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I snatched hold of her wrist. “Don’t.”

“Sorry.” She shrunk away, a wilting bud against the frosts, and followed me in silence through the palace doors.

Jagged angles made the entryway uninviting and formidable, but Calista lifted her gaze, gawking as I dragged her inside. Beasts with gaping maws reared over the edges from the corners, a sort of collision of the dark wolf, Fenrir, and the sea serpent, Jormungandr. I opened the door and led her inside.

When a gust of wind slammed the door behind us, Calista leaned closer. Another foreign sensation that set the skin on my arms ablaze and gathered puzzling fog inside my skull. Reality had long since been clear, but her touch, her scent of sharp ink, of birch parchment, and the faint, sweet petals of roses blurred my senses even more.

Almost as soon as she’d stepped into me, she took note of how close we’d come and positioned her body a pace away.

I left her in the circular entryway and struck a matchstick, lighting a tallow candle.

A curve teased the corner of her mouth as she took in the domed ceiling, the pale walls, as she traced the drawings scattered across them. Some were faded after turns, but the shapes were still obvious and childish from the hand of a boy who’d been left to cruel solitude.

I’d long ago ceased marking the walls to pass the time. Still, a knot of apprehension built in my chest as she strode along one of the walls and touched the leaves of blood roses and the faces buried in the brambles. The children wrapped in the vines and petals were laughing. Her shoulder flinched, as though she wanted to look over it to where I stood at her back, but thought better of it.

Clearing her throat, she moved on and touched wings on ravens in flight. She paused at the shadows coiled around a man’s face, his eyes were hateful and dark, his lips were contorted into a sneer. The night was devouring him.

“It looks like him,” she whispered. “Still haven’t thought of his name yet. He deserves to be called something you think of when you take a piss, you know?”

So long speaking with ghosts that didn’t always reply, it took me a moment to realize she’d pointed her question at me. “Srác.”

One of her brows arched. “What?”

“Srác. That’s what I call him.”

Her full bottom lip slid between her teeth. “That’s old language.”

“I am old.”

Bleeding gods, for the slightest moment, her eyes brightened more than they feared. “It meansshit.”

Her face twisted in a strange expression. I considered she might retch, until a frightening sound scraped from the back of her throat. Light, dry as though she could do for a bit of water, and intoxicating.

She laughed.

Here. In my sights. A laugh that hadn’t been mine for centuries. It was beautiful and grating all in one breath. When I was too still for too long, the light in her eyes faded with her smile.

She turned back to the drawings on the wall. “It’ll do for now. But mark me, there is a better name out there.”

Across the flat panels she took in bits and pieces of the drawings of our fallen world. Trees and the stables where we’d run free. Forest burrows where trolls had always gathered. Stones and pebbles. Flying insects with long, slender bodies and furred legs.

Calista paused when she got to the man with bright eyes, a few scars on his sun-weathered face, and a beard braided in rune beads.

She clutched her chest when she flattened her palm over the smoking herb roll between his teeth.

“Annon,” she whispered and looked at me as though needing an explanation.

What did she want me to say? Captain Annon had been my last connection to life. He’d delivered my roses. He’d done all he could to guide Calista Ode toward her path. He’d been the last breathing soul to step foot behind the gates, all to see to it I hadn’t descended so far down into the shadows that I couldn’t escape.

“Why do you have his likeness here?”

Odd question. “It is obvious.”

Tears glistened in her eyes. “It isn’t. So explain it to me.”

“I missed him.”

Her lips parted. The scrutiny was unnerving. A thousand prickling things seemed to traipse up my arms, my face, down the front of my tunic. For the first time since gaining her touch once more, I yearned—craved—to fade away into the unseen corners.