One floor up, Treila creeps into the room she is meant to be sleeping in, expecting to find it empty as it was when she last left, but no, it is full to bursting. People litter the floor, recognizable but in different arrangements than usual. So many are curled up against one another, resting in unfamiliar embraces. Sleeping mats overlap and rumple, blankets tangle.

Simmonet is sleeping, as is Edouart. Both still alive. They look a little plumper, but that might just be the soft moonlight, and their easy stillness. Nobody is writhing or crying out in the dark. Nobody wears a visage of hunger and pain.

It is a strange, discomfiting sight. Treila leaves them behind, taking the western tower up to what has served as the throne room as long as the king has been in residence.

She doesn’t make it past the first turning, because there stands the Loving Saint.

He looks surprised to see her, though that means very little. He glances at her over one shoulder from where he crouches on the steps, peering into the throne room beyond. His fine lips curl into a smile, and he turns in full, leaning back and regarding her down the length of his lithe body.

“You left,” he says, by way of greeting. His voice seems to prompt a new wash of noise in her missing ear. A harsher sound, this time. A droning, coarse at the edges, familiar somehow.

“I came back,” she corrects.

A bruise discolors his jaw. It’s so incongruous with the rest of him and with what she knows (he can take on Ser Voyne’s skin, but he can’t hide an injury? What use is his metamorphosing, then?), that she’s reaching out to touch him before she can stop herself.

The Loving Saint seizes her wrist before she can reach him. It’s her left wrist. She’s reaching with just her thumb and three fingers, and he sees it, the missing one, and he stares at it with—

Not hunger. Anger. So much anger it nearly burns her.

“You said,” Treila murmurs, “whatever the cost.”

She pushes her other hand into her hair, baring the smooth expanse of jaw where her ear once sat. “So I paid it twice.”

That earns her an actual snarl. It’s bestial, and accompanied by his fingers tightening hard around her wrist. It feels honest when he jerks her arm hard, and she sprawls down across him on the steps.

“Are you jealous?” she whispers in his ear, her heart hammering, feeling both terrified and alive.

And with that he shoves her off him, to the side.