Ornuo and Pneio are here; they have returned at least twice, and may leave again. There’s no sense in keeping them from an easy exit or entrance. She needs the fresh air more than she needs them to stop doing anything, and if the Lady can’t cross her threshold, Phosyne suspects the sill will have much the same impact.

And once the window is free, she can see that it is evening, and that something is wrong, because she has not been in the room for that long.

She leans out through the window, into the cooling night air, and squints down at the shadowed yard. There is another feast in progress. She sees bodies writhing in the dirt below her, fires burning. The cisterns are all covered.

She does not see Ser Voyne.

“I should never have sent her away,” she says as she retreats back in. Pneio hops up onto the thick sill and coils himself around her wrist. Phosyne shakes her head but rubs at the scales below his pointed jaw. “Just like I should never have let you out. Where have you been, foolish boy?”

She gets nothing in return except the heat of his throat. His golden, burning eyes are slits as he gazes up at her.

“Where did you come from?” she adds, voice softer still. “Did you come because I was lonely?”

He shows his teeth in something like a smile.

“They don’t like you at all.”

She runs her hands over his sinuous body, the bunching of his muscles, the quick beating of his heart. For the first time in many months, she studies him closely. He is hot, hotter than any living thing has any right to be, and of course the scent of sulfur emanates from him. He is, to all appearances, living. He is a beast, not an imagining. Once, his brother’s claw caught in the wood of her desk and when he hauled off, it broke. There’d been blood everywhere, though it had steamed and evaporated.

The saints, they are something of the air. These creatures are of fire. Phosyne knows she can manipulate the flame; her candles are proof enough of that, the realization kindled by that maddening chase out to the smithy, at this thing’s heels.

This is how the learning works: side-glimpsed realizations, nothing direct, but always leaning toward greater understanding. She knew how to sing the first note from “On Breath” not because of something she understood from Pneio digging into a coke pile, but because he had dug into the coke pile.