With a howl of rage, Phosyne grasps whatever she can reach. The gnarled, dried husk of the corkindrill, hanging from the ceiling; its teeth are blunt but there is something unseen tangled in them. A star, burning in a vast emptiness. A glittering fragment of mica embedded in enamel. In life, it must have tried to bite the heavens. That tooth sings against her palm. She lunges.

The Lady does not step aside.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, and it is like a brand, like a muzzle. Hearing her name doesn’t stop her, not quite, but it makes her falter. She goes crashing to her knees, losing her grip on the bit of ephemera that now makes little sense, like every other epiphany that has lingered just out of her reach for the last year. Her thoughts grow dim and fuzzy, the way they had as she had focused on the candle flame. Phosyne doesn’t want this anymore, doesn’t need this anymore.

But there is no taking it back. The Lady has her name. Phosyne gave it to her.

Except—

Phosyne is only one name she has borne.

It is the name of a woman, once a nun, who has abandoned her faith, a desperate mind reaching too far beyond its ken, a woman rotting alone in a tower, protected but not cultivated. Before that was Sefridis, believing and orderly. And before that, another name she barely remembers, a child’s name. She has been through so many. She has abandoned two of them. What strains against the Lady’s touch is none of them. She is, instead, clothed in fine robes, made of hunger, dancing upon the fretwork of the universe. It is only the bounds of this castle, this web of tight red string, that contains her. She is not Phosyne, not at all.

The name does not apply.

The nameless thing at the Lady’s feet looks up. She grins. She fists her hands into the Lady’s skirts and hauls Her down.

“Phosyne,” the Lady says, eyes shining, as the nameless woman prowls up her body. As she bares her teeth, but does not bite. “Free me. Free us both.”

The order slides off her like water.

Water.

Her eyes close to slits, and she sees beneath them a great pool of water, lit with burning flames. The water is hers and hers alone.

“No,” the nameless woman says.

They sink into the stone. The Lady thrashes, and the nameless woman feels the bite of the knife into her ribs.

She does not care as they plunge into the cistern, into the light. They strike the water. They roll. They are separated, and the woman’s lips part, inhaling, drinking deep. It pours down her throat and in through the wound in her side.

It slakes the hunger in her just a little. Just enough for her to rise up over the Lady, and to grin down in triumph.