“They wouldn’t know I was there,” Treila argues, but goes still all the same. The Loving Saint’s hands stroke over her hips. His mouth falls to her neck, featherlight. She should kick him for his troubles, but it feels good. Indulgent and sweet, with a blistering edge.

She strains to hear words. There is the soft murmur of one voice only, the Lady’s, and then a wet, slick sound, a wail, a thud.

Treila knows those sounds, though not in that order; by the time her father’s head was parted from his shoulders, he could no longer scream. Her skin goes cold. Insensate. The buzzing in her ears turns all-consuming, obliterating.

It is the sound of bees, erupting from the hive, swarming over her, piercing her flesh.

“Where’s your mind gone to?” the Loving Saint asks, taking her chin, dragging her out of the dark. “Somewhere frigid and angry.”

Foolish girl, she thinks, viciously. But she’s shaking now. She can’t help it. Five years. Five years, and she shouldn’t be so reactive. She is better than this. She has made herself better than this.

“What was done to you?” he murmurs. “What did they take from you? I can smell the scent of snow on your breath. Snow, and blood. Your winter woods.” He pets her sides, and she can feel him wriggling, peeling, untangling. He is searching for that core of her, that thing that makes her dangerous, that element the Lady cannot predict. He thinks he is going to find it. “What are you remembering?”

She makes herself soften. Be easy for him. “Only bad dreams,” she says. “Of when I had a tender heart.”

“Is that why you run away so readily?” he asks, nuzzling at her pulse.

“You told me to go,” she reminds him. Her breath catches in her throat.

“And yet you came back. Changeable thing. We’re not so different, I think, you and I.” She can feel his smile against her skin, and the lightest brush of teeth. She doesn’t flinch. “Why did you return?”

“I wanted to.” It is the truest answer, if not so simple as it sounds. She toys with options, angles she can show him. What would intrigue him? What would keep her safest? What would make him spill some new detail?

“Your knight calls to you so loudly?” he asks, and oh, she hasn’t led him far enough astray at all.

“I want to win,” she says, too quickly, too honestly, as she turns to face him, reclining across the steps. She came back to prove she was clever enough, quick enough, not only to get out alive, but to salvage something of value. Save a few other lives, even though nobody had come back for her after her father’s death. But that isn’t the whole of it.

If it were, the mention of Ser Voyne wouldn’t gall her so deeply.