Lain woke to weight across her chest and the smell of brine.

  For a moment she thought she was back beneath the Dawn Spire. Her body lurched, reaching for the memory of bells and distant screams, of the wyrm’s song plunging out of her like a severed vein.

  Then the weight shifted and she remembered where she was.

  Morgan’s arm lay heavy over her, his palm splayed against her stomach as if he’d fallen asleep guarding the place he’d emptied himself. His breath warmed the hollow beneath her collarbone, each exhale roughened by exhaustion. The iron stove at the far wall had burned low; only a dull orange seam showed through its vent. The rest of the room was inked in shadow, edged in the faint gray of early morning seeping through the narrow window slit.

  Her body reported itself in small, insistent aches. Her shoulder, where his hand had pinned her. The bruised sting along her cheek. The deeper, dragging soreness between her legs. Muscles that had clenched and fought and finally, treacherously, softened, trying to save her what pain they could.

  Later, she promised herself. Later she would name what had happened.

  For now, every attempt to put language to it slid sideways. She could feel him too clearly for simple names.

  Through this new and unknown kind of Tuning, he was a tight knot of exhaustion and something else, something that smelled like shame and need and the edge of panic. His dreams came through in blurred pulses: flashes of stone and fire, a wing crushed under falling rubble, the sensation of falling without being able to spread his wings fast enough.

  He twitched once in his sleep, fingers tightening against her as if he feared she might disappear while he dreamed.

  Lain stared at the ceiling. The stone above them bore faint carvings half-worn by time, old sigils cut in geometric lines. Veinwright work, she thought dimly, from a century when they had carved their designs into stone instead of flesh.

  Her tail lay limp against the mattress. She didn’t try to move it. Any shift in her hips risked waking him. She experimented instead with smaller movements. Her breath, slow and even. Her fingers flexing carefully, then settling again in his hair. At some point in the night she had wrapped both arms around him, holding him while he trembled and whispered thank you into the skin of her throat. The memory ached like a bruise.

  He had hurt her. He had used her body for his own unraveling until she’d found a way to steer it, to survive it, to carve out a pocket of gentler space in the middle of his rage. And then he lay in her arms like a man who had never been held.

  The bond refused to let her flatten any of it into a single shape.

  She drew in a breath and found, beneath the jumble of his sleeping mind, the thready echo of another absence. A silence where there should have been a familiar noise. It took her a moment to realize what was missing: the bloodwyrms.

  She reached for the place in herself where his Veinbond used to tug like a cold hook. There was nothing there now but the thin silver ache of the Tuning and whatever the Underserpent’s intervention had made between them. No external weight, no second pulse.

  For him, the absence was louder. Beneath the sleep-fog he felt raw, bone tired. The tiredness ran deeper than a simple need for rest. It was like a slow unraveling at the edges of him. His hands, where they lay on her, carried new tremors.

  He’s dying, she thought.

  Not today, not tomorrow. But the thing that had kept him outside time had gone with the vanishing of the wyrm. The wings on his back had been a last, extravagant gift, and they were already costing him.

  The knowledge slid icy down her spine.

  She might have turned away from it, once. pushed it back into him and let him choke on it alone. Now it sat between them instead, bright and hard as a stone neither of them could lift.

  He shifted again, breath catching, arm tightening.

  “Lain,” he murmured, almost inaudible.

  Her name through the bond came with the same startled gratitude as his whispered thank you had. It was the feeling of a starving man discovering with astonishment that the bread he’d stolen for himself was sharing its warmth with him in return.

  She closed her eyes.

  He’d taken from her. He’d taken what she didn’t want to give.

  And then she’d taken something from him.

  She had not forgiven him. The ache in her body, the memory of his hand over her mouth, the press of his hips when she’d pleaded with him to stop, those things were sharp and clear. But so was the way his grip had gentled when she’d reached into his grief. His rhythm had changed when she’d steered his pleasure away from cruelty. He’d clung to her afterward, too stunned to speak.

  Monsters had graveyards. She’d seen it. She’d led him to his, if only for a heartbeat.

  Her cheek throbbed with a slow, spreading heat. She turned her head slightly, testing how much the movement tugged at his arm.

  Morgan exhaled, a rough sound, and loosened his hold as if the shift in her breathing had reached him even through sleep. His hand slid from her stomach to rest beside her on the mattress.

  Lain waited a few breaths more, letting him settle.

  She rolled onto her side and eased herself away.

  The cot creaked. Morgan murmured something unintelligible but didn’t wake. His wings, half-spread across the bed and the floor, rustled as they adjusted to the loss of her warmth. A few loose feathers shifted, catching the faint stove-glow.

  And as she lifted her head from the bed, something tumbled to the cot behind her, only just missing Morgan.

  An antler.

  She reached up. The other was loose, the scalp itching. She gave it a gentle tug. It came free in her hands with a soft, moist tug, like freeing a loose tooth, strangely satisfying and leaving a strange new void.

