CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
C HAPTER T WENTY- N INE
Dawsyn’s head snaps back against the ground. The abrupt unfolding of her body is not enough warning to catch her fall. The breath that had been squeezed from her lungs suddenly returns, and it hurts to have them filled again.
She should feel splintered. Pain ought to blossom at every imaginable site. Her shoulder, punctured and untendered, should be pulsing an incessant beat. Her head should be swimming, her throat scorched, her feet battered and bruised by relentless travel.
She should be dead.
The lack of appropriate pain certainly suggests she is. But for the small ache at the back of her skull and the burn of new breath, she feels whole.
She feels… cold. Dawsyn opens her eyes.
Familiar trees tower above her, their branches dappling what little light the sky offers. Pine trees. Their smell strikes her and for a moment she thinks she is on the Ledge.
Dawsyn sits abruptly.
Her breath mists between her parted lips. She sits upon ground that gives and looks down to find herself seated in a snow drift. It slopes away before her, disappearing downward among the dispersed trunks. Not the Ledge, then. But the mountain.
Return to the mountain, Yerdos had said and then laid a burning hand to her cheek. Dawsyn still feels it now, the heat from Yerdos’ touch. She lays her own palm against her jaw and is surprised to feel a keen sting.
At the acknowledgment of pain comes the unfurling of mage light in her mind, the burgeoning of iskra in her core. It stretches like a creature departing its cave.
She frowns, then turns her steady palm to her face and stares at it. The iskra coats it in its intricate filigree of frost.
She is out of the Chasm.
“Ryon?” she calls. She needs to get her feet beneath her. Already she can feel the cold seeping through her clothes to her backside. “ Ryon! ” she shouts the name, and it does not echo. The word is swallowed by the sky, as it should be.
Yerdos saved them. She healed them. She replenished Dawsyn’s magic.
“Ryon!”
She turns and uses her bare hands to climb out of the drift. Her palms burn with the sting of ice, but it does little to slow her. She finds her feet at the crest and rises, looking in all directions.
A body lies in the snow, several feet away. It is crumpled and unmoving, disguised by cloaks and furs. But the shape is familiar.
“Hector!” Dawsyn runs to him. She stands astride him and grabs handfuls of his cloak to roll him over. His skin is colourless, but for the black grit of the Chasm smeared along his cheeks. Small puffs of mist appear beneath his nostrils. Alive. He is alive.
But he is not healed. Whatever Yerdos gifted Dawsyn she did not lend to Hector. He is fading. His eyes are glassy and distant, looking straight through her.
“Fuck,” Dawsyn mutters. He was too weak to fold. They all were.
Dawsyn does not know where to place her hands, where to heal. She opts for his chest, wrenching his cloak open at the ties. She slides his tunic up his stomach until his prominent ribcage comes into view, then lays her icy hands to his skin. He does not flinch.
“Ish-ishveet!” Dawsyn stutters. The iskra and mage light rush to collide and intertwine. “ Ishveet! ”
The power courses through her and into Hector. Dawsyn can feel the thrust of it, rushing through him. She shuts her eyes against the blinding light and wills the power onward. She orders it to find what is broken and mend it.
When the magic is satisfied, it returns to her, leaving her sluggish.
Hector’s eyelids blink rapidly. His nose scrunches as that same smell of ice and pine assaults him, then his gaze finds Dawsyn’s. “Woah,” he says evenly. “You look awful.”
Dawsyn lies her forehead to his chest for a moment, her breaths ragged with relief. “Fuck you,” she manages to spit out. “You scared me.”
Hector pats the back of her head, his body shivering. “Nothing scares you, Sabar,” he reminds her. “Where the fuck are we?”
“The mountain.”
“How?”
“Yerdos,” Dawsyn answers, standing. She grabs Hector’s arm and hauls him upward out of the snow. “She saved us.”
“ Saved us?” Hector repeats, shock widening his eyes. “But… why?”
“I can tell the tale later,” Dawsyn mutters. “We need to find the others. Now.”
In the distance she can hear a keen whining. It sounds like a trapped animal.
“Esra,” Hector mutters, and begins barrelling through deep snow in the direction of the noise.
Dawsyn keeps pace behind him, letting Hector lead through the trees. The sound increases as they travel.
Around the next trunk, there is a disturbance in the virgin snow. A drift crumbles inward, and something within its depths disturbs it further, eroding the sides inward. A dreadful cry comes from within.
“Esra!” Hector and Dawsyn shout as one. “Stop!”
There is a short pause in the onslaught of pained grunting, and then, “Hector?” Esra’s voice calls.
“Stop moving, Es,” Hector orders, side-stepping his way down the embankment of snow to the hole Esra has made for himself. “You’ll only be buried.”
“Already… fucking… buried!” comes Esra’s panicked reply. Dawsyn can hear the stress is his voice, the breathless quality to it.
