But Voyne just reaches out and cups her jaw, strokes her gloved fingers over the dried and flaking gore Treila only now remembers. “You fought,” Voyne reminds her.

“We have no weapons,” Treila says, and her voice sounds choked and frightened.

That won’t do. She firms her shoulders. Leans into Voyne’s touch, a challenge.

“Get me to the throne room,” Voyne says, “and I will take up my blade again.”

“You’re not going to like what you find up there,” Treila cautions her. “The world is breaking. Phosyne is breaking it. It may not be the Lady we need to stop, now.”

For all Treila knows, the Lady is dead, and Phosyne has eaten Her.

Voyne inclines her head in understanding. “Nevertheless.”

Treila licks at her bloody, bruised lips. Voyne stands ready to fight. And she . . . she realizes she does not actually want to run. For all the impossibility that Phosyne has brought upon the world, Treila has tasted victory, and she is ready for more. A struggle with an endpoint beyond simple survival, beyond bitterness.

No more fleeing. No more hiding in the shadows.

She grins.

“Then follow me, Ser Voyne. Let me show you what you couldn’t see before.”

The earth accepts the both of them, and if the armor Voyne wears slows her down, she compensates for it well. They squirm together through the tunnel, hand over hand, the only sound the movement of clothing, the rattle of metal, and their shared breaths. So different, from the desperate attempt she made with Phosyne. So different, too, from all the times she has passed this way alone.

And then they are back in the keep, for the last time, and Voyne stands beside her in the dim light of day.

Outside, the wind is still howling. The rain has stopped, but the clouds still hang low and heavy. Below her feet, the stone shivers, but it has ceased its dance for now.

A moment’s calm. She doesn’t know how long they’ll have it for.

Treila rolls her shoulders, loosens her jaw, and starts to climb, Voyne close at her heels.

At ground level, they are met with a fine corpse, disassembled and organized neatly in the time it took for her to retrieve Voyne. There are splashes of black and gold and red on the ground, remnants of the lesser beasts of the saints. They have made her an offering.

Behind her, Voyne growls, low and soft. “I knew him,” she says. And then Treila recognizes the face, peeled carefully from the skull and draped over an upturned bowl.

“Ser Galleren,” Voyne says, and stoops to touch his brow.

One of Ser Leodegardis’s cousins, Treila thinks. Not a bad man, not at all. She thinks, perhaps, she met him once as a girl. But he never recognized her.