CHAPTER FIFTY
C HAPTER F IFTY
The old noble village is a hive of activity.
Males and females alike gather weapons, sheath their swords. Some seem to bear nothing but expressions of determination. Eagerness. Some cry. Embrace each other. Others slam doors shut and remain inside.
Many stare as Ryon and Dawsyn pass, leading their party through the alleyways, dragging Phineas along with them. Tasheem clasps his upper arm solidly in her grasp. Some come forward to clap Ryon on the back.
“Mesrich!” one says, sheathing a blade as he approaches. Ryon and the male clasp hands. He does the same with Tasheem and then Rivdan. He offers the rest a cursory nod. The male is bearded, with familiar scars cutting a line through his lips. Ryon recalls the day Brennick earned them from a brute who’d hauled him to the Kyph. He had spat at a passing pure-blood at the witless age of seven. Those scars gained him no small amount of admiration amongst the children of the Colony. “We thought Adrik threw you into the Chasm!” he says now, smiling widely.
Ryon sneers. “Adrik? When did he ever lift a finger of his own?”
Brennick guffaws, tapping the hilt of his sword. “He’ll find himself amongst the fray soon enough.”
Ryon’s eyebrows rise. “You’re going to Terrsaw? All of you?”
Brennick shrugs, his enthusiasm plain. “Adrik tried to win our favour by giving us the noble village, but I don’t relish spending the rest of my life on this fucking rock.” He turns to look at those moving with haste around them. “It seemed the sentiment was shared. We already rid ourselves of one dickless king. No one here is much interested in the rise of another.” Brennick winks at Dawsyn. “So. War it is.”
Ryon barely dares to hope. He turns his sights to the sky once more, watching the joyous flight of so many, wheeling wildly, laughing freely. He shakes his head incredulously. “Why now?”
“Well, for one thing, the hapless idiots have flown to the valley, and it’s a battlefield that works in our favour. They won’t fare so well in the heat. For another, the human woman was hard to ignore. Very convincing, she was. Had a whole speech prepared.” Brennick affects a high-pitched voice. “‘If Adrik is to be stopped, the time is nye.’” He chuckles. “She’ll have us believe some of the Terrsaw guards will be waiting to side with us too.”
“Human woman?” Dawsyn cuts in. She steps forward. “What human woman?”
Brennick reads the tension that suddenly becomes Ryon, as well as the vicious curl of Dawsyn’s tongue as she says the name. His eyes dart between them. “Some sort of magic woman,” he says. “She appeared out of nowhere right in the middle of the village. Yennes, she called herself.”
Ryon’s belly rolls. He pictures once more the way Yennes had averted her eyes as she’d left them in the middle of the Chasm, answering the beckons of Alvira. His hand flexes. He resists the urge to reach for a sword.
Dawsyn, however, does not bother flirting with resistance. Her ax is already in her hand – a hand coated in frost.
“Where is she?” Ryon asks evenly, though he cannot supress the edge of malice that escapes.
Brennick frowns at him. “Do you know her?” he asks, all traces of eagerness quickly dissipating. “Who is she?”
“A traitor,” Ryon says, eyes already scouring the lane ahead. “One that is likely leading you all into a trap.”
Brennick runs agitated hands through his hair. “ Fuck, ” he spits.
“Get everyone on the ground,” Ryon tells him, marching past him down the lane. “No one leaves Glacia, Bren, do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he says, following hurriedly, stride for stride. “What about this Yennes? There were a few who seemed to know her. Trust her.”
Ryon barely hears him. “Where is she?” he repeats.
“Headed toward the palace. Said she needed time to recover some. She was dead on her feet when she turned up.”
“She folded a long way,” Dawsyn murmurs. She walks swiftly on Ryon’s other side, her sights set on the spires ahead. “She will be weak.”
“We’ll find her. Get everyone out of the skies,” Ryon tells Brennick again. “Tell them to wait.”
“What are you going to do?”
