Ledge (The Glacian Trilogy #1)

by Stacey McEwan

This cabin that is now hers was once too full and too loud and too much for her. But now, it isn’t enough. She has learned the might of silence. It is the prelude to fear. It is the absence of company. It is the moment before the monster takes you into his claws. She abhors it.

Dawsyn was born on this mountain, on the Ledge, so close to the sky that she has never glimpsed the ground.

For hours, they traded ideas like currency between them, imagining faeries that guarded the woods, witches that cast spells from their snow burrows. The well of imagination they drank from, debating the realms of the Chasm and the beasts on the other side, has long run dry.

Someone looking in might think them lovers, the naked girl cradling a crying man. The truth is that they are just two shades of the same loneliness, friends in commonality, holding each other through the storm.

Briar’s hand ruffled Dawsyn’s hair. Her cracked lips pressed against her forehead once and then twice. “You’ll do better,” Briar told her, her voice serene. “The cold is not alive, but you are.”

Chapter 3 and im already crying in the club

Down in the valley, where the villagers had once lived, their homes were burned to the ground, easily crushed by the weight of the mighty Glacian hordes. The people were slaughtered or captured, shoved up the mountain and further, then flown across the Chasm by the wings of the Glacian beasts. There, they were dumped into the snow and ice of this shelf where they remain. The Glacians only need two things to survive – the cold and humans.

Always the same with these men, like animals in a cage. When they come in heat, they head-butt and rampage like bulls, not a drop of blood saved for their brains in favor of their balls. Today is not a day to find her charitable.

Dawsyn rolls her eyes. “Why do men only use their manners when there’s a knife to their eye? You weren’t such a gentleman a minute ago.”

She does it again and again until he hits the ice and watches, with no small amount of pleasure, as his body slips away, gliding down into that great yawning mouth of the world. What does it mean that she does not cry or collapse? That she feels sated instead of remorseful? She does not crave killing, never seeks it, but it tends to find her. Briar taught her to always take life when it threatened hers.

Oh i love her

Had she escaped a man with the same intent at dawn, only for it to be in vain by dusk?

The beating of her heart slows and so does his. The scent of fear is drowned by the scent of him and despite herself, her body unwinds. She bends where he bends, feels the places of him that yield to her and those that do not. He finds the empty spaces around her and fills them. Instead of feeling restrained, she feels held. And if having her in his lap is a discomfort to him, he does not show it.

“You would never get close enough for that, girl. You have a quick mouth but I’d wager my hands are quicker.” Dawsyn’s gaze, if possible, darkens. “Many have assumed the same.” “And where are they now?” “Decomposing.”

her alone. The broken and buried are not hers either, but still, the sight of it ignites a wrath in her. Not one that she earned, but one she was born into. One that, despite its age, demands retribution, whether it belongs to her or not.

She was not born to walk the valley. And yet she does. She has survived the Ledge, the Chasm, the slopes, and now, she is here. So destiny, she supposes, can fuck itself.

Standing there, a foot shorter than the rulers of the kingdom, in borrowed clothes not nearly as fine, Dawsyn holds the room in her hands. Her body has not been kept by the many servants of a palace, but forged in the ice of a prison. Her parted lips are red and raw from the wind of the mountain, not painted in wine from a lifetime of feasts. Still, she commands them. And Ryon sees her clearly. The Queens, the guards,

“Not a desirable trait, is it? For a woman to be arrogant? On a man, it charms, but in women, it corners us. A self-assured woman is either a harlot or embittered.”

She looks exactly like the woman he first saw in the Glacian palace – like a warrior, like destruction. Like she should be his.

However Glacian he might be, the good in him runs thicker, and she finds that she wants to go to that unknown place, where Sabar and Glacian are not words spoken. She wants to vanish into the thin line between sky and water and begin again.

As she sleeps, he runs his fingers along the lengths of her black hair, following its wave with his eyes, watching where it catches the glow of firelight. She is – and he has known it since he first saw her – painfully beautiful. He imagines that if he were to tell her so, she’d frown, ask him what use beauty is, and neglect to thank him. But she is. And he has found it hard to look away.