  Her Heat was over.

  What had begun with the first fretful days of her Heat – the Underserpent ceremony – was ending here, in this cavern, with a man who had used her Heat to hold her close to him, to tame her, to use her to free the very creature she was meant to enslave.

  And Mallow. Mallow.

  There came a memory: dancing with Mallow in Vaelun. Choosing him, again and again.

  Lain swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her hooves touched cold stone. For a moment she simply sat there, one hand gripping the antler in her lap.

  Her body felt like it had the morning after she’d first drunk Tanel’s suppressive draught too late: used up, overfull of sensation, edges blurred. Except there was no sweet numbness now, no alchemical fog to dull what had happened.

  She drew the blanket around herself, more for the small barrier it offered than for warmth, and stood.

  The room felt different upright. From the bed the ceiling had been all she could see, the carvings a distant pattern. Now the walls closed in around her, narrow and purposeful. Each shelf, each hook, each tool hung with a kind of intent that made her skin crawl.

  The cot had been almost an afterthought, tucked against the wall with just enough space for someone to stand from either side. The stove was small but cleverly vented, the pipe disappearing into a crack in the rock above. A single chair sat at a broad stone slab that had been brought in as a table. The rest was storage: shelves, cabinets, hooks, crates.

  Inventory, she thought.

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  She moved toward the shelves as quietly as her hooves allowed. Morgan’s breathing stayed slow behind her, though the Tuning told her his sleep was shallow, littered with jagged dreams.

  The nearest shelf held food: cloth-wrapped rounds of hard cheese, strings of dried fish, jars of preserved fruit, small lidded boxes of thin metal she didn’t recognize. Someone could live here for months without needing to hunt or trade.

  The next shelf did not hold food.

  Strange tools lay in careful rows on oiled cloth: scalpels in graduated sizes, their handles worn smooth; coils of narrow leather tubing; clamps and buckles and dozens of small instruments whose shapes made her think of bone and tendon and the delicate architecture beneath skin. Some were familiar from the brief time she’d spent in Morgan’s library, back when she’d still believed she might be a partner in his work.

  Others were older. Their metal had the dulled sheen of ancient alloys, their handles inlaid with sigils written in a boxy script she could not read. Her thumb brushed one of the handles and the sigil prickled, faint as static.

  She snatched her hand back.

  On the wall above the tools hung tiles. They were the size of her palm, each carved from thin stone or hardened clay. Sigils covered their surfaces, some simple lines, others layered and dense enough that her eyes wanted to slide away from them. The sigils were inlaid with some mixture that might’ve been a pressed powder or dried paste. Copper wire threaded through holes in their corners, linking some together into small arrays. A few tiles were cracked, their sigils apparently burned out. Others glowed with a dim internal sheen, like coals banked under ash.

  The air around that part of the wall tasted metallic.

  Lain took a careful step back, as if sudden movement might wake something in the tiles.

  On the table lay stacks of paper. Some were scribbled with notes in Morgan’s sharp, angular hand. Others were diagrams: cross-sections of veins, maps of channels through the earth, sketches of creatures she knew and some she did not.

  She recognized the bloodwyrms in one drawing, their elongated bodies curled around a central figure like protective serpents. In another, a wyrm’s head opened to show its skull, the lines of power traced like veins through its bone. In a third, something that might have been a great bird, wings outstretched, its chest plated in overlapping scales. Its hindquarters were drawn twice, one ending in taloned feet, the other in split hooves.

  Her stomach clenched.

  He’d been planning this for a long time.

  She reached for the topmost sheet. Her fingers left faint smudges on the margin where dust from the Spire still clung to her skin. Notes clustered around the sketches in short, clipped phrases.

  Multiple sources.

  Red veins / Underveins – concurrent draw?

  Host integrity? (Glinnel resonance?)

  Tuned as channel.

  Glinnel candidate must remain alive throughout binding – how to achieve?

  A few lines had been scratched out so violently the ink tore the parchment.

  These notes came from before Ivath, before he’d ever met her, back when he still believed he could steal a Glinnel the way one might lift a tool from a workshop and fit it into a waiting notch.

  Any Glinnel would have done, so long as she could sing for the Underserpent. So long as she was Tuned, and could survive the process long enough for him to make something new out of her.

  When he’d spoken to her of the Underserpent, when he’d offered her trust, when he’d told her she mattered to the future of Ivath, none of that had been meant for her alone. He had carved those promises before he’d ever seen her face. The only thing that made her special was that his Veinwright bond had latched to her Heat, and the wyrm’s final pulse had welded the bond shut before either of them could sever it.

  She set the page down.

  Another sheet slid beneath her hand. A diagram of a Veinwright body, sketched without ornament. Organs crosshatched to mark where the borrowed vitality failed first. Notes crowded the edges.

  Bloodwyrm lattice effective – impermanent. Borrowed, not extended.

  Subject requires continuous external source.

