Voyne knows the layout of Aymar very well. She knows each doorway, each yard, each wall; if she has not stepped foot in some for weeks or months, she still has the design etched inside her skull. The Lady used this aspect of her, along with all the others, to roust out each hiding place before the feast.

Now, Voyne uses it to flee.

Castles are not meant to be raced through, but she has no other option, not as the shadows descend on her and nip at her heels. They have no substance to them—not like people, not like hounds—and yet they chase her down. She can’t make out details, only slashes of color, strangely flat, horribly unnatural, but she can taste their hunger.

They clot in the stairwell; she finds the only window wide enough to accept a body and slips through out onto the meager footholds that stud along the tower to another entrance one level down. She clambers, scurries, steals her way across spaces not designated as paths but designed to assist a defender. If she can get to the lower level, she can move to the other staircase. Get to Phosyne.

But outside the walls, the unnerving beasts still pursue her. Where before they were shadow, now they are air; she sees them as smears of black and red and gold and white on the boiling hot sky. Below, she can still see the insensate forms of people she dragged to safety. She almost says a prayer for no new splashes of carmine in the dust, but she is already too late.

Below her, on one of Aymar’s walls, she can see Denisot, the chamberlain. He crawls like a dog, bleeding from his hands, his knees, his feet. He is naked, and on his back are those same smears of flat color. And at their edges, his blood, splashing onto the stone.

A small procession follows him, of humans this time. No—a parade. One has a horn. Voyne ducks and scrapes and claws her way around the tower, so that she can’t see them anymore. The stone is not kind.

She wishes she had Phosyne’s skill, to pass through rock from one side to the other. She must, instead, rely on geometry.

Inside again, and the press of bodies grows close. Laughter, dry and burning, crackles against her ears.

And yet—

It all falls away as she nears Phosyne’s door.

Something is different about it. The proportions are the same, the strange repurposing of the defensive slit beside the door. There is nothing, at first, that marks it as changed. Except the torches by her door are long-since burned down, yet they flash and shine now, driving back the shadows. Even as she staggers closer, they grow, brighten. They pulse, as if with a heartbeat—one much quieter than her own.