Kinok looked at her for a long moment. “Lady Crier, it is not your last breath that interests me. It is everything that comes before.” And he unsheathed the sword at his hip, steel glowing dimly in the reddish light, and swung it in an arc. Crier tensed up, bracing herself.

But it was not Crier at the end of Kinok’s blade.

It was Ayla.

The tip of the sword was resting at the hollow of her throat. It had not yet drawn blood.

“No,” said Crier. Her own voice was foreign to her ears, flat and dead sounding. She couldn’t look away from the sword tip, cold metal on the delicate skin of Ayla’s throat. Ayla was breathing shallowly, holding Automa-still. “Scyre, I will bargain with you.”

“Pathetic, how easy that was,” said Kinok. He was looking down the blade at Ayla, eyes half lidded. So infuriatingly calm. “Truly pathetic. This is what happens when you . . . consort with humans. You have become so weak, Lady Crier. Even a fifth pillar could not make you this weak.”

“I know that was a lie,” Crier said. “I know you forged the blueprints. To blackmail me.”

“Yet the outcome is the same. You are weak.”

Blood in the air. He’d broken skin. Not deep. Only a few drops of blood, red and human.

“You know what?” Kinok said softly, almost to himself. “I think I will cut out her heart.”

“No,” said Crier, and this time she tugged at her chains. “No, take me. You can—you can use me against the sovereign. My father. You can use me as leverage against my father.”

“Crier, no,” Ayla said, barely moving her lips.

Kinok didn’t even look at Crier. “Do you think your father would risk anything, anything at all, to save you? You made a fool of him.”

“I—I’m still his daughter.”

“Ah. No, not quite. He is already in the process of replacing you. The blueprints for one Lady Yarrow are being Designed as we speak. He didn’t even wait a day. Not a single day after you ran, Lady Crier. Before he sent for the Midwives.” He traced the sword tip across the wings of Ayla’s clavicle, tapped it lightly on her sternum, over her shirt. No blood. He was playing with her. Relishing her fear. “Sovereign Hesod never cared about you, Lady Crier. He certainly did not love you. You were created to serve a purpose, and you failed to do so. What use are you to him? What leverage?”

Despite everything, that hurt. Crier thought she’d severed herself from her father, renounced him entirely, but there was a part of her that would always be the gangly newbuilt child following him around, trailing after him through the halls of white marble and gold, asking him questions, asking him for ink and parchment, asking him about the Red Council, sitting in his study with a pile of books, looking forward to their slow walks through the flower gardens and the sun apple orchards. There was a part of her that had never stopped longing for his approval, his trust, his respect. That part was not so easily tamped down.