CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
C HAPTER F ORTY- S EVEN
Dawsyn unfolds onto the very incline she had been on that morning.
She gasps as her lungs expand again. Samskia smiles back at her, teeth unnaturally white in the dark. Above them, the moon casts its strange-tinged glow.
Seconds later, Ryon appears. And then Tasheem and Rivdan, all escorted unfolding by the hand of a mage, who quickly disappears once they have delivered their burden onto the slope. Dawsyn can see the hazy barrier of their magical wards ahead.
But Samskia remains. She tilts her head and peers at Dawsyn. “Vey ty sosud yerd iskra,” she whispers.
Dawsyn does not understand it. Cannot begin to fathom the translation, but she feels a lick of heat along her spine at the utterance and it ignites the spark in her mind. She blinks, her mind repeating the tangle of sounds back to her, like an echo.
“What does it mean?”
Samskia only gives her a conspiratorial grin. She turns to where Ryon kneels in the snow, bending to kiss his cheek.
Then she is gone.
Tasheem stands, shaking snow from her woven hair. Rivdan curses and vomits onto the incline.
“What the fuck was that?” Tasheem spits, bending to rest her hands on her knees.
Dawsyn barely hears her words. Her attention is saved for Ryon, who is here, alive.
She goes to him, and he catches her, there on the ground in a clumsy embrace. She holds him tightly, feeling the slide of his stubble against her cheek, the warmth of his breath on her neck. She feels his heart thump between their layers and sighs.
She remembers the last time she set eyes on him, in the Chasm. Both desperate and half-crazed with exhaustion. “I’ve been looking for you,” Dawsyn murmurs once more, so that only he can hear.
His broad shoulders heave with the weight of his own relief and he wraps her up tighter, pressing his lips to the skin beneath her ear. “What took you so long?”
Dawsyn closes her eyes and escapes to the peace of it all, that he is here. That no danger surrounds them.
But Ryon sighs. “The promise that you made–”
“Not yet,” Dawsyn tells him, unwilling to think past this moment. There will be a time to speak of it, to plan and devise and fight about what is to come. But it will keep.
She pulls back and peers at him properly, losing herself in his warm eyes, in the long lashes that frame them, in the lines and shadows of his face. “If you nearly die again, I’ll not forgive you.”
His lips quirk. He presses his forehead to hers. “Yes, you will.”
“Ryon?” comes a voice from higher up the slope. Esra’s. Dawsyn would recognise it amid a blizzard. “SALEM! They’re HERE!”
“Fuck me,” Tash says beneath her breath. “SHUT UP, ESRA! YOU’LL CAUSE AN AVALANCHE!”
Ryon groans and helps Dawsyn stand. “Perhaps we should have left her with the clan.”
Dawsyn smirks.
“Is that what they were?” Tash huffs, looking thoroughly rattled. “Looked like a family of savages setting Glacians on fire.”
“Vasteel,” Rivdan says suddenly. It seems his body has ceased its retching. “They… they had Vasteel. All this time?”
“I’d wondered where he’d fled to,” Ryon comments casually, though his jaw ticks at the mention of his name. “Seems he hardly fled at all. Managed to find himself ensnared in mage traps instead.”
The conversation is interrupted by the chaotic approach of Esra, Salem, Hector and Abertha, who send snow spraying in every direction as they run downhill.
“Dawsyn?” Hector says, reaching them first. He grabs her shoulders and peruses her, then looks to Tasheem and Rivdan. “What happened to you?” he demands.
Abertha joins them next. But Salem has fallen halfway down the decline and Esra tries unsuccessfully to drag him out of the drift by his foot. “Get up, old man!”
Ryon curses beneath his breath and goes to their aid.
“You found them,” Abertha says incredulously. “How?”
“It’s a long story,” Dawsyn sighs happily. “It’s telling can wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Until we’ve eaten. I fear Tash might entertain cannibalism soon.”
Tasheem grunts. “There’s no ‘might’ about it.”
