Old blood. There is no fresh blood beneath her hands, and no incision in the skin below. Her fingers flex and bend without issue, all the swelling of her beestings gone. Her trembling slows. Voyne realizes, with a strange buoyancy, that she is alive.

And that just a few moments ago, she was in a garden. She was kissing a figment of her past. That figment had murdered her. That figment is watching her now, with an expression that Voyne has no idea how to read, knife at the ready.

On the battlefield, she is trained to be a snarling, vicious beast. And in captivity, in Aymar, she has strained at her leash and burned to transmute frustrated rage into furious action. But death, she finds, is not so galling as dying. And her memory of dying is oddly pleasant. A relief, a surprise, a final lack of struggle. Perhaps that is why she’s not angry. Why she isn’t primed to rip and tear and fight.

Or maybe it’s that when the spasms pass, Voyne is too exhausted to sit up. Too exhausted to defend herself.

“Will you kill me again?” she asks, finally, when she thinks she can speak. It comes out in a hoarse croak.

Treila grimaces, and Voyne notices that it’s not only the glow of the water that is illuminating them, but a candle, somewhere behind her. “I might,” she says. There’s no conviction behind her words. No real threat, Voyne thinks. Whatever drove her in the garden is gone. Transformed into what looks like agony.

She must be as intimately familiar with suffering as that perversion in the throne room had accused Voyne of being, by now. Starvation, frostbite, the loneliness of wandering the land shut out of everything that was once due to her.

It wasn’t kind, what Voyne did to her. Perhaps they are evenly matched, now.

“How long have you been here? In Aymar?” she asks. “How long did I not recognize you?”

A coughing fit sweeps her up, cracking at her ribs. Her world goes hazy, then clears again. Treila is a little closer now.

“As long as you’ve been here,” she says. Her whole body is tense. Coiled. She may not be driven to attack, but she may still snap, like a startled dog. The longer she is polite, the tighter she will be wound. Voyne is intimately familiar with the process.

“I killed your father, Treila de Batrolin, and I have no regrets,” she says. It is kinder, she thinks, to be honest.

Treila bares her teeth, lunges. But the knife hits the stone between them, and it is just the girl on her, hands trembling even as she fists her hands tight in Voyne’s matted braid. Her breath is hot on Voyne’s face. Bare inches separate them as Treila’s chest heaves, as she struggles to get control over herself.