  Without lattice, lifespan – months to years(?)

  Underveins unreachable without anchor.

  Her breath slowed.

  This room wasn’t a place he’d built for work. It was a place he’d built for survival. Or rather, to keep himself from dying. Long before he had been cast from the Underserpent, he had feared this moment.

  He had prepared for the collapse of his own immortality.

  The stove cracked softly behind her, shifting in the cold draft that crept under the door. A gull cried somewhere outside, its voice lost against the roar of the waves.

  The Underserpent had left Ivath. Its absence was a wound in the earth, a raw cavity she had felt before they’d departed. Morgan must have hoped to use the Underserpent, to access the Underveins and root himself into whatever power rushed through the wyrm.

  But he couldn’t access any of it without her.

  A thin dread threaded through her. She slid the papers back into their rough stack.

  On the far side of the chamber, a small hammered-metal bowl sat beneath a shelf. A strip of linen lay inside it, stained rust brown. The scent rose faintly of iron, old and dried. He had practiced here. Tested things. Perhaps on animals. Perhaps on himself. The bowl sat at the height of a seated person’s knee.

  She imagined him sitting there, late at night, bloodied cloth in hand, trying to coax some creature into obedience. Trying to stave off the inevitable.

  A dull exhaustion pressed behind her eyes. She lifted her gaze as the room seemed to come in closer, the walls leaning toward her. There was no window large enough to climb through, only the narrow slit high in the stone that let in light and air. The door she’d entered through last night was thick, banded in iron, its hinges sunk deep into the rock. Beyond it lay only the narrow strip of stone, the cliff’s drop, the endless sea.

  No road, no path. No way out for anyone who could not fly.

  She turned toward the door anyway, as if she might conjure a hidden stair. But the door sat solid in its frame. A thick bar rested in brackets beside it, ready to be dropped across if he chose.

  The ropes she’d seen yesterday dangled over the cliff’s edge, ends knotted around iron rings hammered into the stone outside. She could picture them now, swaying in the wind. Morgan had used them to climb before he’d had wings, hauling supplies from some hidden landing place above. The thought of dangling over the drop with nothing but a rope under her hands made her stomach lurch.

  Maybe, a small stubborn voice said. Maybe she could climb it. If he left her alone long enough.

  Her palms prickled at the thought. She flexed her fingers, imagining rope burn, the skin tearing free.

  Behind her, Morgan shifted in his sleep. The Tuning dragged her attention back whether she wanted it or not.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her hand briefly against the table.

  She wasn’t the only one trapped, though there was no comfort in the thought. He was caught between a dying body and a bond he did not understand, in a room filled with tools meant to make him more than he was. She was caught with him, the channel through which he meant to reach for power again.

  If he could not bind the Underserpent, he would make his own creature.

  Lain drew the blanket tighter around herself and went to the tiny basin in the corner where a jug of water waited. She poured a little into the bowl and splashed her face, hissing when the cold hit the swollen skin of her cheek. The water ran pink where it caught on cracked lips. She studied her reflection in the faint sheen on the surface. The bruise was rising, a darkening bloom. Her eyes looked too large, pupils wide, the whites threaded with red. Her hair had tangled into a chaotic halo during the night, curls snarled with sweat and whatever sticky mess was left behind by her shedding antlers.

  She did not look like anyone’s Bellborn. She wished she could be comforted by the thought.

  Behind her, the cot creaked.

  “Lain?” Morgan’s voice was hoarse with sleep.

  She met her own gaze for one last breath, then turned.

  Morgan pushed himself up on one elbow. His wings were half-furled, feathers crushed and disordered along their length. Dark circles smudged the skin beneath his eyes. For the first time since she’d known him, he looked the age of a man who had outlived his wife, his children, his city.

  He put his hand to the cot, where her antler shed lay against the pillow. He picked it up, holding it gently, examining it.

  His gaze moved over her, taking her in. The bond flared with a dozen reactions at once: a flash of possessive satisfaction at the sight of her in his space, a sharp spike of anger at the bruise he’d put on her face, a deeper, aching fear at the way she stood near the door as if measuring the distance.

  He swallowed. “You’re up early.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Morgan swung his legs over the side of the cot. The act seemed to cost him more than it should. She felt the strain of it along the Tuning, the way his muscles protested, the small catch in his breath as he straightened.

  He noticed her glance, and bristled.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said, quieter than she expected. “I’m not going to crumble now that I have you here.”

  Lain’s fingers brushed unintentionally against the corner of a sketch, the ink line of a wing, a hoof, an antler.

  “When you say here,” she asked, keeping her voice steady, “do you mean this room, or something else?”

  He followed her gaze to the diagrams.

  For a heartbeat, his expression opened. She saw the shape of his intention: the creature he meant to forge, the power he imagined in its bones, the way he saw her standing at its center, conduit and cage both.

  Then the shutters came down. His eyes hardened.

  “Both,” he said.

  The word landed between them like another stone on the pile.