CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
C HAPTER F IFTY- N INE
Her den of girls is warm for such a blizzard-worn night. The fire crackles, her shoulders are donned by threadbare blankets, and Dawsyn marvels at the absence of cold. Her toes do not curl up inside her leather boots. Her bones do not ache.
In the crook of her arm, her sister Maya huddles, peacefully asleep against her side, mouth agape. Her wild tangle of black hair tickles Dawsyn’s neck.
Briar stokes the fire. Her long-braided hair dangles over her shoulder and she flicks it back with a curse.
Valma sits on a cot. She is sewing something together and frowns at Dawsyn when she looks up. “What are you doing here, Dawsyn?” she asks, her fingers continuing to weave thread.
Dawsyn smiles to hear her voice again. It is unbroken, uninterrupted by wet, lung-deep coughs. It is coarse and abrupt, and it rings long after the last word leaves her mouth. “Am I not welcome in my own cabin?”
Her grandmother smirks, raising her eyebrow. “ Your cabin, aye?”
“Leave her be,” Briar grins, eyes sparkling as they regard Dawsyn. Those dark eyes seem filled again. Filled with love and warmth and peace. It has been so long since Dawsyn last saw them this way. “Let her stay.”
“Here?” her grandmother argues. “In this den? No,” she laughs. “She was never meant for this speck on the map, Briar.”
Dawsyn looks to her sister’s young face, untouchable in sleep; then to Briar’s, alive and teeming; then to her grandmother’s, lined with a lifetime of love and labour. Dawsyn had forgotten how her lips pinched together just so, and how her right hand always rose to scratch a spot beneath her ear, and how her left foot incessantly tapped an off-beat rhythm that matched the wind howling outside.
“I wish to stay,” Dawsyn says. And it feels strange that sadness should grip her now, where comfort and warmth is easy to come by. But she feels it. She feels every day spent huddled before a weaker fire, shivering beside them. She feels every moment spent stoking it alone, banishing thoughts of this den when it was filled with women. She learned how to tuck those memories aside, lest this same sadness steal her over the edge of the Chasm. But she lets it sink her now. Lets it fill her up and drown her.
Her grandmother rises and bends to touch her cheek. “No,” she tells her simply. “Not yet.”
“When?” Dawsyn asks desperately, her throat burning.
But Valma Sabar does not answer. She only smiles gently, brushing Dawsyn’s lips with her thumb. “All things find their way back home.”