyn the impending dread of constriction. At times, the path becomes so thin the water spans from wall to wall. If she walks with her arms outstretched, she can touch either side. Here her heart stutters, her throat closes. She becomes sure the next bend will reveal the meeting of those two walls, pulverising any hope for freedom – a dead end.
She walks with her hands pressed to either side as though she might hold those walls apart, praying they do not collapse their efforts. Then, miraculously, they begin to widen once more.
Those walking between them fall constantly. The Chasm echoes their grunts and groans as ankles buckle against the hazardous rocks protruding from the path. Dawsyn’s palms are torn from catching herself on the ground. The children often need to be carried, and it only serves to slow them all.
Slow… agonizingly slow. They travel at such an aching pace. It is perhaps the most painful torment of the Chasm. This black abyss thwarts any attempts of haste. The only sign of time passing is the strip of light miles above them and its incremental changes. The growing amber, the slow waning to grey. Without it, the illusion of night would be uninterrupted. It is the only measure of their progress. The only tether they have to the surface.
When it seems they have pushed onward as far as they can, Dawsyn calls for rest. They will eat and drink, sleep a while. After, there will be nothing else to do but forge onward.
The people of the Ledge let their bags and burdens fall with resounding groans. Many converge at the stream and lap up handfuls of water. There is very little conversation among the groupings – evidence of lives lived in wary solitude. They seem to struggle with the proximity of their neighbours now. Dawsyn watches them clamour for safer positions along the Chasm’s wall, where their backs are protected. They huddle their possessions behind them, lest they be stolen. There is not a single ounce of trust among their number and Dawsyn cannot blame them. It would be so easy to rob one’s fellow here in the dark.
She sighs as she lets her own pack fall from her shoulder. It is full of the most valuable resource they have – food. Dawsyn trusts only her inner circle of outcasts to carry it. Somewhere in this crowd, Ryon, Salem, Esra and Hector carry more. Combined, it still amounts to very little. Enough to quell the appetite of a hundred for a couple of days. Beyond that, they will be walking against the pangs of growing hunger, against time itself. If the end of this Chasm does not reveal itself to them soon, then more dangerous measures will need to be taken. Ryon, Tasheem and Rivdan will be sent atop the mountain in search of sustenance, but only if they are recovered enough to fly – and even in this, Dawsyn has her doubts.
She wipes her tired eyes with the back of her hand, and shuffles with her torch through the bodies to an open space.
“Stifle your torches,” she calls. They must preserve their torch light for travelling less they burn down to cinders. Gradually the halos of light among their party diminish, except for her own. Without the orange glow illuminating patches of dark, the blackness is practically absolute.
It does not take long for Ryon to find her. The torch is a beacon in the dark, and for all Dawsyn knows, perhaps the charmed necklace she still wears around her neck beckons to him as well. Perhaps it mimics this constant searching she feels within her at his absence.
He says Dawsyn’s name and it is close enough that she hears it alongside a hundred other reverberated beckonings. A swarm of murmured human voices weaving through the dark to find their kin.
“Ryon,” she responds.
A hand touches hers, then moves to her waist. No visible arm attached. The outline of a face with no discerning features as it speaks, but unmistakably him. “There you are.”
It is said on an exhale – a quiet blessing. Then his forehead is pressed to hers. And though she cannot make out the finer details of him, she feels their breaths combine, she feels the flicker of his eyelashes on her skin. She can imagine his shoulders falling and rising with each exhalation. He takes her torch and extinguishes it.
She winds her fingers in his and they willingly grip hers in return. “Are you well?” he whispers quietly, grimly. His voice travels over her lips, vibrates against the shells of her ears.
She contemplates her answer, wonders if there is any benefit to lying. “No,” she murmurs back. “Are you?”
His hands tighten around hers. She feels his head shake.
Dawsyn wants more than anything to sink to the ground with him at that moment. She wants to allow her knees to buckle and give in to the crippling exhaustion in her muscles and rest in the reprieve of him, give him the reprieve of her.
“We cannot sleep yet,” she says quietly, wary of the listening ears.
He sighs. “I know.”
“How many are injured?”
“I stayed to the middle most of the way. I counted six, perhaps seven who fell. There were likely more toward the back, though I’m yet to find Tasheem or Rivdan to ask.”
Dawsyn nods woodenly. “Let us see if any of this magic is restored enough that I might be useful. I’ll try to heal who I can.”
“You’ve walked all day, Dawsyn. You’re exhausted. Today hardly granted conditions for you to replenish.”
“And still,” Dawsyn presses, “I’ll heal who I can.”
