Lain dreamed of apples. They were round and red-gold, a color like late autumn. They hung heavy from the branches of the tree in the south courtyard, so ripe the air below it smelled faintly of sugar.

  She sat with her back against the trunk, the bark rough through her Glinnel robes. The cloister walls were a soft blur beyond the garden, the bells a distant song. Here it was autumn, clear and cool, with that particular kind of light that made everything look gold-rimmed, kinder, as if the world were preparing for a long rest.

  Tanel lowered himself beside her with the careful ease of a man who did not see himself as young, but hadn’t quite experienced the complaint of his joints to justify it. He offered her an apple from his pocket, polishing it on his sleeve before holding it out.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be bringing me gifts,” she said. “The High Glinnel will scold you.”

  “Let them.” He grinned. “What's the point of having access to the fruits of the Underserpent if I can’t smuggle an apple to the Bellborn once in a while?”

  She took it. The skin was cool and taut under her thumb. When she bit in, the sweetness hit hard, juice running down her wrist. Tanel watched her chew with that small satisfaction he never showed anyone else.

  “You can’t stay here,” she said around the mouthful. “In Ivath. You should seek refuge with the Underserpent.”

  “I will,” he said. “When I can.”

  “You always say that.”

  “And one day it will be true.”

  He leaned his head back against the trunk, eyes half-closed, his freckles catching the light. A breeze stirred the leaves above them. Some let go, spinning down in slow, reckless spirals.

  “You can’t beat them this time, Lain,” he said.

  Those words did not belong to this afternoon. They belonged to something that hadn’t happened yet. She turned to him.

  “I was so close to sainthood,” she said. “I wish I could go back.”

  “I know.” His gaze steadied on hers. “But no mirror ever became iron again.”

  The apple in her hand grew heavy. “What does that mean?”

  “You can’t un-know what you know.” His voice was very gentle. “You can’t go back to being what you were before they showed you what they are. The best you can do is regroup. Come back stronger. But you can’t fight them now.”

  “What do you do,” she asked, “when there’s nothing left to be done?”

  He brushed his thumb under her eye, the way he had brushed away her tears in the chapel of Saint Fillan. “You cry, sweetheart,” he said. “You cry.”

  Beyond the courtyard, someone called her name. It was measured and resonant, and strangely near.

  “Lain!”

  It wasn’t Tanel’s voice, or any Glinnel she knew.

  “Lain!”

  Mallow.

  The apple slipped from her fingers. The leaves above her turned from autumn gold to ash-gray. The cloister wall cracked down the middle. The tree lurched behind her. Tanel’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

  “You have to wake,” he said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “That’s never been required of the truth,” he murmured. “Go on.”

  Grief hooked her ribs and dragged her struggling into consciousness.

  Lain’s eyes tore open. The ceiling of the cliff house swam into focus: rough hewn stone, faint Veinwright sigils etched in lines that had been softened by time and smoke. The air smelled of banked coals and seawater. Her throat felt thick and sore, the way it did after too much singing or too much crying. Her face was stiff where tears had dried.

  She lay alone on the cot.

  For a moment that surprised her more than anything. The last clear thing she remembered was Morgan’s weight pinning her, his hands, his breath against her scales, the terrible, shuddering way he’d said thank you into her skin afterward, as if she’d done him some unspeakable kindness by not breaking when he did.

  But then the rest came flooding back, his strange workshop and the agreement she’d made, and she wondered what it all meant.

  Now the blanket lay over her hips. The space beside her was still warm, but empty.

  He hadn’t gone far.

  The Tuning told her that before her body had finished reporting its aches. He was close, somewhere just beyond the wall: a physical presence bright in the bond, edges blurred by exhaustion. Cold water on his skin. Rough stone under his hands.

  He was at the cistern, then. It was a place just outside, dug out to catch the cliff’s runoff stream. It made itself into a place a man could stand under and pretend he was not paying penance, only getting clean.

  She was still sore, even a day later, in all the places he’d hurt her. She wondered how much of this was her body and how much her mind recalling what he’d done. Her shoulder throbbed where he’d bitten her. Her cheek pulsed with a dull heat. Her muscles recalled clenching against him, then, traitorously, easing into him when she’d realized fighting would only tear her more. When she’d decided, with a raw and furious clarity, that if she could not stop what he was taking, she would at least shape how he took it.

  Lain’s hooves met the cold stone floor. The room was as she’d left it: stove banked low, notes on the table, shelves full of menacing objects. She did not look too long at the place on the wall where his diagrams had shown something with antlers and hooves. Not yet.