Ryon feels his blood cool in his veins. He feels the violence come over him. “I’m going to pry the truth from her.”
It takes them little time to reach the castle and they do not bother to hesitate at its gates. They enter the tunnels, Dawsyn unlocking the portcullises they meet.
“Keep up,” Ryon calls over his shoulder to the others. They do not have time for Esra and Salem to gawk at their surroundings.
The palace feels colder than usual when they finally set foot within its walls. It is eerily quiet despite the unending stone that quickly reverberates each tiny movement. They move swiftly along its corridors and Ryon cannot shake this feeling of unease, of apprehension.
How he detests these walls. These ceilings. He longs to see it burn.
“What is she doing here?” Dawsyn asks aloud. It is the question on every mind.
Ryon’s jaw is set hard. “The better question is, what has Alvira sent her here to do?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Dawsyn continues. “What ploy would include luring the mixed to the valley if they resist Adrik? Surely if he wants them dead, he would use them for the pool?”
Ryon cannot think on her words around his own rage. Had he not had his reservations towards Yennes on first sight? He should have listened to his instincts. There was always something about her that was shrouded, difficult to discern.
They hear nothing as they walk the vast hallways, coming closer and closer to the throne room. He cannot imagine finding her anywhere else. Where else would an iskra witch be but beside the pool that made her?
And there she is.
Yennes is draped in layers of shawl and delicate fabrics designed to keep her hidden. It is in keeping with his experience of her. She only ever showed glimpses of herself: in the nervousness of her hands, the twitch of her lips, the shirking glances that bolted if ever one tried to hold her gaze.
The woman stands before the pool, her back turned to them. She does not come close to its edge, but still, she seems taken by it. It illuminates her, already absorbing whatever vibrancy she is made of, turning her to shadow.
She turns slowly at their approach, for they have not come quietly. They come with revenge in mind, her betrayal still fresh, and she seems to know it, to expect it. She holds her hands at her sides rather than clasped together, clumsily folding and unfolding. She stands tall and ready. Unflinching.
For the first time since their meeting, Ryon finally recognises her as not a woman diminished of spirit, but a woman unafraid.
A woman born of the Ledge.
Ryon reaches for his sword.
“Farra?” a voice impedes.
The name, so out of place, echoes through the chamber of Ryon’s chest. A name rarely spoken, and yet it is said aloud now, of all places. Of all times.
It is Phineas who speaks. With his wrists bound, he stumbles forward into Ryon’s periphery. His sights are set on Yennes, his expression aghast, awed. “Farra,” he speaks again.
Yennes’ lips press into a thin line. “Phineas,” she replies, as if the two were familiar with one another. As if they were acquaintances of old, meeting unexpectantly.
Ryon’s chest is amid slow collapse. His mind does not find sense immediately. It does not connect the pieces the rest of him already has. He hears his mother’s name and cannot fathom it.
Yennes is watching him, and him alone. It is a familiar stare. Curious and intense. Pained and uneasy. She had watched him often before they all became wise to her deceit.
No, Ryon thinks simply. He says nothing. He does not advance. Indeed, he could not will his body to move if he begged it. He is vaguely aware of his hand grasping his sword and the way it shakes. Somewhere outside of himself, he feels the warm touch of Dawsyn’s fingers, holding his forearm.
“You’re alive,” Phineas says, the words steeped in his own disbelief. And then he seems to remember himself, remember his company, and his eyes dart to Ryon.
Ryon only sees the woman before him. A woman who fled Glacia decades ago. A woman with skin like his own.
“Ryon,” she says now, her voice soft and breaking. He hears it still. Her hand lifts, reaches for him.
“Farra,” Dawsyn says. It is not a call, but an expulsion, as though she tests the name, and upon hearing it again, the woman before Ryon turns toward it despite herself. “ You are Farra?” Dawsyn asks quietly.
Yennes, the survivor, keeps her liquid stare on Ryon as she nods.
His mother.