“The injuries I’ve found so far are superficial,” comes another whisper. Yennes. “I’ve done what little I can for the more concerning injuries, but I’m afraid I am still weakened.”
Dawsyn turns to the sound of the woman’s voice. “We all are,” she says. “But we cannot remain idle and wait to heal.”
“No,” Yennes replies, her outline shuffling uncomfortably. “Ryon? Is… is your back–?”
“I’ll survive.” There is something oddly sharp in his tone. “Do not spare me your healing if you have any left to give.”
“I disagree,” Dawsyn argues. “If you are healed, you can fly ahead to mark the path, warn us of anything that might lay ahead.”
Ryon sighs. “Then you might heal Tasheem first, or Rivdan. Either can do the very same.”
“I fear their injuries are more severe than your own,” Yennes says gravely. “We may not be able to do much for them yet.”
“All the more reason to focus your attentions on them.” Ryon slides his thumb over Dawsyn’s fingers. “Please. I’ll begin rationing.”
Dawsyn wishes she could see his face.
She feels the tendrils of dark iskra lurking in her core and brings them forward. She summons that light in her mind and lets the two collide in her palm.
“Igniss,” she says, and watches as a spluttering flame ignites in her hand. It threatens to flicker out but remains long enough that she can glimpse Ryon’s face, the glow reflected in his eyes.
For a second, their eyes meet, then the flame extinguishes. She sees his lips descend to hers before the light dims, and he kisses her hard. She relishes the feeling while she can, before he pulls away, disappearing once more into the blackness.
Yennes and Dawsyn take a torch each and light them, making their way around the resting bodies. At the other end of their camp, they find Tasheem and Rivdan in states of collapse. They pant, chests heaving. Tasheem’s face glistens with exertion when Dawsyn holds her torch closer. Her eyes remain shut as she speaks. “A good few already seem too weary to continue,” she says, the sound of her usually loud voice lost now. It seems an effort for Tasheem to speak at all. “I suspect they were already made weak by hunger before we took them off the Ledge.”
Dawsyn kneels before Tasheem, peering into her sallow face. A magnificent shade of purple blossoms from her jaw. Her leg is propped up atop a hessian sack and she winces at the slightest movement. How she managed a day of walking across ground so treacherous, Dawsyn can only guess at, and her bets lie with Rivdan. She suspects the male half-carried his friend this far.
Rivdan lies on his back, cradling his arm to his chest. He stares with deep concentration at something above and breathes through his nose, his body quivering. Yennes attends to him.
Dawsyn summons every ounce of her magic, though she feels how thin the threads are, how frayed.
“Brace yourself,” Dawsyn murmurs to Tasheem, and then places her palms to the female’s battered leg.
Tasheem gasps at the contact.
“Ishveet,” Dawsyn intones, directing the cold and the warmth in her palms, showing it the path to Tasheem. She feels it radiate outward, searingly bright, seeking a destination. Something broken to mend.
Tasheem bites out a curse, but it soon turns to a groan of relief. The back of her head hits the earth, her body slackening.
Still, it isn’t enough. Dawsyn feels the magic retreating before it can complete its work.
“Thank you,” Tasheem says, smiling tiredly at her. She seems to breathe a little easier.
“I fear it did not do much at all,” Dawsyn says.
“Well, I no longer wish to tear the fucking thing off, so you’ve at least spared me the dismemberment.”
“Can you fly?”
But Tasheem shakes her head. “Not well,” she says. “Not while I’m weakened.”
“Riv?” Dawsyn asks. “What of you?”
Yennes’ hands leave the male’s shoulder, and he rotates it experimentally, his eyes scrunched in determination. “I might try to, if you wish, prishmyr.”
But Rivdan’s voice still hitches with the force of his pain as he moves his arm, and Dawsyn cannot ask it of him. Not yet. She shakes her head. “Find your rest,” she says to them. “And heal. Lame Glacians are no help to me at all.”
Tasheem smirks as she closes her eyes. “I was going to say the same of lame mages.”
Rivdan chuckles, lying back.
Yennes and Dawsyn make their way through the rest, calling for those injured to make themselves known. A surprising amount have already fallen to sleep without eating. Ryon, Salem and Esra can be heard passing out rations of food in the dark. Perhaps Tasheem was right, and they were already conflicted with hunger before arriving in the Chasm. It worries Dawsyn that they should be spent so quickly, so early into the journey. What will become of them if this trek were to last another week? Or will they all be thwarted before fatigue sets in?
Dawsyn tries to heal twisted ankles and shallow gashes among them, but many are still left only mildly relieved from their pains. “How did you run through the Chasm, that first time?” Dawsyn asks Yennes, baffled. “How could you see?”
