CHAPTER SIX
C HAPTER S IX
Serpent spine and temptress tongue
Silent wails and bargains sung
Bowl the heart and drink it dry
Run…run…run…
Dawsyn jolts upright, gripping her chest. It is collapsing inward, suffocating her. Something with claws digs its nails into her flesh. She drags in a rasping, wild breath, and the feeling disappears.
She blinks but sees nothing. Her chest rises and falls with ease, unhindered. Sweat beads on her forehead, collecting in her palms, but she is unharmed. Her chest is intact, her heartbeats decelerate. Just a dream. It was just a dream.
Yet still, those ungodly voices and their slippery verses echo within her. She can no longer say if they did not originate inside her to begin with.
“Dawsyn?” Ryon rouses. She feels the warmth of his body at her side. “What is it?”
She lets her eyes sweep back and forth but it is a useless endeavour. The Ledge people sleep through the night, their torches stifled, the blackness all consuming. “Do you hear that song?”
Ryon is silent a moment before answering. “A song?”
Dawsyn nods – another useless endeavour. “Voices? They woke me.”
Ryon pauses again, presumedly to listen.
Serpent spine, skip down each rung.
Back to where the end begun.
But he only chuckles. “I am surprised you hear anything above Salem’s snoring. He could rival a hog.”
Fear slides its way down Dawsyn’s throat, into her stomach, joined immediately by iskra, rising to the call of turbulence. Still, she hears it, the last whispering tendrils leaking away as though the wind carries it.
Slice their bellies,
Carve the skin.
“What do you hear?” Ryon asks now, all traces of humour gone. He must feel her rigidness, the threat emanating from every pore.
It is strange. Dawsyn has met a great many terrible things in her life. Things that troubled her, scared her. Living, breathing foes that stood taller and numbered greater, all with the desire to kill her. And yet here where she is not touched, where she can see no foe – in this darkness is where she is most afraid. She is gripped by terror. Choked with it. “I hear…” Dawsyn begins, only she can hardly describe it. “I hear…”
Before she can respond, another noise makes itself known. It springs out of the quiet, black nothingness without warning, and stills Dawsyn and Ryon both.
A high-pitched cry – muffled. As though a hand were pressed tightly over a pair of lips. It is immediately followed by rustling and a whispered refrain. The refraction of the Chasm’s walls makes it difficult to discern whether it is a distant sound or not, or what direction it comes from.
Dawsyn rises to her feet and twists her head. She takes the ax from its sheath on her back, turning it over with her hand.
This is a sound she knows. It is not the murmur of something bodiless. This is horribly recognisable.
She does not light a torch. Instead, she calls fire to her palm and lets the small light serve as her guide. Dawsyn hears Ryon make haste at her back, just as alert. She hears the singing of metal as he removes a short sword from its scabbard. She has little doubt that the sounds are recognisable to him as well.
She follows the sounds of the smothered whining. Softened terror is the most heinous kind. It heats Dawsyn’s blood. The flame in her palm brightens, yet the people she passes seem unperturbed in their sleep. Deadened. It disquiets Dawsyn. How has the noise not woken them?
In a crevice along the rockface, a woman’s legs kick out against the earth, one after the other, as though attempting to gain traction. She lies with her upper body hidden within that fissure. Atop her, a dark mass shifts. A man’s form holds her down, and the quiet refrains continue, the muffled sounds of torment.
“Shut up!” the man hisses.
Ryon reaches them before Dawsyn – a stroke of fate, for the magic within her has gathered at her palm, ready to explode, and she sees very little reason not to let it.
The assailant turns at the sound of Ryon’s approach. Though she cannot yet make out his face, she hears the crunch of bone as the butt of Ryon’s blade collides with his nose.
The man is hurled sideways, his head hitting the side of the jutting crevice. He collapses in a heap on the ground, a pitiful moan escaping him before he is quiet and still. The woman in the shadows struggles to stand. Dawsyn hears her panting, then spitting something onto the ground, and when Dawsyn holds the mage fire closer, she sees that the woman is hardly a woman at all.
“Abertha,” Dawsyn breathes on an exhale.
She couldn’t be more than eighteen. She tries to straighten her cloak and don her hood, concealing the auburn curls that tumble wildly about her face.
“Fucking mongrel,” she rasps, wiping her mouth aggressively with the back of her hand. “Sat on my chest as I slept and tried to pin me there, as though I haven’t won every fucking match against him since we could walk. Coward has to wait until I’m asleep to claim a victory.”
But Dawsyn spies the discolouration around Abertha’s lips, the angry red patches on her throat “He tried for much more than that,” Dawsyn says darkly. It is not a question.
Abertha spits once more. “I was handling it.”
“Are you hurt?” Ryon asks, his voice quiet, his face still turned toward the assailant, likely considering further injury.
