“He said it was only a moment,” Lissa said. “You know better. For months he stood beneath your window and serenaded you like a tomcat, but in the end, when you asked for clarity, he slunk away a coward.”

“Bitterlich is no coward.” Isabelle had witnessed his bravery many times. She snatched away Lissa’s air, and the matchmaker drifted away to thump against the end of her tether. Whatever the truth of Bitterlich’s feelings, his answer had closed a door and she was not going to sit outside in the rain pounding on it.

In the end she painted her romantic inclinations into the graveyard with all her other vain hopes: the university she’d wanted to build, the family she’d wanted to have.

The everdream became dull and gray around her. Her thoughts came more slowly, haltingly. She was all but out of air herself. She needed to breathe.

She let go her anchor and turned her face to the breach. The shape of it had changed, in her perception, from a crumbling barricade to a very deliberate opening, a gateway through which she could pass at will. She glided through it.

She heard a groan, and realized it was her own noise, her own body. She hurt everywhere, but her fever had broken. Some tipping point had been passed, much as the moment when a great storm blew out leaving ruin in its wake, but before rebuilding commenced.

She wasn’t dying anymore. Which meant her transformation must have completed.

Isabelle opened her eyes. It was like trying to shift a door on rusted hinges, and she found her face covered with a thin parchment that let in light but not shape.

A hushed voice said, “Isabelle? Can you hear me?” It was Marie, still tending her, thank the saints.

“Yes.” Isabelle’s tongue was as dry as an old potato and she felt like her face had been covered in rice paper. A powerful thirst gripped her. “Water.”

She reached up to brush the parchment from her eyes. Bending her arm felt like breaking a twig in two. Her bones felt like sharp-edged quartz, and her skin … her hand came away with a death mask of dried skin. She’d pulled her face off!

Only her parched throat and dried tongue stifled her shriek. She tried to sit, but lacked the strength and fell back immediately to the sound of crunching, like she’d fallen into a patch of dried leaves. More dead skin. Dismay filled her at the sight of her dermis cracking and crumbling. Except … this had happened to her dozens of times, through many lives. It was all part of the process of transformation.