Treila shifts her fingers closer. Strokes the stone. A faint breeze, like an exhale, ghosts across her face, and she leans into it. “And I will be out of this castle, able to make my way to wherever I wish?” she murmurs, voice low and sighing, as if she’s giving in to a fantasy. “If I let you take a finger of my choosing, will I emerge from Aymar Castle onto the plain beyond, safe and sound?”

She lets one fingertip slip from the stone, hover in the space just before the darkness.

“Yes,” her creature sighs. “But.”

“But?”

“But should you wish to return,” he says, and she can hear his smile, “the fee will be a little higher.”

He doesn’t specify. She doubts she could make him if she wanted to, but—she doesn’t want to. Doesn’t need to.

Resolved, Treila extends the smallest finger of her left hand into the darkness.

At first, there is nothing. Then the brush of gentle lips against her knuckle. A tongue, laving from the web between little and ring finger up to the very tip, prodding beneath her fingernail. She thinks of the Loving Saint, planting his tainted seeds, and grips her free hand tight against the stone so that she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. It’s eat or be eaten, she tells herself, and she cannot eat darkness.

But it can eat her.

Teeth close around her first knuckle, test the heft of the joint. Treila clenches her jaw and refuses to close her eyes or look away. There’s nothing in the darkness that she can see, and so there is no warning when the bite comes, and there is nothing but pain. Treila cries out, falling forward, catching herself against her left shoulder on the stone.

Tears burn her eyes. She’s yanked her hand back from the crevice, helpless to resist, and nothing stops her. Nothing stops her, but nothing opens for her, and she stares at the abbreviated length of her finger.

There is no blood.

“It’s not so nice, to tease,” her darkness whispers. “That’s not enough to set you free. A little more, clever. Just a little more.”

Treila’s crying. She doesn’t want to be, but the pain is too much, even though there’s no blood, even though there are no longer teeth against her skin. For a moment, she doesn’t think she can do it. Doesn’t think she can complete the bargain, offer her hand once more to the creature in the crevice.

But she has suffered worse. That long winter, starving, cold, too shocked and confused to be angry yet, not angry enough to keep herself alive. And yet she is. She found her spite, at last, and rode it out of the forest.

Treila harnesses that spite again and thrusts her hand into the black.