She feels Yennes shudder delicately beside her. “I could not see,” she says. “But I could hear them.”
Dawsyn frowns. “Hear who?”
“Have you not been listening? Do you not hear it?”
She means to say “no.” She means to say, “I hear nothing”’ But curling into her ears are the unrecognisable whispers, the taunts, singing to her once more.
We dealers call…’til you heed the fall… Strangled pleas and sweet release… Lie where sorrow dares not be… Cease your breath…
Cease your breath.
Amid our walls.
Inside our breast.
“One must run,” Yennes says now, her voice breaking the illusion of others. “When being chased.”
With that, Yennes leaves Dawsyn in the darkness, taking her torch with her. Moments later, the light is snuffed.
Dawsyn makes her way toward the sound of the stream, stopping when the toe of her boot splashes into the shallow water. Everything creeps up on her here, never quite as close, or far, as she judges. She cups her hands to the brook, letting them slowly fill, then brings them to her lips. The water is gritty with sediment, and as she swallows, Dawsyn thinks she detects something metallic, but it is better than nothing.
She finds her way back to a wall she can slide down, finally. She sighs as her backside finds the ground and lifts her chin to an approximation of the sky, but now sees nothing at all. Night has fallen on the surface.
Dawsyn finds the charmed necklace beneath the layers of her clothing. She runs her fingertips along its chain. She wonders where Ryon is.
Like a call answered, she hears a body moving toward her, coming ever closer. And then his voice is saying her name again.
She says, “I’m here,” and “take my hand,” and his fingers are back in hers. They rest upon the cold ground, side by side, her forehead pressed into the curve of his neck, where she can feel the pulse of him and nothing else. Not the rising panic in her gut or the weight of obligation. Just that who she loves and oblivion.
It doesn’t seem such a bad fate.
“We could stay here.” Ryon whispers, his mind aligned with hers, and she smiles.
“The very opposite of our objective, if you’ll recall.”
“Indeed,” he groans, for a moment not sounding noble at all, but more as though the presence of anyone else in their vicinity is a gross invasion. “Do you think these people will notice if I fly you to the surface for an hour or so?”
“An hour?” Dawsyn grins. “Would you need an hour?”
Ryon squeezes her waist in his hand, and she buckles beneath it, smothering her outcry in his chest. “You wound me,” he murmurs.
Dawsyn reaches up to trace his face, the skin beneath his eyes gritty. “Wounding you has become a favourite pastime of mine,” she tells him, her breath catching when his teeth graze the pad of her thumb.
Ryon chuckles, the same way he did when Dawsyn once held a knife to his throat. It brings to mind how his body felt beneath hers, coiled and tense, rigid with consuming anticipation, with brilliant desire. Just as hers had been.
The spark in Dawsyn’s mind – that shining zeal that encompasses her mage ancestry – suddenly doubles, pulsing heat throughout her. She feels it rekindle with Ryon beneath her touch, stroking the hair back from her face, as though he were its life source. Her life source.
Think of a time you were happy… content, Baltisse had once bade her, coaxing Dawsyn’s mage magic to the surface. There had been only one memory powerful enough to conjure it.
Dawsyn lifts herself higher onto Ryon’s chest and his hands assist her, gripping her beneath her clothes. Hands that somehow find their way through to her skin. She leans over him, her face hovering above his, and waits for the dark to creep back, waits for her eyes to adjust, and find the finer features of him she has come to rely on. She needs to drink them in again. Needs to retrace them. Needs them to anchor her here, where nothing seems real at all.
Dawsyn presses her mouth to his and lets her tongue trace the curve of his lips. She drinks in the deep rumble that rises from his chest and cannot help but press in closer. It is all she can do not to push further. It is a torture not to let that resonating light in her mind expand, let it move her hands beneath his clothes.
She can feel the urgency in his grip on her ribcage. He holds on fiercely, his fingers twitching each time her tongue flicks into his mouth. She knows how badly he wants to move them. Wants to let them ignite that light in her mind. Wants to make it detonate.
Instead, she sighs. She lets her lips slow, lets them mould around his with something less desperate.
Ryon sighs too. “What I wouldn’t give,” he whispers, moving his mouth to her ear, “to fly you away.”
They wake again with no knowledge of how long they have slept. The thread of light above them appears grey. Dawn, perhaps. There is no way for them to tell. The mass of people rouses with reluctance, sluggish and haggard. They look at Dawsyn and Ryon with petulance, even bitterness, as though they were captives and Dawsyn their captor.