Abertha takes a careful step away.
Dawsyn and Ryon are the only ones that remain awake.
The others lie asleep around the fire, in the same cave where Dawsyn and Hector cut Abertha’s toes away.
It isn’t a coincidence that neither have fallen asleep. It is as though Ryon’s presence has awakened that same ringing thrum she had felt within the mage wards. She feels unsettled in her own skin. Sitting across from him as they ate was almost intolerable. And she sensed it was no better for him. He stared at her unerringly, his expression not always content. There was too much heat in his gaze to feel comfortable. Her heart was beating too quickly to relax. When had they last stood beside one another without the barrier of impending doom firmly between them? There had been so few hours like these, where no guillotine hung from above.
She did not want to sleep.
As soon as Esra’s eyes close, half-way through one of his many tales, Ryon rises.
He is before Dawsyn in the next moment, taking her hand and pulling her to her feet. Then, they are back in the moonlight, finally escaping to the surrounding forest. Before Dawsyn can lead ahead, Ryon wraps her in his arms and leaps into the air, his wings unfurling in the same moment. Suddenly, they are skyborne.
He flies her into the treetops, and they glide a short way down the slope until craggy rockface appears below. Ryon descends upon it immediately, setting them both down at the base of a slow-trickling waterfall. Here, the slope flattens and water cuts through the snow in a staggered line before falling over the next cliff edge. The black rock face is smoother here, made even by the near constant persuasion of water. But tonight, the water runs thin, and the rockface is merely a shield to the icy wind.
Dawsyn barely feels the cold. She is made of fire.
If Ryon boils too, he does not act upon it. After setting her down, he steps back from her, lets his hands fall from her waist and turns away. He runs his hands over his head and looks out over the sheer drop before them. “Dawsyn,” he says, and the word is riddled with accusation.
No, Dawsyn thinks. Not yet.
“Did you mean what you said to Roznier?” he asks. He knows that answer already, surely. He knows her.
Dawsyn doesn’t respond immediately. She watches the muscle along the back of his neck contract. She wishes he would come closer.
“Dawsyn,” he says, firmer this time. “Answer me. Did you mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“That you would martyr yourself?” Ryon snarls, turning to face her, and Dawsyn finally sees the heat in his eyes for what it is. Not lust. But anger. Betrayal.
Dawsyn swallows. She knows he won’t let the conversation be avoided. He will not allow her this one night to pretend.
She considers refusal. Distraction. Denial. Anything to trace the edges of the truth and not touch it. The dawn will see their next reckoning. For tonight, she wants only reward.
But Ryon grits his teeth, widens his stance. His wings retract and vanish from view. And he appears like the mountain around him – immoveable.
“I meant what I said,” Dawsyn allows. “I believe that I can absorb the pool’s iskra. I believe I can contain it.”
Ryon shakes his head in disbelief. “You cannot possibly. Malishka, please .” He comes toward her. “Listen to me. It cannot be done.”
She cannot bring herself to become indignant or arrogant. Because she knows. She knows all of this already. And she owes him a thousand lives but can only give him this one. And perhaps they won’t survive each other, and the thought is unendurable. And yet…
“Ryon,” she says, “I have to try. ”
He groans, eyes shuttering. Ryon turns away from her and even with his face hidden, his strain is apparent. Dawsyn hears him muttering to himself and she steps toward him, her fingers drawn to the places where his shoulders bunch and flex. But he suddenly rounds on her.
“The incantation!” The words surge from him, his eyes widening with some shallow sense of hope. “Roznier mentioned an incantation would be needed. An incantation we don’t have.”
Pain lances her to see him clutch so desperately at anything that might dissuade her. She wishes it were possible.
She repeats the words that Samskia muttered to her. Words in a tongue she knows little of. “Vey ty sosud yerd iskra,” she recites. It is committed to memory. The old vocabulary may elude Dawsyn, but there are some terms she is intimately knowledgeable in. The phrase feels etched into her skull and Dawsyn suspects Samskia’s hand carved it there.
