Ianthe rolled away from you, damp with drying blood. You watched as she stood before the amethyst-studded rapier she had left in its scabbard, and you watched her slide it out, slowly, with a soft metallic sound that set your teeth on edge. You watched her web her skeleton hand with a neon pad of fat—not your preference, but she had her own proclivities—and raise the sword behind her, gauging the new weight in an arm substantially lighter than the one on the floor, and close her eyes.

Lunge. The arm answered. The movement was reactive, liquid, smooth. She cut a sweep before her, then flicked her naked wrist; each action was clean. The sword was as light in her hand as the bones in her arm. Her body was not her body—it was strange to you how you could see no trace of idle Ianthe in the parry and the thrust. Instead you saw a cavalier who had known from the cradle what life intended for him, and had a rapier placed in his hands not long after.

You might have changed your clothes, or washed the blood from your body. All your sister Lyctor did was throw her nacreous white robe over her shoulders, where it settled like snow under an aurora—all she did was belt her rapier to her waist, and slide the trident knife into the special scabbard across the hip, and point at you, and say: “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do not leave the room.”

You were still weary and frightened, and Ianthe leaving reminded you how vulnerable you really were. But Ianthe did not heed your protests. Nor did she take fifteen minutes. You sat yourself back on the bed and pulled the covers up around your shoulders, and very slowly and surely your heart rate returned to normal.

It was fully twenty-five minutes before the door opened again. You coiled for flight, but it was, after all, just Ianthe—an Ianthe who had changed. She was a sorry sight. You had an artist’s fondness for the right arm, but recognised the shocking juxtaposition of it, of the bloodless flesh and then the bloodless bone, that unexpected and violent nudity. Her yellow lace nightgown had dried to a crust of brown, and her hair had dried in patches of much the same colour: a sort of carroty stain at the temples and the ends.

But the expression on her face was that of undressed release. It was the expression of an awed child watching their raised skeleton totter forward for the first time without falling. She was incandescent, softly luminous in a way that gave her bleached skin a creamy colour, and which made the death-mask lines of her blank face animated and alive. Her eyes were blue again, with those mountainous flecks of sea-parted brown, and for the first time you thought how much she resembled her twin.