There is no third confrontation. Yavena does not permit it. She keeps Iraline docile with venom, her mind chemical-slurred, her movements leaden with toxins. Yavena’s actions are a betrayal, she knows this, a blasphemy of trust, but there is no other hope, no way to go but forward. When they at last they reach the courts of the Ten Thousand Colors, absolution will surely be found.

There is no absolution, only fire.

“What—”

Yavena’s eyes map the labyrinth of the Ovia capital, warped by destruction, its sunset-clasped minarets and aqueducts reduced to a memory. Smoke haunts rubble-licked streets, thick as lies, as anguish.

In the distance, knotting with the funeral hymns of the Ovia, the voice of the Gak, triumphant.

“No.” Yavena exhales, fear clotting, congealing in her throat. She staggers through the archway into the main pavilion, now a landscape of broken bodies, whimpering survivors, and ravaged architecture. “Nononono.”

Iraline, fingers crusted with the grime of the road, says nothing, only slumps to her knees as Yavena releases her.

“No,” Yavena says again, as though the word could subvert the truth of a thousand half-eaten corpses. “How could this—”

Even as the question unspools, an answer decants itself into her mind, a taste like salt, like a sister’s desperation.

You did this.

It is hours before Yavena submits to this knowledge, to the horror of her actions. Hours before she collapses in an alley, her face in her arms, and wails for forgiveness from a city of indifferent ghosts.

The Dog-King is not what Yavena remembers.

He is colossal, primordial, a nightmare made fur and sickle-moon snarl. Where Yavena remembered a scholar’s inquisitiveness, a boyishness of conduct, there is only a predator’s stare, hard and flat and golden behind small amber glasses.

“Why?” It is the only word that Yavena can find.

“Because you betrayed your end of the bargain.”

Yavena jolts forward, one wincing step at a time, back held straight despite the agony that oozes between every vertebra. She can barely feel her left arm, can barely register the connection between tendon and nerve, the muscles flayed almost to ribbons. With a grunt, Yavena transfers her kris to her right hand, her weight to her left foot. Her grip tightens. After all that has happened, she will not bow, will not bend till she carves absolution from the ribs of the king.

“It was one Mother,” she whispers between a mouthful of blood.

The Dog-King bares an indolent smile. “One Mother. One bargain. One treaty.”

“You tricked us—”

“We gave you every opportunity to perform as you should have, and you failed.”

“You used me!” she screams, limping closer, closer to where the Dog-King sits draped over his throne of dead Mothers.