CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
C HAPTER T HIRTY- F OUR
Abertha only screams for a few seconds before she slumps back, unconscious.
“Dawsyn!” Esra yells, falling back onto his arse. “What the fuck did you do?”
Hector is already snatching the rags from Esra’s hands and passing them to Dawsyn, who presses them firmly to the gushing wounds at the ends of Abertha’s foot.
“Why… good god, Dawsyn! Why’d yeh do tha’?” Salem gasps. He watches on in horror, his skin tinged green.
“Better to have it over with,” Hector intones, ripping fabric from the bottom of his tunic. He begins tying it around Abertha’s foot. “The flesh was dead.”
“But… fucking hell! To cut off her – her – Could yeh not’ve tried to heal her, Dawsyn?”
Dawsyn chews on her tongue as she helps Hector wrap the wound. It will need to stay dry and clean – as well as can be kept in their current setting.
“Surely, there was something else you could’ve done!” Esra protests. He glares at Hector with something like disgust.
The bleeding is already slowing, Dawsyn notes.
“Dawsyn? Are yeh hearin’ me? Yeh should’ve given the girl some warnin’, at least. She should ’ave some say o’er her own goddamn feet!”
“The flesh was black. Dead. I cannot bring back something perished.”
“But to cut them clean off like that? Mother above , Daw–”
“Would it have been better to wait?” Dawsyn asks, her voice rising. “To let the frost spread? Let her foster the delusion I could possibly restore what I cannot? As for her say, Salem, what say has she? Dead flesh cannot stay. Frost that creeps in and takes hold can only be cut away.”
Esra scoffs, scrubbing his face with his hand. “Some warning may have been polite,” he says to both Hector and Dawsyn. “To hold her down like that…”
“We saved her the anticipation, Es,” Hector says calmly, carefully holding his bloodied hands away from his clothes. “Warning her wouldn’t have changed what needed to be done. Better that she didn’t have to think on it at all.”
“We did her a favour,” Dawsyn says, watching Abertha twitch and jerk in her sleep. The throb of the wound will awaken her soon. “The expectance of pain is as bad as the reality. We could at least save her from the former.”
“But when she wakes, ” Esra says. “Fucking hell, Dawsyn. Surely she will be–”
“Grateful,” Dawsyn interjects, her raised voice making Abertha jerk again. “She will be grateful. She is Ledge-born and she understands the whims of frost as well as Hector and I.”
“I don’t know,” Salem mutters, pushing the hood of his cloak back over his head in agitation. “I don’t know about tha’.”
“No, you do not,” says Hector, not bothering to look back at the old man. Instead, he levels his gaze with Esra’s. “You did not live constantly fighting for warmth as we did. You lived beneath the sun, and you have no wisdom to give in matters of the cold.” Hector stands, nodding at Dawsyn. “I will see about finding some bollybark,” he says, then leaves, taking long strides past Salem and out in the open wind.
There is a tense silence. Esra, whose eyes have not left the place where Hector disappeared, clears his throat. “What is bollybark?”
“A pain suppressor. It tastes like shit. But if you can stand to chew it, it numbs the senses for a little while.”
Abertha whimpers in her sleep, and Dawsyn gently rests her bandaged foot on the cavern floor. “She will live,” Dawsyn says firmly. “And that is what matters.”
Salem shifts uncomfortably from side to side. His lips part as though he wishes to say something more, but then they close again.
“Perhaps I seem callous to you,” Dawsyn says quietly. She has never denied as such. “That is quite well, but Abertha will awaken. She will walk again soon. I will heal the wounds once I am restored enough to do so and–”
“We do not think you callous, love,” Salem interrupts. His features have turned softer, apologetic.
“It was…” Esra hesitates. “Just quite a shock, is all.” And indeed, he appears rattled to the core.
Dawsyn sighs. She feels suddenly uneasy in her own skin. The knife at her side glints accusingly at her.
“Dawsyn,” Salem begins, finally meeting her eye. “I – I’m sorry. It ain’t my place to cast judgments. I’m older, but I don’t reckon I’ve seen half the life yeh had up there on that ice shelf. This mountain,” Salem looks out to the slopes. “Well, I can’t imagine how anyone survives it long.”
Dawsyn nods and stands. She spies Esra shaking his head, as though he can’t rid the butchery from his mind. “I may seem cold to you,” she tells him. “But you should not tarnish Hector with the same opinion. He is far kinder than I, and had you been made to live as he lived, you might appreciate the oddity he is.” Dawsyn’s heart tightens, remembering the skinny boy on the Ledge. “Hector merely understands what needs to be done. Rest assured he will berate himself. He will not need your assistance.”
