Her throat is whole now, unnaturally whole, but if she swallows—yes, she feels it, a sharp little pebble, lodged behind her windpipe, her esophagus. If she strains her head from side to side, she thinks she will feel it scrape.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“It is that which has cut you free from a tangle of air and fire. And now you are what you always were before—clad in iron, strong and steady. Can you feel it?” Hands press into the armor along her back, the shimmering metal that Voyne now realizes is no metal at all, but a glittering latticework. The idea of armor, not the substance of it. But where the darkness touches, it solidifies, gains the heft of steel.

She gasps at the weight.

“You are made of me,” it murmurs in her ear.

“What do you want?” she asks. “And what can you give me in return?”

“They are one and the same. Destroy them. Let their blood soak into the stone. Restore order and solidity.”

A tongue curls around her earlobe. She shudders, panic flaring in her breast, sharp and bright. She listens to it as carefully as she can. “Feed you once more,” she supplies.

The tongue disappears, replaced with nibbling teeth. They do not pierce flesh. They are gentle. Controlled. A dog biting fleas from its mates’ fur. “That frightens you.”

“I won’t exchange one master for another.”

Cardimir and the False Lady and Phosyne—but the darkness doesn’t laugh at how much practice she has at shifting her loyalties recently. It doesn’t needle her, doesn’t mock her.

“I do not ask for a bargain. I do not ask for submission,” it says instead. “We are already one and the same.”

She quakes at the thought. “But you are hungry,” she whispers, wary.

“Hunger is inescapable, shield bearer,” it says, and the hands at last leave her scalp, disappear back into the darkness. The teeth go with them a moment later. “You cannot gain any distance on it. It will follow you to the ends of the earth. But the hunger that I am holds this castle up. The hunger that they are would tear it away from you. The hunger that you feel would lead you to victory.”

Another shudder rocks her. “If you speak the truth. If this is not another ploy.”

“You doused the candle. You asked to speak to me. You never intended to ask for freedom.”

“I wanted only information, not a mandate.”

“You have always had the mandate.”

Voyne closes her eyes. Thinks of Carcabonne, and Treila’s father, headless at her feet, and Phosyne given over into her care. None of it has been easy, or simple, or even clear at the time. It is only after that she can feel the rightness of it. It is not obedience, not even loyalty, but one single note above all else:

Protect them.