As Dawsyn passes with her lit torch, she hears whispers.
Should have remained.
Worse than above.
She can’t be sure if the voices are real or imagined.
Her fingers itch for her ax.
If possible, they forge ahead at a pace even slower than the day before, and the path keeps winding interminably onward.
“Sabar,” calls a voice at the back, accompanied by a hacking cough and the harsh clearing of someone’s throat.
Dawsyn looks over her shoulder, holding her torch higher, and illuminates Nevrak’s face. The Splitter. He wipes his mouth with the too-long sleeve of his cloak.
“Nevrak.”
“Slow down, girl. Ain’t all of us have kept our youthful gait.”
Dawsyn groans internally. Until now, she has kept any conversation to the likes of Hector, Esra or Salem, who keep close behind her, but now she sees that they lag behind. She has indeed made headway. Hector keeps hold of Salem’s upper arm. The older man has had no small number of tumbles on the trek.
Clenching her fists, Dawsyn paces her steps. “What do you want, Splitter?”
“Come now. Ain’t a need for cruel nicknames.”
“There wasn’t a need to split Old Percy’s skull in half either, but the rumour goes you did it on principle.”
Nevrak clicks his tongue. “I was a younger lad then. And Old Percy had made a few unsavoury passes toward my lady. Not to mention a rather crude groping in the middle of a Drop. Who would I be if I’d let it slide?”
Dawsyn considers for a moment, remembering the disturbing stare of Old Percy and how it had clung to one’s skin. Her guardian, Briar, had always forbade her from walking by the man’s cabin.
She shrugs, ceding the point. “Fair enough, Nevrak, we’ll call it a term of endearment. What do you want?” He coughs again, and the wet sound of the hacks sound woefully familiar. Dawsyn is at once transported to her cabin on the Ledge, where her grandmother would wake them nightly with uncontrolled gasps and spluttering. “You have lung sickness,” she says plainly to the man, watching his beard tremble with the force of his breaths. Even in the weak light she can see his eyes watering, the purple veins stark on his forehead.
He nods. “So it seems. Neither here nor there, if you want the truth. I’ve already lost my wife, my daughters. Only Wes remains now, and he’s full grown. I only need to see him reach safety. I have strength enough for that.”
Dawsyn recalls the shapes of two little girls wrapped in furs, lying in the snow, their father and brother protecting their bodies through the night. Here is a man who, like Dawsyn, committed atrocities on the Ledge in the name of protection. And who, like Dawsyn, only means to fulfil obligation. A man of the Ledge, cornered into a character he was forced to adopt, if only to survive long enough to see his son freed.
It is why she could not simply disappear into the folds of the valley and be content with her own freedom. It is why she is here in this godforsaken place, leading the unwilling to somewhere that might balance their bad fortune of being born on the Ledge.
“What we all want to know, Sabar, is how long this journey will take?” Nevrak asks now. “You surely have some inkling.”
Dawsyn swallows. She cannot simply refrain from answering. “A few days.”
“Not very precise.”
“Precision is difficult to achieve with a hundred or more people in tow, Splitter,” Dawsyn intones. “Our pace is not as steady as I’d hoped.”
“There are many that are weary already,” he continues. “What do you mean to do if some fall behind?”
“No one will fall behind. There are enough strong backs among us that we can carry who we must, should it come to that.”
Nevrak scoffs. “A fool’s errand.”
Dawsyn turns toward him. “And what do you suggest we do?”
“Leave them,” he says simply, his stare piercing. “Leave the weak to their unfortunate fate and let those strong enough forge ahead.”
It is the answer Dawsyn suspected he’d give. She tsks at him. “And you speak to me of being cruel?”
“What is cruel is burdening those who stand a chance of surviving this grave you’ve thrown us into.”
“Thrown you into?” Dawsyn repeats, ice creeping onto her tongue, seeping into her voice. “Do you wish to return to the Ledge already, Nevrak?” She says it like a promise. A threat. “Would you prefer that you had not followed me into this Chasm? Are there others that would like safe passage back onto that fucking shelf?”
Nevrak’s eyes narrow. “I want reassurance that you’re prepared to do what is necessary. It will come to pass either way, princess.”
The moniker makes her jaw clench, and she tastes blood on her tongue. He means to use it to demean her, to lessen her, but it brings other questions to Dawsyn’s mind. They are long overdue for the asking.
“While we’re being painfully honest, Nevrak. I have a few questions of my own.”
“Make your ask then, girl. Ain’t nothing else for us to do down here.”
Dawsyn steps carefully over a sharp boulder, then continues. “How old were you when you were brought to the Ledge?”