Dawsyn makes to follow Hector out into the wind. “I’ll go help him.”
“No,” Esra calls, gathering his feet beneath him. “Let me.” He crouches as he makes his way toward her, his head in danger of glancing off the rocky ceiling. As he passes Dawsyn, he takes her hand, squeezes it. “I do not think either of you unkind. Just far stronger than anyone ought to be.” He smiles in his lopsided way, then departs, pulling his furs tightly around his torso as the squalls lash at him.
Another whimper sounds and Dawsyn turns to see Abertha’s eyes open. Tears well in the corners and her lips shake. She utters small noises that she clearly tries to absorb. She breathes heavily through her nose.
Dawsyn ducks by her head, crouching on her haunches. “I’m sorry, Bertie,” she says quietly, her voice oddly choked. She finds she can barely look at the girl. Instead, she looks at her own hands, clasped together and stained red.
“Th-thank you,” Abertha whispers, the words hitching. One hand reaches up and clasps tightly around Dawsyn’s wrist. “Thank you f-for doing it swiftly.”
“I will heal you come morning,” Dawsyn vows, clasping her own hand atop Abertha’s. “At first light.”
“Promise?”
Dawsyn sees her watery eyes, the wildness of her hair, and thinks of another girl she once made promises to, who looked up at her with that same shrewd insight.
“I promise,” Dawsyn says.
And though she is not one to offer comfort, she seeks her own. An inexplicable starvation urges her to lie in the place beside Abertha, feeling the girl’s arm aligned against hers. Their shoulders press together, side-by-side. Dawsyn closes her eyes, and she is in her den of girls, the wind beating its mighty gale beyond their walls. But she is not afraid. She is not alone.
They survive a fretful night.
The mountain blizzards with impressive intensity and the fire struggles to endure. Hector and Esra find enough bollybark to subdue Abertha’s pain for a couple of hours, but she spends the remainder of the night restless, unable to find relief from the throbbing in her foot. Dawsyn tends to the fire before Hector takes over, bidding her to find her sleep so that she can be of use come morning. He ensures Abertha’s feet stay close to the flames – her exposed toes are still in danger of frostbite if they cannot not bring warmth to them.
By morning, Hector’s face is drawn and weary, but not defeated. He smiles wanly as Dawsyn sits upright, giving up on the pretence of rest. The sky outside has finally begun to lighten, and the wind has breathed its last. The mountain is now a sleeping beast – eerily silent and still after having rampaged and wreaked havoc in the dark.
Esra and Salem are curled in on themselves on the other side of the fire and they likely found no more sleep than she. Their eyes move behind their eyelids with the chaos of the restless.
But Abertha is wide awake. Sweat dampens her hair. “Is it morning?” she breathes toward Dawsyn, eyes pleading.
Dawsyn nods. Without further preamble, she pulls her gloves away from her hands and gently lifts the leg of Abertha’s pants. Dawsyn places her hand on the part of her foot that is not wrapped in bandages, then closes her eyes.
The iskra is sluggish, but responsive. It moves to coalesce with the dim light of her mind. Together they flow from her palms and into Abertha.
It only takes a moment. It is all she can expend before the magic retreats again. But Abertha breathes a sigh of deep relief. She lets her head fall back and closes her eyes, the tension lines in her forehead and around her mouth now gone. “Thank you,” she mouths.
Dawsyn unwraps the bandaging gently. It is heavy with congealed blood, but the flesh beneath bears no wound. Only the fresh, angry pink of new skin in the absence of two toes.
She sighs, relieved, and wrings her hands together to loosen their tension. “You will repair your boots today.”
Abertha stares at her balefully. “I’ll consider the advice.”
“And check them every day.”
“Obviously.”
“And wrap your remaining toes, lest they blacken and break off mid-journey.”
Abertha rolls her eyes. “You need not mother me. I am capable of–”
“Of almost succumbing to infection? Of walking miles with snow in your boot?”
Abertha frowns, then looks at Hector. “Is she always so insufferable?”
Hector grins.
“If you act like an infant, I’ll treat you as such,” Dawsyn says, but Abertha is grinning at her, the amusement clear on her face.
“I cannot imagine anyone less suited to raising infants.”
“And yet, here I am, chaperoning three of them across a mountain,” Dawsyn mutters, rising to her feet. “Now, get ready. Let us see if you can walk without falling on your face.”
Dawsyn waits while Abertha mends her boot and wraps her feet. When each are done, they slowly venture from the gap in the boulders that served as their shelter.
Abertha walks unsteadily.
