Is this the meeting Isaac mentioned? To investigate what happened at Esau’s fortress? If so, it could be serious trouble. If Geryon somehow realizes I can use the Dragon’s power, or that Ending has been helping me, who knows what he’ll do? She was worried for the labyrinthine, but more worried for herself. Without her, I’ll never find a way to get to Geryon.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced, letting her fork fall with a clatter.

“Don’t mind me,” Ashes called after her as she left the room. “I’ll just struggle home through snowdrifts taller than my head. All in a day’s work for a half-cat!”

Alice’s hands were covered in blood, slimy and slick with the stuff. It squelched between her fingers, dripped down her forearms, and pattered to the ground like warm, salty rain.

She was in the forest, among the silent, snow-shrouded trees, beside a stream running fast and cold between icy banks. Her father was there, in his neat suit and his traveling hat, looking down at her gory hands with wide eyes. Alice looked up at him and felt her heart sink.

It’s all right, she wanted to say. It’s not my blood. It’ll wash right off. But she couldn’t speak, as if the winter chill had frozen her tongue in her mouth.

Instead, she knelt beside the stream and plunged her hands into it. It was deeper than it looked, deep enough that she couldn’t touch the bottom, and for a moment she felt herself teetering on the edge of an unknowable abyss. The water was bitterly cold, and her skin went numb almost at once, but she bore with the chill and the pain, watching the blood stream off her in puffs and gouts.

Finally, she turned around, raising her hands for her father’s inspection. See? she wanted to say. All clean.

But her hands weren’t clean. Brilliant crimson drops still tumbled from her fingers and splashed silently into the snow.

Furious, and a little scared, she put her hands back into the stream. Her fingers started to hurt, spikes of pain shooting up her arms and into her shoulders. She kept them there until her hands felt like useless clubs, until it felt like her skin would shatter into icy fragments when she moved. She didn’t care. Blood kept washing off, swirling eddies of it floating downstream.

At last, when she couldn’t bear the pain a moment longer, she lifted her hands. Her fingers wouldn’t move, and she could barely lift her arms. Her skin was still coated in slick blood, steaming in the cold air.