Despite all that had gone between them, the fair and the foul, his heart leaped in his breast when he at last heard her words, as quiet as if they did indeed issue from beneath the mud at the bottom of a deep, deep pond.

Husband?

I am here, at your bedside. How are you today?

Weaker. I…I can barely hear you. I sent my words to Yasammez. She did not think the name, but rather a flutter of ideas—Grandmother’s Fierce Beautiful Sister of the Bloodletting Thorns and the Smoking Eye. I should not have done it, she told him, almost an apology. I did not have the…strength…but I was…

Afraid she would use up what little of her music remained, he hastened to finish her thought. You were wondering if she had succeeded. And she told you she had.

Succeeded at your plan. Fulfilled the Pact. Not at what I wished…

Which would have availed you nothing. Trust me, my sister, my wife. Many things have passed between us over all these years, but never lies. And it could yet be my own compromised plan, like the despised, bent tree in the corner of the orchard, that will bear fruit.

What would it matter? There is nothing that can be done now. All that we love will perish. Her thoughts were so full of blackness he could almost feel himself pulled down by them, like a man so fixed on the swirling clouds below his mountain path that he leans toward them and falls free…

No. He pulled himself back, disentangling himself from her. Hope is the only strength left to us and I will not give it up.

What hope? For me? I…doubt it. And even if so, then what of you…? He sensed her amusement, that old, bitter mirth that sometimes over the long centuries had felt to him like a slow poison. What of you, Ynnirit-so?

I ask for nothing I cannot bear. And Yasammez has given the glass to her dearest, closest servitor, Gyir.

The Encauled One? But he is so young in years…!

He will bring it to us. He will stop for nothing—he knows its importance. Do not despair, my queen. Do not go down into the darkness yet. Things may change.

Things always change, she told him, that is the nature of things… but she was fading now, weary and in need of that deeper blackness that was her sleep, and which might last days. A last bubble of dark amusement drifted up to him. Things always change, but never for the better. Are we not the People, and is that not the substance of all our story?

Then her thoughts were gone and he stood alone with her silent, coolly slumbering shell. The beetles shifted on the walls again, a quiet unfurling and resettling of wings that rippled sunset-colored lightning all around the chamber until they too settled down to sleep once more.

They were back.

The dark men, the faceless men, once more pursued him through burning halls, sliding in and out of the rippling shadows as though they were nothing but shadows themselves. Was it a nightmare? Another fever dream? Why couldn’t he wake up?