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She inclines her head at the darkness’s honesty. “They taste like honey. They look like I do, and the girl, in the broadest sense. They ask for loyalty, devotion, adoration.”

The darkness hums. “What else?”

“They abhor iron.”

“Then they are not like me at all.” The darkness laughs, and the ground trembles. “They are my enemy, then, as well.”

“You do not fear iron? It does not strike you dead?”

“Oh, no. No, I am made of it. I could not reside below the earth and shy from any scrap of ore, any vein of metal, now could I?”

Voyne adjusts the map that has been forming in her mind since she awoke down here, weak but clearer-headed. She moves pieces about the board, not to wholly new terrain but to where she thought they might go, where she hoped they could be placed.

“You are very old, aren’t you?” Her hand caresses the stone below her, stone that has sat here for centuries, millennia, the bedrock that Aymar was built upon. She wonders how long this cavern has existed for. If it’s always been here, or if the water by her side has carved it more recently. Still, she knows she is thinking not in mortal years,but something larger, more expansive. “You were here before I arrived. Before my people arrived. Before the first hands laid the first cut stones aboveground.”

“Not quite. I came when those first stones were cut.”

Her heart quickens. “Why?”

“Because I was called for. I was bargained with. I was fed.”

She thinks, then, of Carcabonne. Of blood in the snow, sinking down to the stone beneath. These castles have certainly been fatted upon death.

“What for?” she asks.

“Protection.”

There is love in its voice, or at least a heady fondness. “And would you say you protect us now?” Voyne whispers.

“The castle has not yet fallen to ruin, has it? The stone it sits upon has not collapsed? I am limited in what I can do. Just as you are limited.”

Just as she has been paid in blood for her protection, as well.

“There is iron in your spine,” it says. Fingers trail up her back, along her shoulders, across her neck. She shudders but does not pull away, holding herself stiff and wary, wondering, wanting to know where they will go. They tangle in her hair, then come to rest atop her scalp. There are too many of them to belong to only two hands, though of course the hands they belong to (if they belong to any hands at all) need not be the same as hers.

But there are enough, regardless, to encircle her brow. To rest as a crown of sorts, and for a moment, they are a circlet not of flesh or shadow but of stone. Heavy, solid.

“The clever girl’s knife, the tip snapped off within you. Can you feel it?”

Her throat is whole now, unnaturally whole, but if she swallows—yes, she feels it, a sharp little pebble, lodged behind her windpipe, her esophagus. If she strains her head from side to side, she thinks she will feel it scrape.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“It is that which has cut you free from a tangle of air and fire. And now you are what you always were before—clad in iron, strong andsteady. Can you feel it?” Hands press into the armor along her back, the shimmering metal that Voyne now realizes is no metal at all, but a glittering latticework. The idea of armor, not the substance of it. But where the darkness touches, it solidifies, gains the heft of steel.

She gasps at the weight.

“You are made of me,” it murmurs in her ear.

“What do you want?” she asks. “And what can you give me in return?”

“They are one and the same. Destroy them. Let their blood soak into the stone. Restore order and solidity.”

A tongue curls around her earlobe. She shudders, panic flaring in her breast, sharp and bright. She listens to it as carefully as she can. “Feed you once more,” she supplies.

The tongue disappears, replaced with nibbling teeth. They do not pierce flesh. They are gentle. Controlled. A dog biting fleas from its mates’ fur. “That frightens you.”

“I won’t exchange one master for another.”