The talk of bodily demands made my brain finally pay attention to all the complaints my body had been screaming into the void. Sleeping on the floor in a little ball felt terrible, as it turned out, and my shoulder and hips hurt something awful. My mouth was all cottony and I had to pee and it felt like I'd left a tampon in for days.

The last one was weird enough that I frowned, then stuck my hand down my pajama pants and poked a finger into myself a tiny ways, as if I might have forgotten a tampon up there last time I'd had my period and needed to fish out the string. Something pricked me, and I yanked my finger back out of my pants to stare at what looked like a tiny metal cactus-spine embedded in my skin. What the hell?

With a dawning sense of horror, I pulled down my pants, reached between my legs, found the soft edge of something inside of me, and pulled it out. I stared at it, uncomprehending. It looked like one of those anti-rape condoms, except instead of rows of clear plastic teeth, it had lines of short, delicate metal needles, fragile and breakable. That would never latch onto anybody, I thought, staring at it. They'd all just break off and—

Iron.

That was iron.

I flung the thing away from me with an inarticulate scream, and approximately one second later Dain was at my side, holding himself a foot away from me with fear in his eyes. I snatched at him and he dropped down to the floor, hauling me onto his lap and wrapping all four of his arms around me. I couldn't tear my eyes off of the thing, the thing that would have killed Dain if he'd had sex with me, driving little deadly iron needles into his bloodstream, iron that he would never have been able to tear out of himself.

At last his eyes followed mine, and he went deathly still. "What's that?" he asked, in his calmest, most conversational voice. There was murder under that voice, barely leashed.

"That's why," I whispered. "That's why they told me to make you happy. They gave me iron teeth."

He was going to kill them. He was going to hunt them down and he was going to gut them and he wasn't going to feel one dram of sorrow over it. I wasn't even sure I could blame him for it. Axily, and Miaquen, and Ciradyl...

Ciradyl? That wasn't right. Something about that wasn't right.