  Instead she went to the table, found a spare scrap of vellum and a piece of charcoal. She started taking inventory of the food. She knew how to do a little cooking – all the Brothers and Sisters shared kitchen labor – and it would be easier if she knew what he had on hand.

  She heard the faint scrape of the outer door. A breath later, his footsteps in the entryway. When he entered, he was still wet. Water had slicked his hair to his skull, then frozen there in stiffened curls. Droplets clung to the ends of his lashes and the edges of his feathers. He’d found a shirt amongst his supplies, but must have found it impossible to get into, because he carried it in one hand now, forgotten. His wings, spread half open to dry, seemed to take up half the low-ceilinged room. His eyes caught on her and she tried not to meet them.

  “You were dreaming,” he said.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “You were listening?”

  “I didn’t have to,” he said tightly. “You drag it through the bond like a net.”

  She folded her arms. “I didn’t invite you into my sleep.”

  “I didn’t invite you into my emotions, either,” he snapped.

  The words hung there a moment in an odd truce.

  He swallowed once, hard, and his shoulders eased. “You were crying," he said. “I went outside. I thought…” He trailed off, apparently unable or unwilling to complete the thought that followed. Perhaps he thought that if he didn’t feel it, it wouldn’t be happening.

  “Next time,” she said, turning back to the supplies so he wouldn’t see how raw she still felt, “you can wake me instead of running away.”

  “Perhaps I will.”

  He said it like he wasn’t used to the word perhaps in his own mouth. It left an awkward echo in the bond.

  Lain bent her head over the scrap of vellum, charcoal scratching softly. Round of hard cheese. Dried fish. Sacks of grain. Flour, at least two stones. Jars of fruit. Salt. Oil. All the careful hoard of a man who did not trust the world to feed him.

  “You’re wasting ink,” Morgan said eventually.

  “It’s charcoal,” she said. “And I’m not wasting it. I’m trying to figure out what I can make that isn’t smoked fish and dried fish and fish dust.”

  “There are other things,” he said.

  “I see that.” She tapped the list. “Grain. Flour. Beans. Dried peas. Things that turn into rocks if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “You know what you’re doing,” he said, wary. “Don’t you?”

  “Some cooking. All the Brothers and Sisters learn.” She glanced up. “Do you?”

  His jaw set. “There were always people for that.”

  She let that sit for a beat. “Of course there were.”

  He bristled at the tone more than the words. The bond prickled with defensive irritation.

  She pushed the sacks with her hoof, testing their weight. “We could make flatbread,” she said. “Or small loaves. I would need time for proofing.”

  “You want to use the flour,” he said.

  “Yes. That’s what it’s for.”

  “It’s for later,” he said. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

  “We,” she repeated softly. “Planning on keeping me that long, are you.”

  He ignored that. “Flour keeps,” he said. “Baked bread doesn’t.”

  “Bread feeds people,” she said. She straightened, dusting her fingers. “You’ve stocked enough to keep one man alive for months. Two people can afford a loaf.”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “Then what is the point, Morgan?” She set the charcoal down with care she did not feel. “You drag me to the edge of the world, tell me I’m the only thing left between you and death, and then you begrudge me bread.”

  “It isn’t about the bread,” he snapped.

  “Exactly.” Her tail flicked once, sharp. “So say what it is about.”

  He stared at her, wings flaring a fraction wider in reflex, shadowing the wall behind him. “It’s about controlling our supplies. About not wasting what we have. About not pretending this is a… a retreat. It’s not a cloister kitchen, Lain. It’s a survival store.”

  “And you’re the one who gets to decide how it’s used,” she said. “Of course.”

  “If I don’t decide, we starve when the storms come in. If I don’t decide, you come up with some generous Glinnel plan to feed the next shipwrecked villager and we both die by winter.”

  She hadn’t considered any of those points – that there were storms that hit the coast that would make it difficult to leave; that there were shipwrecks here that would leave people stranded below them; that she would remain here nearly an entire year, as winter was only just ending.

  She let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so frayed, setting aside her fears about a long stay, choosing instead to focus on his weakest argument. “You really think I’d rather feed strangers than myself.”

  “I think you don’t know how to stop handing yourself away,” he said.

  The words hit too close to sit comfortably. Her cheeks grew hot and anger rose to meet it.

  “And you don’t know how to stop taking,” she said. “So here we are.”