“Course I’m not,” Abertha mutters.
Dawsyn grimaces. It seems a common defect amongst Ledge women to want to bear the burden of their aggressors alone. Dawsyn can see it in Abertha’s face now. The determined set of her eyebrows. The rage that masks the insult, though there is a slight shake to her voice. The girl turns her face away in a show of disinterest, but Dawsyn makes out the glistening of her eyes in the firelight. “If you don’t mind,” Abertha says dismissively, and begins to stand, brushing herself off.
Dawsyn knows better than to expect a person of the Ledge to show gratitude. She doesn’t dare embarrass the girl with coddling; Dawsyn does not possess the flair for it, and it would only compound the insult. Instead, she does the only other thing that ought to be done. She turns to the man on the ground and kicks his side until his body flips over.
Wes, son of Nevrak, lies unconscious at her feet. A trickle of blood flows freely from a cut on his scalp, but he is alive. His eyes move behind their lids.
“The fucking weasel,” Dawsyn murmurs, lip curling in disgust.
The boy’s pants are halfway undone, as if there were any doubt to his intentions with Abertha. Dawsyn’s eyes run over his gap-toothed mouth, his plain, round face and bent nose. She raises her ax.
“What is this?” comes a voice, much louder than necessary. It bounces off the rock face, stirs the bodies that lie nearby.
Nevrak disentangles from the gloom. Behind him are two other men of the Ledge, standing behind him like pillars. Nevrak looks down at his son, lying lame and bleeding on the ground, with his trousers askew. Then, he looks to Dawsyn and Ryon, who hover over Wes with their weapons drawn.
Nevrak’s eyes narrow, and he pulls a dagger from his sleeve, spinning it in a menacing circle. His chums do the same.
“Nevrak,” Dawsyn says, trembling with fury. Others have begun to rouse. They gather beyond Nevrak, some of them lighting their torches. “You ask an excellent question. Why don’t we confer with your kin?” Then, without waiting for an answer, and with unceremonious violence, she launches the toe of her boot into Wes’s side once more.
The boy jolts upright as Nevrak hastens forward, raising his dagger. But Ryon meets him with his sword. “Watch your step,” Ryon says in a voice that promises death, and Nevrak is forced to halt.
Wes coughs and splutters into his own lap, gasping painfully as he grips his side.
“Pa?”
Dawsyn lowers to her haunches next to him, placing the blade of her ax beneath his jaw. “I’m afraid not,” she says flatly. “Now stand.”
Wes gulps against the edge of the ax blade but does not dare reply. His eyes do not leave hers, even as she applies pressure against his throat. He rises unsteadily, keeping his chin lifted as the ax follows.
And with the absolute imbecility of a man cornered, he reaches for the sheath at his hip.
Dawsyn’s hand arrives first, and she grips the hilt of the blade in his belt. She could happily slice his throat open now, let him spill out into the Chasm.
“I wouldn’t,” she warns, her voice a void.
“What the fuck is the meaning of this, Sabar?” Nevrak demands. Rage was seeping into his reddened cheeks, spittle dampening his beard. Here was a man she had only yesterday begun to sympathise with. A man she thought no different to herself. She laughs through her nose, and it seems to rattle him. His eyes flit between the ax at his son’s throat and Ryon’s sword tip. “You dare threaten my son?”
Dawsyn turns her gaze back to the weasel boy. His lips quiver. One of his eyes is swelling shut. She waits until his stare meets hers. She waits for the pupils to dilate with fear, for the swallow at his throat to reverberate against the ax blade. Then she says, “Go ahead and tell Pa all the bad things you were doing in the dark.”
Wes’s eyes flick to Nevrak’s, silently pleading. “I…”
“Louder,” Dawsyn orders.
Sweat beads at Wes’s lips. “I… I…”
But Abertha shuffles forward into Dawsyn’s periphery. “It was a fight,” she says loudly, her voice far stronger than the boy who tried to pin her down not minutes before. Abertha looks with contempt at the people closing in around them to better watch the proceedings. People who would gawk and spectate but would never once raise their hand to protect her. To shield her. On the Ledge, every eye is turned away from their neighbour. Turned inward solely to mind one’s own welfare.
“We were fighting,” she says loudly, for all to hear. “And Sabar stopped us.”
Dawsyn’s eyes shut. No, she thinks.
“It’s done,” Abertha continues, and in the silence that follows Dawsyn opens her eyes to find the girl piercing her with a stare like the tip of a knife. It beseeches her. Begs her. “It’s done,” she says again.
Beyond Abertha, those watching seem to lose interest. They back away, falling into the darkness. Just another tussle, nothing more. They were ripe for picking on the Ledge.