She pulls in a deep breath, her attention on Ryon unwavering. “I am sorry,” she tells him, tears spilling over her cheeks, but she keeps her shoulders back, her chin up, and her hands do not furl together.
It is anger that strikes Ryon first. He can feel it burning in the centre of his stomach, slowly rising. “Humans cannot survive the bearing of a Glacian child,” he says. It is all he can think of to say, anything to deny what is standing before him. A dead mother is preferable to a traitorous one.
As though she can read his thoughts, his quiet seething, Yennes’ lips tremble, but she stares still. “I should have died,” she nods, agreeing with him. “Many times, I’ve feared it would have been wiser.”
Silence followed. Cold and wrenching. Ryon merely waited. He waited for something sensical to rise from the quiet.
Yennes sighed. “You took a long time to come,” she begins, voice uneven. “I laboured for hours. All through the night, and then when you finally came… I did not mind at all that I would die, because I had seen your face. I had held you against me and felt your warmth, your strong heart and I’d never felt so sure of something.” She almost smiles. Almost. “Dying didn’t seem such a great price to pay for you to live. I should have died.” She seems to say it to herself. Her voice recedes to a mutter. Her eyes turn distant.
“Your father saved her, deshun,” Phineas says now, his drawn face pleading with Ryon’s. “He carried her into the palace and he meant for her to drink from the pool, but…”
“But the brutes found us,” Yennes – Farra – says. The term ‘brute’ snags on his mind again, a word Yennes had used in his presence. A word only those familiar with the Colony would use. “They threw me into the pool instead and something within me still had enough strength to fight. The thought that my soul would linger here inside them… I could not allow it.”
The sick ire in his stomach only burns hotter. “And my father?” he asks, and perhaps she can hear the pain he feels, because she flinches.
“They took his wings,” she says, closing her eyes. “He went into the Chasm, and then–”
“Phineas saved you,” Ryon finishes for her, looking to the Glacian in question. The male nods, looking as ancient as he should.
“Your father loved her,” he murmurs sadly. “However foolishly.”
“Foolish indeed,” Ryon says icily. “I wonder if he’d have guessed we would one day find each other again, only for you to lie to me. Deceive me.”
“That is not–”
“Tell me, Farra,” Ryon continues, cutting her voice in two. “Why not tell me you bore me? I may have warmed to you, relied on you. Surely every worthwhile fraud knows the best manipulation is to make someone care for you?”
Farra sighs deeply, her shoulders slipping from their careful composure for the first time. “It was never my intention to manipulate or deceive. Baltisse asked me to help a girl made of iskra and mage light, and I came to help her.”
“She could have died by your hand!” Ryon roars, the anger finally peaking. “If Dawsyn – if any of us had died when you led Alvira to meet us in the Chasm, it would have been by your hand. Do not lie to me once more. You did not come to help; you came to ruin us!”
“I had no choice , ” Farra says, desperation beginning to creep into her tone. “The Queen… I’ve long since stopped fighting the hold she has on me. But that ends today, Ryon. Today, Queen Alvira falls, and the Ledge people will finally be free. There is a plan–”
“Are we to trust a plan outlaid by you?” Dawsyn says suddenly, stepping forward. Ryon sees the ice solidifying over her fingers. “A woman who folds into Glacia for the first time in thirty years, now that her son has outgrown the need for her rescue? Tell me, Yennes. Did you ever think of the boy you left in the Colony? Or were you too busy appeasing the Queens you serve?”
The tears that streak down the woman’s tired face are answer enough. “I wanted to come back,” she says looking back at Ryon. “But the Queens were watching. Baltisse convinced me not to.”
“Baltisse?” Ryon hears the name whispered from one of their group.
“I wanted to come for you, Ryon,” Farra says and Ryon sees the truth of it in every line of her face. “So many times… I almost did.”
“And here you are now,” Ryon utters, swaying where he stands. “For what did you finally find the courage?”
Farra nods, as though ceding the loss of his forgiveness perhaps. “There is a plan, one that we stand a chance of completing if we act quickly. I only ask that you listen, please. There is no time to squander.”