“It may take some getting used to,” Dawsyn says, leading her out into open air. “My grandmother cut away more than two before she died. She always said the adjustment was difficult.”
Abertha breathes deeply, her nose turned upward. “It is good to be standing at all.”
The forest before them has been reshaped, renewed. That is the beauty that follows the brutality of snowstorms – the landscape afterward is reborn. The blemishes of yesterday are buried.
“So clear,” Abertha says, staring at her surroundings. Dawsyn knows what she means. On the Ledge, a permanent mist remains. They lived among oppressive cloud. It clung to the mountain top and only ever afforded them a world of grey. Here, where the cloud does not always reach, the forest is pristine. Without the wind to shift the powder, everything is thrown into sharp relief.
“I remember your grandmother,” Abertha says now, walking cautiously forward through the snow. “She was a force to be reckoned with. Scarier even than my own mother.”
Dawsyn grins slightly. “A fitting description.”
“But she was sympathetic. I spied on her through the trees as a child. I watched her say a prayer over the Garisson brothers. They were dead in the grove. Do you remember them?”
Dawsyn remembered. Burly men with a penchant for muscling the trees from others where they saw fit.
“They were bastards and yet your grandmother still spared their souls a prayer,” Abertha says. “I never forgot that.”
Dawsyn laughs grimly, kicking snow off the toe of her boot.
“What?”
“My grandmother killed the Garrison brothers,” Dawsyn admits, shrugging her shoulders. “Whether she prayed over their everlasting souls or not seems forfeit.”
“Oh,” Abertha says, seeming to consider that for a moment. “Well, I watched my father kill a man once, and I don’t recall him imparting any words of salvation, save for a kick in the side before he stepped over the body.”
“I no longer believe in the power of prayer,” Dawsyn says, following Abertha around a copse of bushels. “If prayer had any sway, we would all be standing on newfound land on the other side of this fucking mountain. Instead, I led us to fire and brimstone.”
Abertha studies her for a moment. “Do you still believe the Queen is corralling the others into a trap?”
Dawsyn looks her in the eye. “I know she is.”
“Then we are most fortunate indeed.”
“Forgive me, but I cannot bring myself to celebrate.” At that, Dawsyn’s heart thuds heavily. Any capacity for optimism she once had has long since been laid to waste.
She has failed to find safe settlement.
Failed to find Ryon.
“You will see him again,” Abertha says, as though she had read her mind. She looks around as though Ryon were likely to appear from behind a tree. “Mother knows, you won’t stop until you do.”
Dawsyn says nothing. In truth, she has not considered the alternative. She knows she will search for Ryon for as long as it takes to find him. But should she find him already dead…
“You’ll find him, Dawsyn,” Abertha says again. “You are too stubborn for the fates to thwart you.”
If only it were so simple. “Will you tell me something, Abertha?”
“Bertie,” she says. “It is what my friends call me.”
“Bertie. When I found you in the Chasm, fighting off Wes–”
Abertha shudders delicately. Her shoulders tense.
“Why did you absolve him?” It had gnawed at Dawsyn all this time, that Abertha would not allow Dawsyn or Ryon to simply cut the boy down where he stood. Mother knew, they were more than willing.
Abertha sighs. “You must think less of me.”
“No,” Dawsyn says firmly. “I only wonder at your reasoning.”
Abertha ambles onward, placing one foot before the other carefully, and does not answer immediately. Dawsyn thinks she may not answer at all, before she hears the girl utter a sound of annoyance. “I stole his sisters’ clothes after they died. Not all of them,” she iterates. “But a cloak, a pair of gloves, boots. Wes caught me with them in the Chasm.” She holds up her hands now to display the hide gloves. They are crudely made, but thick. “I thought he’d kill me.”
Dawsyn waits. “But he didn’t.”
“No,” she says. “He was furious, but he had always had affection for me – even asked me to marry him last season.”
Dawsyn shakes her head. “That wasn’t affection.”
“No. And perhaps he deserved a swift death for forcing himself on me. But… when we were all scrambling for our belongings on the Ledge, I saw Wes and his father bending over the bodies of his sisters and kissing their foreheads, and my first thought was to loot their cabin while their heads were turned. So, perhaps I deserved a swift death, too.” Dawsyn watches Abertha lift her face to the sunlight filtering in through the thick brush of pine needles, contemplating them. “I suppose I’d thought us no better than each other.”