The utterance knocks the air from Ryon’s lungs, and he exhales in a gust. It deflates him. She can see the tenuous hope spilling from him, leaving him slack and empty.
“That’s the incantation. Isn’t it?” Dawsyn says, though she need not hear his answer. His reaction is confirmation enough. “Samskia whispered it to me, and I’ve heard it over and over since. I… I feel it,” she closes her eyes, and there it is. Waiting in the background. An ever-persistent pulse.
Ryon closes his eyes again. “It won’t work, Dawsyn,” he says, though his voice lacks conviction. “And you will die in the attempt.”
“You cannot know that.” She tries for gentle.
“The pool was created by four powerful mages. Each of them cutting away a piece of their power to procure it. Dark magic. It cannot be contained by just one person!”
Dawsyn has already come to the same conclusion. She has already admitted to herself that her hopes of survival are slim.
But she does not need to confess her doubts to Ryon. “Baltisse once told me that I would decide what I was born for,” she says now. “I believe this was it.”
“You’re a liar,” Ryon growls. “You know it won’t work, and you will willingly throw yourself in hellfire. You’ll take yourself away from me.”
“I’ll destroy the Pool of Iskra.”
“YOU WILL TAKE YOURSELF AWAY FROM ME!” His voice rebounds off the rockface. It echoes across the mountain. He pants, his chest heaving, and the air before him fogs.
There is a crack in Dawsyn’s chest that spreads and spreads. She shakes her head. “Not willingly,” she says weakly. “I will do everything I can to keep that from happening.”
“Tell me this one thing, Dawsyn. Please,” he says, coming toward her, close enough to touch. “When we first met… when we walked these slopes together… did you feel what I felt?”
She swallows, her skin prickling. “What did you feel?”
His eyes trap hers. “I felt something cut its way into my chest and bind around my heart, and you’ve lived within me ever since. Wherever I go, it remains, and it seeks you out. Nothing feels right unless I can see you, hear your voice.” He looks down at her, and when Dawsyn tries to avert her eyes, he takes her chin and lifts it, so that she can see nothing but his glare. A glare that strips her, always. Turns her inside out. “ Look at me and tell me that you were not carved apart and remade with a piece of me.”
She feels her throat tighten, her eyes sting. “I was.”
“And do you feel it still, that thing that does not allow you to sleep without me? The thing that demands satisfaction?”
Dawsyn swallows again, shivering to the current that comes to life beneath her skin. She nods.
“That’s me,” he tells her, slowing his words so that they puncture her skin, stealing pieces of her. “That ache that you feel in your chest… that’s me too. Don’t you crave me, Dawsyn?”
She nods, absently reaching up toward his mouth, rising to the tips of her toes.
“And have we not sacrificed enough of each other? Of ourselves?”
Dawsyn’s lips are a hairsbreadth from his, but he holds her chin away, and stares down on her, denying her this last inch. “Yes.”
“But you would throw yourself into that pit and take my heart with you.”
She closes her eyes, shakes her head.
“Yes,” Ryon says roughly. “That is your plan. Is it not? To leave me here. Alone.”
“No,” she murmurs quietly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“ No, ” she urges. And there is pain in the word. Pain and love and resolve, and she opens her eyes to his, finding the flecks of black around his irises. “No. I love you.”
He drops his hand from her jaw, removing that one barrier between them. “ Prove it,” he growls.
Her mouth collides with his in the same moment and it takes the breath from her lungs. Her hands scratch at his neck, trying to find purchase on him to leverage herself closer, despite all the ways they press together. It is not enough. Not close enough. Not hard enough. The ache he spoke of begs relief and she seeks it in every piece of exposed skin she can reach. She groans when he lifts her higher, where she can angle her lips with his, dig her fingers into him. “Please,” she breathes.
“Please, what?”
“Let me have you.”