Dawsyn seethes quietly, but her eyes don’t leave Abertha. They stay glued to the girl’s throat, to the graze on her jaw, to her bruised lips.
“Wes lost,” Abertha snaps at Nevrak. “Again. Shame you lost your dear girls. They were twice as strong as your bastard-born son.”
The veins in Nevrak’s furrow bulge slightly. “Gloating is unbecoming on you, Bertie. Born with a bitch’s tongue, like your mother.”
“Such is my burden,” Abertha says dryly, then she shoves past Nevrak, disappearing quickly.
Dawsyn is left with Wes in her grasp, the ax blade still biting at his throat. His breath seems steadier, as though knowing he has not been bested, as if he believes himself out of the thicket. He even grins up at her. “If you don’t mind, Sabar,” he says thinly. “Lower the ax.”
“Unhand him, Dawsyn,” Nevrak adds. “And tell your pet to step back.”
Dawsyn looks over her shoulder at Ryon, still blocking Nevrak’s path with his raised sword. Nevrak eyes Ryon with something intended as contempt, but instead only appears scared, dwarfed.
Dawsyn grabs the blade from Wes’ hip and throws it before any can react. With precision it embeds into the toe edge of Nevrak’s boot, likely just nicking the skin inside. Nevrak curses and stumbles backward, saved from falling by the arms of his fellows.
“Bold of you to insult a Glacian,” Dawsyn says. “I wouldn’t make a habit of it.”
Ryon chuckles good naturedly and sheathes his sword.
“You almost got my foot!” Nevrak shouts.
“I’ll admit, I was a little short,” Dawsyn allows. “I was aiming for a toe.”
Nevrak rights himself, pushing away his two cronies and pulling out the blade. “Get off me,” he mumbles to them. And then to Dawsyn, “Ain’t a single person here that needs you to show us the way, Sabar. Only two directions and you’ve already pointed the way.”
“An interesting threat,” Dawsyn intones. “Why don’t you make good on it?”
Nevrak hesitates. “What?”
She nods in the direction of the Chasm’s path. “By all means, be on your way. And take your pitiful excuse of a son with you.”
Nevrak says nothing. His eyes sweep between Ryon and Dawsyn, now quelled by hesitancy, by fear.
Dawsyn huffs a breath of mirth and turns her eyes on Wes. “If this… stain … touches one more person indecently…” Here, Dawsyn pauses, raking her eyes with revulsion over Wes’s face. “If your hands find their way beneath one more skirt, I will cut off your cock, Wes. Do you understand?”
He swallows. “I didn’t–”
The denial is choked off by Dawsyn’s ax. Beads of blood spout along the skin. “Do you understand, Wes?”
The boy’s eyes water, but he nods this time, refraining from speaking at all.
“Good,” Dawsyn says. With that, she finally withdraws the ax. After one last warning glance, she turns her back on him.
“Morning is breaking,” she says, and indeed, a sliver of grey light has appeared high above. “If you wish to blaze the trail, Nevrak, you ought to make haste.”
“We will allow you to lead the way,” Nevrak mutters darkly. “If I have your word my son and I will not be threatened again.”
Ryon laughs and the sound is laced with violence. He steps toward the Splitter, and it serves to illustrate how much taller he is, how much more imposing. Nevrak swallows and holds his blade up again.
“I’d be more concerned by her pets ,” Ryon says.
With the magic in Dawsyn’s palms pulsing, she leads Ryon back toward the creek, where many are huddled to drink or douse their faces. Dawsyn breathes through her nose, reimagining the sounds of Abertha’s cries.
“I’m surprised you didn’t kill him.”
Ryon’s voice slides over her shoulder. He is looking down at her, brow furrowed.
It isn’t an accusation, nor a reproach. She frowns. “Perhaps I should have.”
“No. The last thing we need is a revolt.”
Dawsyn supposes he is right. The miracle of rescuing the people from the Ledge will be for naught if they cannot herd them to the Chasm’s end peaceably.
“I only mean that I expected to have to stop you,” Ryon elaborates.
“You mean that you expected to tear me off him, kicking and screaming.”
Ryon grins. “Yes.”
But Dawsyn cannot find the humour in it. Men like Wes walk amongst them still, when they should have been left to starve on the Ledge. Instead, she will personally escort them to their freedom, should the Mother bless them all.
“You did what was necessary,” Ryon tells her.
But Dawsyn can’t help feeling that necessary acts so often contradict with what is right. Wordlessly, she reaches to take Ryon’s fingers in hers. They are warm to the touch, and she shivers.
Without needing any further prompt, he wraps both arms around her, forearms resting against her chest, and pulls her into the enclave of his body. “We’ll make it, malishka” he says, lips glancing her neck.
Dawsyn shivers again. “Whatever comes?”
She feels him grimace. “Whatever comes.”