  He flinched. The Tuning carried it cleanly, a little flare of shame quickly stamped out.

  “Bread can wait,” he said, quieter. “We have other work.”

  “What work?”

  “I’d like to focus on this bond,” he said. “Learn how to use it without tearing each other apart every time one of us dreams of apples and dead lovers.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again when the image hit: Tanel handing her an apple, the courtyard splitting, Tanel’s hand on her shoulder. Mallow’s voice calling her name from a place she could not reach. She felt the flicker of satisfaction that crossed the bond at having affected her so profoundly.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  “Face it, Bellborn. We were under a falling building,” he said. “The odds –”

  “Don’t say odds,” she said. “He’s not a tally in one of your notebooks.”

  His mouth flattened, but the bond betrayed him. Under the old habit of clinical detachment, he’d already written Mallow off. Another name in a long column of dead he did not dare look at too closely.

  “You brought the Spire down,” she said. “You and your bloodwyrms and your chains and your ‘odds.’ You used me to free the Underserpent. You tore the city open. And then you flew away.”

  “I dragged you out of the Spire while the ceiling fell,” he said. “You were –”

  “I was still breathing,” she cut in. “So were they. I know you didn’t care for Mallow, or the Dagorlind. But what about Rhalir? The Ashborn? They were loyal to you.”

  The tuning flooded with a burst of fury.

  She didn’t let up. She reached along the bond, following the sore places like a finger pressing bruises. The grief he’d tried to hold at arm’s length, the image of Mallow disappearing over the edge, the echo of the Underserpent’s voice as it wrenched through them both.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “We trusted you,” she said. “I believed you when you said this would save Ivath. Look at how well it turned out. The leash is gone, the city is broken, the Underserpent has fled, and the men who followed you into the dark are lying under a mountain of stone you made.”

  “Enough.” His voice roughened.

  But she kept going. She couldn’t stop.

  “You killed them,” she said. “You and the Dagorlind together. You just chose a different song for their deaths.”

  “I am nothing like them,” he hissed, stepping closer to her. “I didn’t abandon you to die, like your Elder Tanel.”

  “Tanel did abandon me, that’s true. And I was just as loyal to him as Rhalir was to you. You left him under the rubble like the coward you are.”

  The bond bucked. For one wild heartbeat she was inside his memory instead of her own: not Mallow falling, but Siobhan in the doorway, her hair loose, her hands lifted; two small figures behind her; The one boy tumbling from the door as the earth shook, and Siobhan lifting the other, flying; the instant, nauseating realization that he could not move fast enough –

  She ripped herself back, gasping.

  He was white around the mouth. “Get out of my head,” he said hoarsely. “If you keep digging, you’re going to find things you can’t bear.”

  “I’ve already found them,” she cried. “I found them while you were inside me. I felt you using me to bury them again.”

  His wings shook. “You think that’s what that was,” he said. “Burying.”

  “I think,” she said, her voice trembling now, “that you don’t know how to do anything with your pain except push it into other people.”

  He took a step toward her. She didn’t move.

  “I warned you,” he said.

  Before he could brace, she opened herself to the full churn of what he’d made her feel: the helplessness on the cot, his hand over her mouth, the sick, hollow way her body had gone soft to save itself; the knowledge that she had been reduced to a tool again, after everything, and that some part of him had taken comfort in it. She didn’t throw words, only sensation, and the bond carried it straight into him.

  He staggered as if she’d shoved him. “Stop,” he said again, but it came out ragged, nothing like a command.

  “Why?” she asked. “Does it hurt?”

  His hand found the edge of the table, knuckles going white. She saw the same scene flash in his mind, but from his side this time: the rush of power, the way his rage found shape in her body, the way his grief had cracked when she’d pulled him toward it. The aftermath – his head on her chest, his arms around her, the shocking, terrifying sense of relief.

  He hadn’t let himself think about it since. He’d stuffed it into the same dark corner as Siobhan and the children and all the other faces he’d cut away from his conscience.

  She made him look.

  He snarled, an ugly, wordless sound, wings flaring wide enough that she had to brace instinctively.

  “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

  “Because there’s nothing else left you haven’t taken,” she said. “You took my Heat, my city, my friends – you took the one thing that made me different and turned it into a tether for your fear. All I have is this. This bond. This is the one place you can’t shut me out.”

  His eyes gleamed, bright with infuriating heartbreak. “So you’ll poison it.”

  “You poisoned it first,” she said.

  He lunged.