Dawsyn presses her lips together, considering her words. She has never been well-versed in words of comfort, but it seems suddenly imperative that she ease whatever burden Abertha carries. “My sister was the best thief I knew,” she says, and it turns Abertha’s attention away from the sky and whatever thoughts afflict her. “She somehow managed to fit herself within the tightest holes, through the narrowest of gaps. She was deathly quiet, too. I cannot count the times I turned to find her standing behind me, holding a blade she’d filched from my belt or my boot. Truly, she was a reckoning. It drove our mother wild.”
“Briar,” Abertha frowns, remembering. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Dawsyn affirms. “And my sister was Maya. She almost got herself bludgeoned more times than I can count.”
“But people were afraid of you,” Abertha adds. “Your grandmother, too.”
“Maya wasn’t afraid of us. Of anyone, actually. She would never have apologised for the things she thieved.”
Abertha chuckles.
“You remind me of her,” Dawsyn admits. “You are the age Maya would be now, had she lived.”
Abertha pauses before answering. “I wish I’d known her better.”
“If you had, you might have taught her some forgiveness or compassion. They are difficult to come by in our kind. Someone of such character does not deserve a swift death. They deserve freedom. Safety.” Dawsyn looks out at the endlessly undulating slopes and shakes her head bitterly. “I am sorry I could not lead you to it.”
Abertha reaches out to place her hand on Dawsyn’s shoulder. “You led me here,” she says. “And even if I should perish tomorrow, at least I stepped foot on land that was not tilted to the Chasm.”
Dawsyn feels her lips upturn despite herself. As Maya once had, Abertha has a way of forcing her to good humour.
“Now, tell me,” Abertha bids, continuing through the drifts. “How does one come to find themselves intertwined with a Glacian?”
Dawsyn huffs a sad laugh. “Do you have any understanding of what it is to fall in love?”
Abertha blinks at her.
“No, I didn’t either,” Dawsyn says. “But rest assured, it was not something I could prevent.”
“But why him?” Abertha’s curiosity seems genuine, and it betrays her youth.
Dawsyn thinks carefully, then shakes her head. “It was not something within my control. When we were first acquainted, I thought him no different than the pure-blooded Glacians. I might have walked away then wholly intact. Now… it feels like parts of me have been carved out.”
“What changed?”
Dawsyn thinks of the slopes and how her heart leapt with each quip, each cutting word and its counter. She thinks of how it thrilled her to challenge him. How, after seven years in solitude on the Ledge, she found herself leaning into the companionship, rather than away.
She thinks of the inexplicable magnetism between them and how difficult it was to ignore. She thinks of how he watched her, wherever she went, and how difficult it was not to stare at him. The sly touch of his fingers along hers, the secret pass of a hand on her hip. She thinks of the way the warmth of him made her shiver with newness. How the circle of his arms feels impenetrable. How she breathes for the next moment she finds herself in their embrace.
“I learned we were not so different,” Dawsyn says, smiling unknowingly. “He is a difficult man to ignore.”
“I will not deny you that. He is quite… magnificent. In bed sport too, I’d imagine?”
“If your thoughts keep wandering to Ryon and bed sport, I may have to cut off the rest of your toes.”
Abertha smirks. “Love to see you try.”
Dawsyn does not say anything more. Her eyes instead are fixed on a spot downhill, where the pine trees grow closer together along the slope. They look almost purposefully placed. It reminds Dawsyn of the pine grove on the Ledge, where the saplings were planted in rows.
“Dawsyn?” Abertha says, stopping alongside her. She skirts their surrounds, looking for any imminent threat.
“Do you see that?” Dawsyn asks, nodding downhill.
“The cedar trees?”
Dawsyn’s gaze is not concentrated on the trees themselves, but rather the haze that seems to hang in their midst. Where the rest of the mountain is clear and virginal, the copse of cedars in the distance seems… distorted.
Abertha, however, seems perturbed not by the strange fog, but by Dawsyn. “I suppose they do seem to have grown closely.”
“Not that. The mist . Do you not see it?”
Again, Abertha only squints, then gives Dawsyn a perplexed look.
Dawsyn grits her teeth. “It is right there. ”
“I don’t see any mist, Dawsyn.”
“Go back to the others,” she says stiffly. “I will return soon.”
But Abertha follows her down the slope, her footfalls slightly uneven. “Where are you going?”
“There is mist among those trees. And yet the rest of the slope is clear of it.”
“I see no mist, Dawsyn. Slow down!”
But Dawsyn feels seized by something she cannot name. She trudges through the drifts without minding the snow that slips into her boots, her stare fixed upon that odd cluster of cedar, so uniformly placed in their unnatural line, almost as though they were grown deliberately.
A division.
A gate.
The light in Dawsyn’s mind grows inexplicably warmer as she hastens. It seems to urge her onward.