“Fucking Mother above,” Dawsyn grunts, coming to a stand-still beside the hole. She can just make out Esra’s face below, half covered in snow. The rest of him is already buried beneath a foot of it. “Aren’t you dead yet?”
“Unfortunately… it seems the Mother will not bless me… with death’s sweet release,” Esra says. He sucks in each breath with great effort. “Though you may as well leave me here in this grave, Dawsyn… I am not far from it.”
“You’re not dying, Es,” Hector admonishes. He digs fervently, pulling the snow away from the small hole like a madman.
Dawsyn does the same, carefully avoiding placing her feet anywhere near the edges.
“I am dying,” Esra argues weakly. “Dawsyn… darling… move your face out of the way. You look awful. If I am to look my last… then I want to look at Hector.”
“You’re not dying! ” Hector says. His face mottles with exertion.
Esra’s eyes close as they dig low enough to reach him, to hook their arms beneath his shoulders. Sinking their feet into the snow to leverage themselves, they haul Esra out of the hole, inch by inch.
“Leave him there,” Dawsyn orders when Esra is part-way out. His legs are still buried in the drift, but she can reach his chest, and that is all she needs.
As she did to Hector, Dawsyn finds his skin and lays her hands upon it. “Ishveet, ” she says, and feels that same outpouring of power. It flows into Esra and quickens his blood, it warms his heart, mends what was broken.
As the bright light fades, Dawsyn opens her eyes to find Esra’s warm complexion as it once was. The cracks in his lips have sealed, and the cuts on his cheeks are no more. The places where his cheekbones had begun to cut into the flesh are now round, and though the scars along the right side of his face remain, the rest of him is as it should be.
“Heavens,” he says, gripping his chest. He breathes deeply, seemingly relieved to be breathing at all. Then he shivers. “Fuck my arse its cold.”
Hector grabs him. He hauls the man out of the hole until his boots are free, and then lifts him to standing.
“Easy, boy! Let me–” but Esra’s indignant protests are cut off when Hector presses his mouth firmly to his.
“Well, that’s one way to shut him up,” Dawsyn pants.
Hector holds Esra’s face gently in his hands and when their lips part again he keeps his forehead pressed to Esra’s. They share breath and Dawsyn grins to herself.
“Do not speak of dying again,” Hector commands, but his voice is anything but gruff.
Esra smiles, then wraps Hector in his embrace. “Of course not, my love. It was all jest.”
“You were crying like a baby,” Dawsyn reminds him.
“I love you, dear Dawsyn,” Esra says. “But sometimes I think you ought to have remained on the Ledge.”
Dawsyn grins again. “Come,” she says. “We do not have time for Hector to realise his feelings now. We need to find the others.”
“I swear to the Mother, if that hawk-woman spat Salem into a gorge, I shall never forgive her.”
Dawsyn begins traipsing her way down the slope. “Oddly sentimental of you.”
“Sentimental? Ha! The half-wit wagered that Hector would kiss a pig’s arse before he’d kiss me. I told him that if I won, I would drop my trousers, and Salem could kiss my –”
“Kiss him again, Hector,” Dawsyn interrupts, quickening her pace. “Now. For the love of the Mother.”
Dawsyn, Esra and Hector fan out and search the surrounding wood, looking for disturbances in the snow and listening keenly to any sound. The wind is, at least, oddly still. It does not try to hurl them down the slope, taking any tell-tale sounds with it.
After an hour of searching, Dawsyn becomes frantic. There are no signs of the others – not Salem or Abertha, nor Rivdan or Tasheem. Not Ryon.
If they have been thrown onto this mountain by Yerdos, Dawsyn fears they do not have the fortitude to survive it for long.
The cold will not hinder him, Dawsyn reminds herself, though it does not ease the fear. There is little sand left in the hourglass. Should she fail to find them and heal them, they will not live through the night. She feels sure of it.
Daylight is waning. The temperature is dropping. Dawsyn’s magic, though recently replenished, has been depleted to heal Hector and Esra already. She does not know if it can be extended to help the rest.
She trudges carefully onward. To either side of her, she can make out the distant shapes of Esra and Hector searching as she does. She listens intently to her surrounds but hears only the squeak of boots in snow. It is a surprisingly welcome sound after the crunch and clatter of rock in the Chasm. The feel of sinking snow beneath her soles is not something she ever imagined missing.
She lifts her boot and pauses. Beneath the vast pine before her, the snow is disturbed, as though someone had sat beneath it, resting their back to the bark.
Dawsyn rounds the trunk, finding the drag marks that lead down the slope. It could be an animal, dragging its kill to its den.
But Dawsyn doesn’t think so.