Her entire weight crashing down on him barely elicits a grunt. She is small in his hands but not in his mind, where she takes up every crevice, every corner, filling him entirely. She pants an order at him, impatient.

He bites back a smile and shakes his head at the ground, taking several paces toward her. “I cannot decide whether you are a curse or a dream.” “Can’t I be both?” she asks. “Evidently.”

In the divide between night and dawn, they sweep across the fields like dark spirits, unseen and unheard by those who hunt them. It is long after they return to the safety of tree cover that the night finally succumbs to the light, and the fields cannot betray even their footprints.

What a shock it must have been, Dawsyn thinks, when he outgrew the smallness they’d all failed to confine him within.

I want you to know that I was alive long before your grandmother was born and your great-grandfather, too. I’ve seen Terrsaw in many forms, and never was it finer than when it was in the hands of the Sabars. Mages weren’t always a welcome entity, but the former

King and Queen… they saved me and the others from being burned at the stake.”

With that, she flips Dawsyn’s hand to see her palm and traces her fingers over the lines. “You weren’t born for the Ledge, Dawsyn Sabar,” she says, curiously eyeing her ...

delicate, unadorned by any gem or jewel. “There is absolutely no magic in this to protect you, I’m afraid,” Baltisse smiles. “I just want you to have something of me near your heart when you cut Vasteel’s from his chest.” Their eyes meet, and as Dawsyn clasps the thin chain around her neck, she feels energy pass between them, in the way that only two women can – like ropes tethering, connecting them. It is the kindred binding of girls that sh...

He will never again question the actions of his father, who risked everything to love a human woman. Some of them can be, he has learned, addictive. He can no more explain the compulsion to touch her than he can explain his need for sleep. He does not understand why he is bound to watch her any more than he understands the patterns of the wind. He only knows he tried not to, that he fought it, and that finally succumbing to her feels like a kind of blissful unravelling.

She does not need him, but he can think of nothing more sating than the idea that she might.

He is a thing of the dark. There is a glint of his sword as it enters the crook of the sentry’s neck and sinks to the hilt. Ryon’s feet land heavily a second later. Blood spills from the sentry’s mouth, his faded eyes wide in shock. Ryon grips the sword hilt again and wrenches it out, and the Glacian topples forward to the snow.

“Do not die,” he tells her, eyes searching her face. She grins, running one finger along the line of his jaw. “I never do.” As though he cannot stop himself, he pulls her mouth up to his. The curve of his lips, the feel of his rough jaw, it consumes her. She crushes her mouth against his, momentarily drunk on the way warmth seeps through his lips to hers. In painstaking degrees, they part, the wide span of his hand running from her hairline to her throat.

thought we were avoiding hacking them down along the way?” Dawsyn asks him lightly, drawing her own blade from her belt. “I specifically recall the words, ‘No hacking, slicing, or gutting until we get inside’.” “Yes,” he concedes. “This was a special case.”

Dawsyn struggles against the Glacian who holds her. “Ryon! If you defend my honor each time someone slaps me, you’ll live a short life.” “But still an honorable one,” he grunts, spitting blood to the ground.

It will take years for the Izgoi to concede that they were led into the palace by a human woman possessed with Glacian magic. It will take longer to unravel the tales spun to satiate the doubt of the mixed-bloods who would not hear of a girl wielding a power they themselves could not. Instead, they will say that the portcullises were torn from the stone, smashed to pieces – or in one case, opened by a particularly inflated Izgoi, who will claim that he had been willed to conquer the portcullises by a god.

will be centuries before the tales evolve to tell of Dawsyn Sabar, granddaughter of a crown princess, leading a battalion of the Izgoi through the tunnel and raising the portcullises one by one with the palm of her hand. Until then, they will leave out how she was the first to step into the palace, the first to raise her weapon. They will not tell their children of how that ax cut through the stomachs and necks of Glacian guards who sought to fell her and failed.

she counts the pulse of his blood instead and wonders if she’s ever heard a sound more significant.