In the lower yard, down by the cisterns, a man holds aloft his daughter like an offering. Blood runs down the little girl’s arms and legs. At his feet, his other children crowd and press, lapping up each drop that falls.

And around it all is the audience. Even in so much drowning sunlight, Voyne can barely make out their contours. They are light flashing off of quartz, heat haze, splashes of whitewash on stone. They are flat, where the bodies they advance toward are thick and curved and so real Voyne can’t stand to look at them.

But they do have weight to them. Dust scatters in their wake. And when one bends to the flayed man’s chest and bites—

Well, their teeth rend flesh as well as any beast’s.

Voyne keeps her head down through all of it, shaking, shivering, cold in the hot noon sun. She feels like she is drowning. She feels like she is dying. But that’s hardly new. What is new is only the intensity of the feeling. She takes solace in the fact that she doesn’t feel hunger when she sees these horrors, unlike everybody else around her.

But it is her lack of hunger, of course, that marks her.

She’s in the shadow of the south wall when it happens. When the first set of eyes settles on her, sees through the thin veil of her act. Voyne only knows because she stumbles as she walks, has to put out a hand to support herself, and as she tips forward, she sees the whites of two eyes replaced with piercing gold, pupils dotting the center, widening as they take her in. They measure her weakness. They see her falter.

Voyne is running before she has time to rationalize any of it.

The nearest open door leads into the smithy. It’s fifty yards away, if that. She has a clear shot, or as close to it as she’s going to get; the nearest tableau, a woman carving pieces of her flesh and placing those bloody scraps into her own mouth, isn’t close enough to reach her.

Her muscles burn. Her head pounds. The world keeps trying to fall away, to pitch and yaw, but she closes her eyes and sprints.

Behind her, she hears paws, hooves, feet in the dirt. Her pursuers snarl. They call to her, desperate for her aid. They laugh.

The wall of the smithy is as solid as it was when she slammed Phosyne up against it, and she collides hard, wrenching her shoulder. She gasps, eyes open, spun around to face what is coming for her. Everything tilts. She sees a flash of movement, feels pain in her leg, kicks out. Punches. Scratches. Fights, like she has not fought in years.

She gains a moment’s freedom. It’s enough.

She throws herself into the smithy, expecting only more chaos, more horror, more blood—