The Dawn Spire gave way beneath the Veinwright and the Bellborn in a slow, terrible collapse, the stone folding in on itself with a sound like a tremor Lain had once wrought on the hills above their valley. Heat rose in waves from the fractured chambers below, carrying dust up into the sharp morning air. Morgan’s wings strained against the chaos as he lifted them higher, pieces of shattered marble drifting past like pale, ruined feathers. Lain clung to him without meaning to, her hands locked around his neck as if it might steady the world below.

  Ivath cracked open in every direction. Rooftops slid into the sinkholes left by the Underserpent’s departure. Bells toppled from their towers and rolled into the streets, chiming dully as they struck stone. The city felt hollow now, as though a vast body had exhaled for the last time.

  Morgan’s grip around her had the fierce certainty of someone who had chosen a single task and refused to fail at it. Through the Tuning she felt him, closer than he had ever been, his fear threaded with that stubborn will that held him upright in the air. The emotion carried too clearly. There was no distance between them. She felt the tremor of his breath before she heard it.

  A second feeling moved underneath the first, something quieter and older. Lain closed her eyes, hoping to find herself back in her own body, but instead she slipped briefly into something that was not hers: a glimpse of stone corridors, the echo of a woman’s voice, the memory of a feather brushing across a child’s cheek. She flinched, and the image scattered like disturbed dust.

  Morgan’s expression was drawn tight with the effort of flying through the ash. “You’re alright,” he said, though he could feel perfectly well that she was not.

  The sky above them had already begun to clear, stripped of its familiar haze. The blue looked wrong to her, almost too large, as if the world had lost a ceiling. Without the Underserpent humming beneath the city, she felt unanchored, half-mortal and half something else entirely, suspended in a place where neither part of her knew how to breathe.

  She pressed her forehead against Morgan’s shoulder and tried to quiet the part of herself that kept reaching into him, uninvited, hearing more than she should.

  She thought of Mallow. Of Morgan’s black spear, meant to kill her, instead piercing Mallow in the chest.

  She thought of the night Morgan had bonded to her, her Heat ensnaring in their communion as they drank each other’s blood.

  Her Heat was nearly dead now.

  She thought of the way Morgan had taken her then, commanded her through her blood, forced himself inside her before she was ready. And the morning after, when he had been more kind, almost gentle, telling her the story of his wife Siobhan and his two sons, dying from a Dagorlind-ordered quake.

  And the bloodwyrms. Would they die without Morgan? Had they already gone, gifting him their lives in the form of his wings?

  Lain did not know how much time had passed when Morgan finally descended in a slow, spiraling arc. The beating of his wings grew uneven as the strain of carrying them both began to show. The wind shifted as they dropped below the cloudline, cold and briny, sweeping in from the rugged lowland coast. Lain lifted her head enough to see the landscape unfold beneath them: steep green cliffs veined with dark rock, the sea churning far below in long strokes of gray and white. Waves struck against the cliff face with old and patience, carving the stone little by little.

  Below the cliff’s edge, perched on a narrow rise of flattened earth, stood a low structure of timber and shale dug into the cliff face. Ropes hung from iron rings hammered deep into the stone, and the remnants of a pulley system dangled over the cliff like the bones of some forgotten machine. It did not look like a refuge. It looked like a secret hideout or an unfinished mine.

  Morgan steadied his wings as the ground rose to meet them. They landed in a rough slide of gravel that jarred through Lain’s legs even through Morgan’s grasp. When he released her, she stumbled before righting herself. Her hooves sank slightly into the damp soil, and the cold rushed up through her so sharply she shivered.

  Morgan folded his wings with the slow, pained care of a man tending an injury he did not want her to see. One of the larger feathers came loose as he drew them in. It drifted to the ground between them.

  He stared at it for a long moment, not bending to retrieve it, not even moving his boot as the feather settled against the gravel. Then it hissed, and dissolved slowly into smoke, just like the bloodwyrms. Something tightened in his posture, a strain Lain felt before she recognized it, his breath held too long, his jaw clenched, the faint tremor through their shared Tuning that warned her he was balancing on the edge of some unspoken thing.

  She stepped back, an instinctive shift of weight that sent a soft crunch through the gravel.

  Morgan’s head snapped up, at first as a startled predator, but then his gaze shifted into a precision that set her pulse quickening. His eyes tracked the movement first, then her, as if he had to assemble the pieces of the moment to decide whether or not she belonged in it.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, though she had made no sound of pain.

  “I’m only cold,” Lain answered.

  But the lie caught in the space between them. His pupils thinned, adjusting to some inner recognition.

  “You’re afraid,” he said.

  Lain swallowed. “I’m tired.”

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  “That isn’t what I feel.”