“Esra! Hector!” Dawsyn runs downhill, following the marks. It leads her to a pine tipped on its side, uplifted by the weight of gravity. It leaves a hole in the ground big enough for a mountain cat to seek shelter, or…
“Smoke!” Esra yells, ploughing awkwardly through the drifts toward her. Between the thick tangle of roots that resolutely tether the tree to the ground, smoke rises.
Dawsyn’s heart lurches into her throat and she barrels toward the warren, allowing the snow to slip down the sides of her boots in her haste.
The glint of metal is Dawsyn’s only warning before the airborne blade flies at her chest. She gasps and spins mid-stride, letting the knife fly by her. “Shit.”
“Dawsyn?” a voice asks.
A face has appeared between the roots. One framed by wild auburn hair and a soot-smeared face. Abertha.
Dawsyn pants, almost laughs.
“You Ledge-folk ever thought of saying ‘hello’?” Esra quips, approaching with a mixture of grunts and curses. “It’s wasteful, the way you throw knives around.”
“Hurry!” Abertha says. “The old man… I did what I could…”
Salem.
Dawsyn slides the rest of the way down the slope, letting her arse hit the drifts despite her better judgement. When she reaches the tree, she grabs the roots in either hand and lowers herself into the hole beneath. The warren is low, and she must squat. It smells strongly of earth and damp wood. The air is made dank by the slow burning of kindling. And at the fire’s side lies the unconscious form of Salem, covered in what appears to be Abertha’s fur and hide cloak. His usually flushed cheeks are sapped of colour, just as Hector’s and Esra’s were. Just as Abertha’s are now.
Dawsyn wastes no time. She crawls to Salem’s side and pushes the layers of his clothing aside to reach his chest. She feels him exhale at the chill of her touch. A good sign , she thinks.
This time, the magic takes longer to find the bridge to Salem. It moves sluggishly. Dawsyn finds herself pushing it onward. She comes dangerously close to commanding its will, though she knows better than to force magic’s hand.
When the light dims, Salem’s eyes flutter open. He looks around with a dumbfounded expression. “Dawsyn,” he says, finding her in the gloom. “Yeh look bloody awful, lass.”
Dawsyn grits her teeth. The insults are wearing.
He frowns. “We’re alive?”
She clutches his hand for a moment. “You’ve Abertha to thank for that.”
“Abertha?” Salem asks, like he’s never heard the name in his life.
“You dragged him here, I assume,” Dawsyn asks the girl without turning to look at her. She can feel her hovering close by.
“He was fucking heavy,” is her response. Dawsyn grins.
Salem frowns peevishly, but says, “S’pose I ought to thank yeh.”
Abertha shrugs and looks away, uncomfortable. She is dishevelled, and clearly weak, though not as dire as the others had been when Dawsyn had healed them. She is thin, haggard, certainly. But not moments away from her death.
“I can help you, too,” Dawsyn tells her, gesturing down to her palms. “Return some strength.”
Abertha looks sidelong at Dawsyn’s hands, but then nods hesitantly. Dawsyn lays her palms on Abertha’s cheeks. But the magic groans internally within her, turning reluctant.
Once more, Dawsyn coaxes. Please. She will need it.
The magic collides and finds its way to her hands, now moving like a petulant child, just as it had in the Chasm when there were too many people to mend and heal.
The light fades all too soon. “Damn it.”
“It is all right,” Abertha says softly, moving away again. “Food will strengthen me. Rest, too.”
The magic has barely brought colour back to the girl’s cheeks, but she is young and hardy. A girl of the Ledge. She will survive.
“Salem?” comes Esra’s voice, his face appearing between roots. “Did you die?”
Salem grumbles. “Surely not. No way it’d be yeh sorry face greetin’ me at Mother’s Gate.”
Esra grins. There is a spark of genuine relief in his eyes. “Wet those chops, old man.”
Salem frowns. “What?”
“Dawsyn, move aside a moment. I need to lower my arse into this warren.”
Salem looks incredulously up at Esra’s toothy smile. “What’re yeh blitherin’ about?”
“Why, I’ve successfully gained the affections of the handsome Ledge boy, Salem. Our lips were united not moments ago.”
Salem pauses for a moment, a small smile slipping through. “Bullshit,” he pronounces.
Esra’s returning grin speaks of something much more than victory. “I told you he’d fall in love with me. They always do.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Salem murmurs. “Bolly to yeh, son.”
Dawsyn shakes her head. “Come,” she says to them all. “There are more of us to find.”
“Who?” Salem asks. He notices when Dawsyn swallows. His eyes turn pained. “Ryon,” he answers for her.
“Tash and Riv, too.” Her heart rate spikes at the mentioning of their names. They could be anywhere on this mountain.
“We’ll find them, lass.”
“We will,” she says, and nods to Abertha to climb out of the warren first. She does not allow herself to think of any other possibility. Already, the separation aches.
He is not dead.
He will not die.