“Laila…” he said. His eyes looked wide. Frantic. “I know I have made mistakes. I know I said unforgivable things, and grief was no excuse. I know I will regret those moments for the rest of my life, but I can make it up to all of you. I swear it. Are they here?” He looked around the room, a hopeful smile touching his face. “Are they well? Can I see them?”

Laila managed to shake her head.

“Please, Laila, I can take care of everything—”

Finally the words snapped out of her.

“But you didn’t,” she said coldly.

Séverin stilled. “I know my actions in Lake Baikal looked unimaginably cruel—”

“Actually, they didn’t,” said Laila. Her throat felt raw. The words she had longed to say rushed out: “I wish I could say I was surprised, and yet, I wasn’t. You had already changed so much. Everything … every person … was disposable to you.” She advanced on him, her hands trembling. “All this time, you thought you could get away with devastation so long as it justifies some irrational calculus in your head. And now you apologize for appearing ‘unimaginably cruel’?” Laila laughed. “What you did was so in line with who you are that when I became conscious, I wanted nothing to do with you. I smashed that Mnemo butterfly because I knew there was nothing you could show me that I wanted to see. Nothing you could leave me that I wanted to chase.”

Séverin’s smile finally fell. “You broke it?”

She nodded. She watched his eyebrows twitch upwards. It might have looked like surprise, but she knew that look. Not surprise, but caution.

“What can I do, Laila?” he asked finally. “You can hate me until the day you die … but let me make that day your choice. Let me use the lyre to help you … to help all of us.”

Laila felt rooted to the spot. Séverin took a step closer to her. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Name any penance, and I will pay it kneeling.”

This close, she caught the mint and smoke scent that clung to him. Before, she used to imagine that Séverin burned a new path wherever he went, and that the smoky smell of fire shadowed his steps. But she was wiser now, and her mind recognized what her body did not. She remembered the scent of mint and smoke from the funerary fires burning along the banks of the river of her childhood. Even the fragrance that clung to him was fatal.

“And how do you plan to do that?” she asked. “By turning yourself into some kind of god?”

His eyes flashed. “If that’s what it takes,” he said.

But there was a caged quality to his voice, and when Laila searched his eyes again, she found the words for what she could not decipher before:

He wanted godhood.

More than that, he believed he would get it. She could see it in his eyes. That ice in his gaze had melted to something shining and zealous.