“Dawsyn! Mother above, these boots are newly stitched!”
But Dawsyn barely registers her voice. The cedars tower above her as she grows closer, and her eyes track their height. They disappear into the sky, taller than that of any other tree around them. And between their vast trunks, clinging to the bark, is that barricade.
Not mist, Dawsyn realises, but something other. A filmy haze.
It hums with magic. She can feel it in her blood.
“Ouch,” Abertha complains, coming to a halt at her side. “I would remind you of my very recent dismemberment, but as you were the butcher, it seems pointless.”
Dawsyn holds up a hand to stay the girl’s complaints. “Do you hear that?”
The humming grows louder. It is the swelling of a storm, the amalgamating power before the burn of lightning.
“ No, ” Abertha emphasises. “Dawsyn, what–”
“And the mist?” Dawsyn queries, studying the barrier before her made of trees and haze. “You still do not see it before you?”
Abertha appears truly incredulous now, looking left to right as though the blanket of grey does not distort her view in every direction. “I do not see it,” she says, her voice quieter. “I swear it.”
Dawsyn frowns warily at the film, the magic. Her hand reaches forward.
“What are you doing?”
She hears nothing but that alluring hum. The mage light within courses down her arm and she does not give thought to the fingertip that stretches before her, gently glancing off the haze…
A shout leaves her as she is thrust into the air. Dawsyn is flung backward, her feet leaving the ground for one long second before her back collides with it again, the snow softening the fall, but a strike of pain sizzles up her arm, quickly dissipating.
“Mother above!”
Dawsyn sees only the tips of cedar and blue sky, before the view is impeded by Abertha’s face. “Fucking hell! Are you all right?” Her eyes are wide with alarm. “What was that? ”
But Dawsyn only groans softly, the fall having pushed all air from her lungs.
A voice travels to them from uphill. “Is that Dawsyn I see on the ground?” Esra’s hovering face joins Abertha’s. “Having a kip, are you?”
Dawsyn gives him a lethal glare, still struggling to suck in a breath.
“What’re yeh doin’ down there?” Salem adds, his face appearing among the others. “Weren’t yeh the one tellin’ us all to keep our arses off the snow?”
“Yes, Dawsyn. If you must swoon, do as I do and ensure there is a strapping lad whose arms will catch you,” Esra says.
“Shut up, Es,” Salem mutters. “Ain’t nary a man strong enough to catch tha’ thick skull.”
“On the contrary, I have delicate features, but a huge phallus. So, I suppose, the ratios balance in the end. Dawsyn? Are you having some sort of episode?”
Abertha answers for her. “She was thrown backward.”
“Dawsyn?” Hector’s voice hails from the distance. “Why is she lying in the snow?”
“She is having an episode!” Esra shouts back.
Dawsyn groans once more and sits up. She feels snow drip down the back of her neck. “There was an entire pit of molten lava waiting inside that Chasm,” she says on a shallow breath. “If I was wiser, I would have pitched myself into it.”
“Has she maddened?” Esra asks.
“Fuck me, but these people are annoying,” Abertha says with a sigh. She proffers a hand, and Dawsyn accepts it, getting her feet beneath her. Then Abertha’s gaze returns to the place between the cedars where Dawsyn had been standing moments before. “What was that?”
Dawsyn’s mind hums insistently, the bright spark pulsing behind her eyes. “Something to keep one out,” she says. She does not know where the knowledge comes from, but it is there, throbbing behind the beating drum of her own mage blood.
“Yeh said she were thrown?” Salem asks, his eyes assessing Abertha. “What’d yeh mean, thrown?”
“I mean one moment, she was standing amongst that tree line,” – she gestures toward the cedars – “and the next she was on her back.”
“Well,” Esra says, pulling the waist of his pants higher. “Let us see what foe lies beyond!”
“I wouldn’t, Esra,” Dawsyn warns, but the man has already passed, striding determinedly toward the opaque wall of grey that he so obviously cannot see. “You’ll be sorry.”
“Come out, you cowardly f–” His sentence is cut short by the high-pitched shriek he emits as he sails through the air, landing a foot before them and spraying them with snow.
“Mother’s tits!” Salem shouts, backing away, his eyes darting around the forest. “What the fuck was that?”
“A barrier ,” Dawsyn answers, staring with fresh awe at the strange magic. “A ward.”
“Glacians?” Hector asks, pulling forth a long dagger from his sleeve. He looks to the skies, as though white wings might suddenly appear above the treetops.
But Dawsyn’s eyes remain on the magic. “No,” she says. “Mages.”