Long-limbed things have crawled down from the windows, and advance in cautious waves. Eyes glint at her in the dark. Phosyne is rising from the throne, and she is beautiful and terrifying all at once. She is glowing. Voyne feels heat rolling from her. She tips her head back and sings one quaking note, and all the reed lights in the room flare to life.

The shadows, caught by the light, resolve into something not quite human. They are like paintings, frescoes, pale faces staring back in the flickering glow. They don’t move when Voyne looks at them, but she can’t see them all at once. At the edges of her vision they’re only smears, bits of gold leaf and charcoal. They are prowling. They are getting closer.

Phosyne reaches for her.

Ser Voyne surrenders to the last order she was given and runs.

Maybe it’s Phosyne’s distance from the throne; maybe it’s the strength of Voyne’s own panic; maybe it’s some whispered order she does not hear as she pounds down the stairs. But as she runs, her mind comes back to her. Full awareness returns to her, and with it, horror. She is retching as she reaches the ground floor, stumbles over the bodies sprawled below her. Some stir. Some ask questions. She ignores them, throws the door open.

The sun is blinding overhead when Voyne pitches out into the yard.

She has stopped trying to make sense of time.

Space, though, she thought she could count on. She knows the dimensions of Aymar intimately, knows how many the upper and lower baileys can hold comfortably, knows where every entrance to the towers that stud the walls are.

Nothing is where it should be.

This place has transformed since she tended to the fallen beneath the blazing sun. The walls tower above her, the ground undulates away, and the sky spins lazily. Voyne makes it only three yards at most before she stumbles, falls, vertigo swarming over her in a hazy rush. Inside. If she goes back inside, the walls and floors will join as they ought.

If she can only get up to Phosyne’s tower, instead . . .

Voyne can’t risk it. She must go to ground somewhere else. The cistern’s depths, perhaps, if only for a little while. Long enough to think. To regain mastery of herself.

But unlike the last bright sunlit moment Voyne was outside the keep, the people in the yard are awake. They are on their feet. They are—

Well.

The Absolving Saint stands at the head of a table and slides a piece of sharp, shining glass beneath the skin of a man who lies naked beneath him. The saint flays him carefully, a beatific smile upon his silvered lips. The man sings.

Sings, not screams.