Slowly, with one hand pressed against the manor wall, Josiri rose to his feet. He was used to Anastacia’s evasions, so why did this one send a shiver down his spine?

“Whose choice is it?”

Her head dipped. [[Freedom came with a price, extracted from us both.]]

He shook his head and cursed softly as the motion set the world spinning. “I don’t understand.”

[[You will.]]

She turned, fingers brushing the hood from her brow. Dark eyes swirled in a face of smooth, white porcelain chased with gold and framed by black tresses.

Josiri’s heart leapt into his throat. His shaking fingers clutched at the wall. He felt sick, as if all the festering ills of the past days had settled deep within his gut, and now sought to spill free.

“That’s . . . That’s not a mask, is it?”

[[No.]]

An eternity passed as he struggled to find his voice. Another crawled by while he sought words beyond his straining grasp. He felt smothered by ice, the warmth sucked from his bones even as his lungs cracked.

“How?” He gasped the word from a raw throat. “How did Akadra do this?”

Anastacia’s gloved fingers clinked against her face. [[He made this body. He promised it would carry me beyond the walls, and it has. But it is also my prison. I cannot leave, and the world is dust, for all the sensation it offers.]]

“No!” Josiri ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “This isn’t real! What you’re talking about . . . it’s not possible.”

[[You know I was never flesh as you are flesh . . . and many things are possible with magic that are otherwise not.]]

“Magic? Your magic?”

[[And his. I thought together . . .]] A hint of panic touched her voice. [[This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.]]

The note of dismay, of loss, finally cracked a chink in the ice around him. Josiri’s hands slipped from his face and looked again at the horror Akadra had wrought. The thing he had made of the beautiful, effervescent creature with whom he had shared so many years.

Ice melted before a raging flame.

“I’ll kill him!”

A gloved hand closed around his arm, the grip tighter than it had any right to be.

[[No! If I’d wanted that, he’d be dead already. And I did want it, for a time. I have wanted so many things this past day. I have dreamed forth enough woe on others to drown an ocean. But in the end, I have one need alone. Even if he can no longer bear to look upon what I’ve become.]]