Nevrak pauses before answering. “Who’s to say I was not born there?”
“You seem the right age for it,” she says. “It does not take a genius.”
Again, Nevrak hesitates to answer. “A boy,” he says, “seven… or eight, perhaps. I’ve long since stopped counting years as they pass. I was old enough to be afraid. Old enough that I’ve retained the memory of the cold when it first grabbed me.”
The cold is not alive, Dawsyn hears in her mind. The voice of her grandmother. And yet the people of the Ledge only ever speak of the cold as though it were a sentient thing.
“Old enough to remember more,” Dawsyn accuses. “You knew that Valma Sabar was Terrsaw royalty.”
Nevrak levels her with a derisive stare. His lip curls. “Course we knew,” he says, and the plurality catches Dawsyn off guard. “She came screaming into that village while it burned, got snatched up just like the rest of us. Knocked the crown right off her head.”
Dawsyn bristles at the resentment in his voice. “She came to warn you all,” she says. “To tell you to run.”
“And it was too fucking late.” Nevrak’s tongue flicks over his lip, jaw rolling. “Likely it was her frumped-up skirts that slowed her down, and she got herded up that mountain just like the rest of us, weeping and pleading with the Glacians the entire way. Woman had never known a day of discomfit in her life.”
Bile crawls up Dawsyn’s throat. Nevrak’s description is much like the one Dawsyn would give Alvira or Cressida. But never Valma. Her grandmother was the opposite of pomp and privilege. The image of bravery. Even Dawsyn’s imagination cannot conjure a realm that would have seen Valma Sabar stooping to beg for mercy.
Dawsyn wants to argue, to reject the insult to her grandmother’s name, but Nevrak is speaking freely now, his eyes glazed with memory, and she resists the urge to stop him.
“We were thrown on that Ledge with nothing but a few scraps of food, and the fighting started straight away, as you can imagine. The princess stopped it. Started decreeing laws and ordering folk about. They all listened to her at first,” Nevrak comments. “She was royalty, after all. Bossy. Put her nose in everything. Wanted everything divided fairly,” Nevrak chuckles, as though it was unthinkable. “Thing is, up there on the Ledge, people soon figured royalty didn’t mean a fucking thing. Weeks went by and there was no sign of King Sabar’s calvary. No one came to find us, to save us. And here was another Sabar, still dangling her rank and dishing orders. They got sick of her mighty fast, I’ll tell you. At some point, a fellow challenged her,” Nevrak’s tone turns darker, dangerous. “She’d hoarded some food for herself, or so he’d said. He demanded that she give it up,” Nevrak shakes his head. “When she refused, the man fisted her hair, and dragged her to her feet. He pulled her all the way to the Chasm, kicking and screaming.”
Dawsyn’s palms grow icy at the thought.
“Some folks tried to stop him, but even more held ’em back. They were angry at the entire monarchy, see? The palace had failed them, failed to rescue them from the Ledge. People were dying in the snow each day, and still no one came. I think it were pure frustration. We were all maddening more ’n more each day. That man pulled your grandmother all the way to the ice, and just as he was about to let her slip over, she pulled a knife out of nowhere and shunted it into the base of his mouth. Pushed it all the way to the hilt. We watched him sag onto the ice, and it carried him all the way down and into this fucking hole.” Nevrak shakes his head, the memory still confounding him. “He weren’t the only one to try and take their vexation out on her, either,” he continues. “It became clear that the Ledge had no leader. Your grandmother slunk away just as the rest of us did. We armed ourselves and stayed vigilant. Trusted only a small few. I don’t remember a single person deferring to her after that day. She weren’t royalty, just a prisoner, as we all were. And we all knew that only the lucky few would survive that place. Only the hardiest. The most pragmatic. Your grandmother knew it, same as the rest of us.”
Dawsyn shakes her head, swallowing that unnameable emotion that threatens to weaken her voice. “And not one person thought to mention to me, or to my sister, that we were the granddaughters of a crown princess?”
Nevrak chuckles darkly then, ending on another forceful cough that bends his back. “And why would they bother themselves to? The last time I heard someone refer to your grandmother’s rank, I had not a single hair on my chest, and she tacked their hand to a tree with an ax,” Nevrak shrugs. “She gave up the title long before you lived, girl, and we heeded her warning. The Ledge has no royalty.”
Nevrak nods to Dawsyn and falls back, allowing her to walk on ahead with her torch, with her eyes squinting into the dark, with her mind on the Ledge and her grandmother, where she’d denounced her own title with a blade.
A princess made a monster.
And now a monster made a princess.