  The wind lifted loose hair along her neck, and the cold air prickled against her skin. She turned from him, meaning only to gain distance before the conversation twisted into one she was not ready to have. But the moment she shifted her weight away from him, a pressure hit her – not physical, but a tightening along the Tuning, like the thrum of a wire pulled taut.

  “Don’t,” Morgan said.

  The word was soft, but it stopped her as surely as if he’d placed a hand on her arm.

  Lain faced him again. Morgan’s expression had changed. Something inside him had pulled inward, folding around a single thought, sharpening it.

  It was a flash of memory.

  A corridor of stone lit from the side. Morgan stumbling against a wall, blood dripping from his fingers. The echo of his mother’s voice calling his name. The iron smell of a blade drawn. The old, familiar fury that had shaped him into a man who could not bear to lose control of anything, least of all himself.

  The memory hit Lain so suddenly she gasped. She staggered back, catching herself against the post beside the door. The world around her dimmed at the edges as the memory bled into her senses, as if she’d been placed inside the event itself.

  She could feel the stone under Morgan’s palms. Hear the harshness of someone breathing beside him. The fear, the violence. The bright, hot satisfaction that followed the first cut.

  She ripped herself out of it with a sharp inhale, one hand pressed to her sternum, the other palming the door at her back.

  “Morgan,” she whispered. “I saw –”

  He reached her in two strides. “Don’t pull away from it.” His voice was almost steady, but strained by the effort to hold himself together. “You saw what I was.”

  “What you were?” Lain’s voice caught. “Is this meant to reassure me?”

  He didn’t answer. His fingers curled restless at his sides, flexing as though resisting the urge to reach for her, or seize her.

  “Whatever is happening between us,” she said cautiously, “it’s not the Tuning anymore. I’m seeing things I shouldn’t.”

  “The wyrm has done this to us,” Morgan said, stepping closer. “Removed channels. Barriers. All the power I carried – everything I fought for – it’s gone. Except for you.”

  There was no triumph in his voice, only a stark, unguarded desperation that made her wish she could take another step backward, except she was already against the door.

  The movement sent a flare of emotion through him, simmering and malevolent, born from an instinct he had spent years shaping into something useful.

  “You ran from me,” he said softly.

  Lain froze.

  “I didn’t –”

  “You did. My two Veinbound servants, hiding with each other – do you think I did not know?”

  He was talking about Mallow. Last night, she’d found her love for Mallow afresh while Morgan destroyed the city, breeding his bloodwyrms in the deaths of Ivath’s citizens. It was the refuge of Mallow’s arms that had kept her grounded, the safety of his love that had rewarded her with the vision of Saint Fillan.

  It had only been the night before.

  How strange, the speed with which her universe had been upended.

  “You found another way into the Dawn Spire,” Morgan said. “You meant to free the Underserpent alone. Undo all I had done to spare your life.”

  “Because I was afraid,” she whispered.

  “Of me?”

  “Yes. Morgan,” she said, amazed he would have to ask, shocked that he would imagine any other response. “Look at what you’ve done. And worse, what you almost did.”

  “And now?” He stepped close enough that she felt the heat of him, the scent of soot and salt and cold air. “What are you afraid of now?”

  His voice had gone quiet, as if the sound of it was something he meant to slip under her skin. She felt the question press against her the way the wind pressed against the cliff, steady and unavoidable, searching for a place to enter.

  “I’m still afraid,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  Because he’d killed Mallow. Because he’d meant to kill her. “Because I don’t know what you’ll do.”

  Morgan stood very still. The light from the low clouds caught the edge of one wing and ran along it in a dull and fading shimmer. He seemed to look through her then, as though trying to separate her words from the fragile emotion she kept trying to hold away from the Tuning. It didn’t matter; the bond carried it straight to him anyway.

  “Come inside,” he said. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m fine here.”

  “You’re cold,” he said. “And you won’t relax while the door is behind you.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  Morgan’s gaze flicked briefly to her mouth before returning to her eyes with the careful attention of someone measuring the angle of a threat.

  “You know,” he said. “You’ve always known.”

  He caught her wrist.

  Lain stiffened. The instinct to flee crawled under her skin. He felt it – of course he felt it – and the flare in him sharpened toward a kind of pained hunger.

  “Bellborn. Don’t pull away from me.”

  “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  He loosened his grip immediately, but his hand remained around her wrist, as if breaking contact would break something inside him he could not afford to lose.

  Lain drew a slow breath, steadying her voice. “Morgan. Let go of my arm.”

  He did, but only after a moment too long.

  Lain breathed a sigh of relief. The wind lifted her white curls, and the chill slipped under the collar of her robe. Morgan did not wait for her to move. He stepped to the door, opened it, and looked at her again in a way that left no reasonable path but forward.

  She went inside.