Ryon does not offer her a nod. He lets his eyes bore into hers, and he waits.
She swallows before continuing. “Queen Cressida has turned against her wife.”
There is a small intake of breath from Dawsyn. “You lie.”
Farra sighs. “She has orchestrated an uprising, a revolt. She and the captain of the guard, Ruby.”
The information is jarring. It stuns their party into silence. No one reacts. No one speaks. They listen warily, unsure if what they hear is sinister or of substance.
“By now, the Queen’s Jubilee will be over, and the citizens of Terrsaw will know that the Ledge is empty of people and its survivors have arrived in the valley. With a rebellion already growing, Cressida’s announcement will place Alvira in a very tight corner. Her only viable choice will be to stand with Ruby and the battalion of soldiers she has waiting in the Fallen Village, ready to defend the Ledge people, rather than sacrifice them to the Glacians.”
Ryon’s breath catches in his throat. “And yet you are here, staying out of the fray.”
“I am here because even with half the Terrsaw guard, it won’t be enough,” Farra says. “I came to rally any remaining Glacian I could. I came to know a few in my time here. I hoped I would find them, appeal to them.”
“And in that, you have succeeded,” Ryon says. “The sky is filled.”
“It’s a trap,” Dawsyn says at once. “It must be.”
Farra looks at Dawsyn for a moment, eyes soft and rounded in awe. “You are far braver than I, so you may never understand my weakness. Where you would have spat in the face of a queen who watched your every move, I obeyed.”
“No,” Dawsyn corrects. “You kneeled.”
“There was never another end to the Chasm, Dawsyn,” she says gently now. “I knew it in my core. In my blood. The voices within… they bid us to run in the opposite direction for a reason. I did what I thought was necessary to save those within it.”
“You were a coward,” Dawsyn says. “And we’ve no reason to believe a change in character now.”
Farra looks over her shoulder at the glistening pool and for a moment Ryon wonders if she has forgotten where she is or why she is here. But then she speaks. “Whether I am to be believed or not matters little. At dusk, the Glacians will meet the Ledge people in the Fallen Village, and a battle will ensue, with or without your help. But if our people lose, they will be herded back up those slopes, Dawsyn. Back onto the Ledge.” Her eyes aren’t pleading, nor determined. They are merely weary. They are weighted in regret. In shame. In the violence of her years.
“I prayed each day that you would grow and live well, Ryon,” she tells him softly. For a moment, Ryon can glimpse what life might have been like, carved by her hand. A life of soft glances and mild touches and quiet reassurance. A life removed from the one he lived. “You were meant to be born, just as you were, so that you might do great things, as all improbable souls seem to.”
She clasps her hands together and they intertwine with one another. “Some of us were meant to die. I’ve learned the cost of outstaying one’s welcome. I’ve wronged you. Hurt you,” she says. “But I will make it right again, I swear to you. I only ask that you give me the chance to do so.”
Every fibre of Ryon’s being is at war, parrying with indecision. He should kill Farra… his mother. He should kill her. Not for revenge, but for the sheer likelihood that she is still a slave to Queen Alvira.
But something aches deep within him, and it begs him to leave her be. He finds he cannot lift the sword in his hand. He turns to Dawsyn, to the others. “Please, give me a moment,” he asks of them, and they do not hesitate to comply. All bear the same stunned expressions he likely mirrors, and they nod, backing away. Tasheem pulls Phineas away.
“Leave him,” Ryon tells her, looking at his father’s friend, his mentor. Tasheem grimaces. “Go, Tasheem, please.” And Rivdan leads Tasheem away, nodding once to Ryon.
Brown eyes appear before him, hands on his face. Dawsyn speaks, but he only watches her full lips and hears nothing. “Stay,” he says, interrupting her. He does not mean to say it, does not remember giving thought to it, but there it is. He wants her with him in moments like these.
Her hands leave his face, only to intertwine his fingers with hers. “Always,” she promises.