“I told you,” he says, his voice more controlled than hers. “You already do.” He takes her to the rockface then, pressing her back to its smooth surface. As it always does, his strength baffles her. His size overwhelms her, eclipses her. She reaches for his shirt at his waist and pulls it over the hard planes of his stomach, then higher. She lets him pull it over his head while she marvels at the sculpting of his body. Then she pulls at her own clothes slowly, relishing the heat in his gaze as they reveal more and more of her skin. The furs fall to the ground. Then her leathers. Her blouse is tugged free. The control he so recently held slips a little as she pulls the last laces of her stays and lets them stretch over her breasts, lets the straps fall slack over her shoulders and hang loosely, until she is barely covered at all.
“Pull it away, Dawsyn,” Ryon says, and the deep timbre resonates within her. “Don’t play with me.”
She wants to play with him, if only to prolong the moment. She wants to watch him crack and come undone. But the heat of his glare is too much. His hands on her waist are too much, and she finds she can do little more than obey him. Heed to him. She slides down his body until her feet touch the ground and undresses before him fully, sighing with each pass his hand takes over her body.
“Perfect,” he says evenly, tracing a line from her throat, between her breasts, and down the middle of her stomach. Not stopping until he reaches her sex. He cups it, watching carefully as she arches into him.
Perhaps she’d feel the cold if she weren’t ablaze. Perhaps she would notice the sting of the air if it weren’t for his body so close to hers, emanating waves of heat. When she pulls at the ties of his trousers, he makes no move to stop her, or help her, so she frantically wills her shaking fingers to untie them, reaching within to grip him.
He hisses at the feel of her hand wrapped around his cock, then again when she pulls, sliding her hand up its length.
Dawsyn feels his fingers move against her slickness, sinking into her, and she struggles to keep focus. Her eyes roll into the back of her head as he slowly chases the rapid tempo of her breath, invoking each moan, each beckoning of his name. But her hand manages to maintain its clasp, and it lavishes him with her own need. He grows hotter in her palm, harder. And soon, he is thrusting back into her hand, his need as large and urgent as hers.
She lines the head of his cock against her sex and lets it slide against her. His lips crash into hers, nipping and tasting and stealing her sense, and she pulls away only to tell him, “I ache for you. Always.”
His pupils dilate, then he is lifting her off her feet once more, pressing her back into the stone, and sliding inside her.
Her gasp is swallowed by his shoulder. She has yearned to feel this way again, so full with him, so heady. She moves her hips against his without a mind to do so, and he moans. “Not this night, malishka,” he tells her, stilling her hips with his hands. “Tonight, we take what we need.”
His thrusts are slow and languid, and they make the blood in Dawsyn’s veins pound with impatience. Every absence of him feels torturous, each filling is bliss. “Did you think of this, Dawsyn? Those nights we spent apart?”
She barely sees, barely thinks, but nods, murmurs yes, over and over.
“I think of little else. You consume me. Do you understand?”
She takes his mouth and licks into it, trying to convey her acknowledgment where words elude her. He rewards her by increasing his rhythm and she holds on tighter. She meets him thrust for thrust and feels the first quickening deep in her belly. “Ryon,” she pants.
He releases her, putting her feet on the ground and turning her to face the stone. But though she cannot see his face, she feels the wall of his chest against her back, his arms wrapped around her like a vice. She arches her back, her hands finding purchase on the rockface.
He tells her other things that make her blood sing, and all the while she hurtles toward a pinnacle of ecstasy, her mind falling into a trance. He pushes into her harder, faster, until she is unaware of where he ends and she begins, until their shared pieces are indiscernible from the others, and she detonates. She calls his name, and he responds, pounding against her until the tension snaps.
They come apart together.
And are remade with pieces of each other.
They sink to the snow, Dawsyn cradled away from its touch, and in the lingering bliss is only his heartbeat, the most significant sound in the world.
“Stay with me,” he whispers to her. “Vow it.”
This promise, in part, she can swear to. “You took my heart long ago, Ryon,” she says. “It stays with you.”