The echo of Benjy’s words rang through Ayla like a bell toll. She didn’t know what to think. For so long, everyone around her had said: They are monsters. There is no reasoning with them. Stay away. And now . . .

She frowned. “Well, tell your precious queen to leave Benjy alone. She’s toying with him, leading him along. He’s not something she can play with before devouring.”

“What are you talking about?” Storme asked.

“They were all lovey-dovey at the ball last night,” Ayla said. She rolled her eyes. “It’s made him a fool.”

“I see,” said Storme, very softly, and then neither of them spoke at all.

Later that night, belly full from dinner, Ayla slipped into her bedchamber. Her mind was still reeling from everything Storme had told her, thoughts swooping like seabirds. She’d been waiting all day for some time alone. She knew once she started thinking about it she wouldn’t be able to stop. The quiet devastation of her brother’s story.

She changed into her sleep clothes, pulled back the blankets, and froze.

There, on the mattress, was a folded-up piece of parchment.

Cautiously, Ayla held it up to the lamplight. The parchment was yellow and worn, the creases soft, as if it had been unfolded and refolded a thousand times. It was a letter, she could tell that much. Messy handwriting, the ink blurred with age. Even if she’d been reading her whole life, it would have been near incomprehensible.

Ayla sank onto the mattress, lost. Then she leaped up and hurried to her writing desk, fetching a pen and a fresh piece of paper. She smoothed out the old parchment. Tried to focus on identifying one letter at a time.

After a quarter of an hour, she was pretty confident she had the first two words.

My Storme . . .

My Storme,

Today I have a story for you.

Once, a witch charmed a collection of bones into dancing whenever she played the flute. The bones were mostly in the shape of a person, with a few bits missing here and there; when they danced, they rattled together as one, and when the music stopped, they clattered to the ground, silent and still as any tomb. The witch didn’t do this for any particular reason. She didn’t want to frighten the nearby villagers or play a trick or disrespect a sleeping grave. I think she was just lonely. I think she just wanted to dance. She lived out her days, her witch’s life span, in a small cottage at the edge of a clearing in the deep, dark woods, and after a while the bones learned to dance to birdsong, and the soft coos of owls and mourning doves, and sometimes even the cry of a faraway wolf. And the witch, who had previously not spoken to anyone for a long, long time, sometimes put away the flute and sang, every song she could remember and a thousand she invented on the spot, and the bones danced their rattling dance, teeth chattering on the floorboards, and the witch laughed and the bones danced to that, too.