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Avern’s expression darkened, but his voice came out soothing.

The contrast unnerved Gisele. “I understand it must have been hard, living so long without your magic, bound to a human. I’m sorry that I didn’t find you sooner; I know everything seems wrong to you right now, but you’ll see.

This is for the best, I promise. You’ll thank me in time.

Now change so we may be done with this place. We’ll fly together.”

Gisele froze. He meant for Mal to change into a gryphon?

A glimmer of transformation wavered over Mal’s body, but his expression remained set. “No.”

Avern frowned. “Now,” he commanded, and there was an odd echo of reinforcement in his voice, the vividness of him intensifying. He was using Mal’s name against him, somehow.

Mal bared his teeth in a snarl that was much sharper than usual, and his hair grew feathery around the edges, but he kept his form.

His eyes spat defiance as he resisted, but how long could he hold out?

Could you hold out against someone like Avern?

He’d cut through their bond like it was nothing, and he had Mal’s name.

Gisele drew her dagger, edging closer to Zingiber.

She wished she’d re-poisoned the blade, and with something considerably faster-acting than blood matagouri.

But if her aim was good enough… Avern was wholly focused on trying to force his will on Mal.

There was no ambivalence in her heart as she gauged the distance, no ethical inner turmoil.

A strange calm came over her, her breathing slowing. Her hand was perfectly steady.

She threw.

Even before the blade left her hand, she knew her aim was true. It should have caught Avern directly between his shoulders. He was facing completely away. It should have worked.

But Avern whirled with blinding speed, batting the dagger aside even though he couldn’t possibly have seen it coming.

His attention narrowed on her, surprise and violence in his ice-blue eyes.

She felt like a rabbit in a hawk’s sight, paralysed with knowing that every move might be the wrong one.

This was the darkness she’d sensed beneath his surface at the ball, the vicious warrior who would kill anything that threatened his control.

His eyes promised that death as he prowled towards her.

She backed away, her mind running in panicked circles.

Plan, she needed a plan. How could you make plans against someone who moved so fast, who had greater magic more powerful than she understood?

The only reason she wasn’t dead yet was that he was savouring her fear, with the sharp intensity of a predator sensing blood.

Mal launched himself between them. “Leave her out of this.”

Avern’s eyes narrowed. “Move.” The word struck with otherworldly force.

“No!” Mal fought it, legs crumpling under him as he tried to both move and stay at the same time. He landed on his knees, panting, his hair blood-red in the dawn light.

But Mal’s actions had brought Avern back from the edge of dark violence; he seemed almost amused. His veneer of reasonableness, of civility, slid back. It frightened her, now she knew what lay beneath it.

“How are you resisting?” Avern mused aloud and then shook his head. “Never mind. Your human pet isn’t important. Come with me and I will forget her provocation. That means get up.”

Mal was drawn inexorably, snarling, to his feet under the summons.

“That’s better,” Avern said mildly. “If you won’t change to fly with me, then we must leave on foot, I suppose. Come.” His voice held a faint note of recrimination; wasn’t Mal ashamed to be so difficult? Avern clamped a hand on Mal’s elbow and began to lead him away, like an errant child.

There was absolutely no way that she could let this man take Mal.

Her dagger was gone, lost somewhere in the rubble on the other side of the garden.

Magic. She had magic—could she do something like what she’d done with the solshant?

Except she couldn’t explode gold anymore.

There wasn’t even any gold here. So what could she do?

Plants! Something with plants. Her scattered panic fixed on a single image: the apricot stone bursting into life.

Gold-green power swam through her, uncertain but extremely angry. With an explosion of soil, vines burst from all directions, wrapping themselves around Avern’s legs. Triumph made her light-headed, but it was short-lived.

Avern ripped himself free, his magic roaring like cold fire, shattering the vines to ice. He turned, murder in his eyes once more.

“Witch,” he spat. He raised a hand, and Gisele prepared to duck, but Mal grabbed his arm before he could hurl whatever spell he’d intended.

“Avern,” he said, low and desperate. “I’ll leave with you willingly, so long as you don’t harm her.”

“No!” she cried.

Mal’s eyes met hers, bright with unspoken emotions, and chief amongst them was one that was completely unacceptable: apology. Hadn’t she told him that he wasn’t to sacrifice himself to save her?

“Don’t you dare,” she told him. “Don’t you dare, Mal.”

The air almost rippled between them. His perfectly matched golden eyes were full of pain but no indecision. Or…not quite perfectly matched. There remained a thin ring of blue around his right iris.

“I promised you your freedom,” he told her gently and turned back to Avern. “Promise me she’ll be safe, and I’ll come with you.”

Avern’s eyes had narrowed, looking between them with a disturbing calculation, a sense of danger balanced on a knife-edge. It sent a chill down her spine. “You would exchange your life for hers?” he asked with deadly softness.

“Yes,” Mal said, without hesitation.

The knife-edge unbalanced. Avern kept his horrible mask of composure, but his eyes burned with sudden fury. Jealousy? “No,” he said. “No, I think not. Kill her.”

Mal jerked back, shock carving his face. “No. Avern?—”

“Kill her, Rumpelstiltskin.” The name struck like dissonant thunder, wrong, wrong, wrong, yet Mal’s whole body quivered like a puppet in response. Avern’s eyes gleamed with the satisfaction of owning the name so completely that even speaking it didn’t release it from his grasp.

Mal’s eyes were twin pools of torment as he turned towards her. “Run,” he whispered.

She began to back away, heart thumping, mind working frantically.

She had to stop this. How could she stop this?

Think! But she’d never been terribly gifted at thinking under pressure at the best of times, and right now all her higher brain power was wholly preoccupied with furious mental screaming.

The dagger—where was it? She scrambled in the direction where it had fallen, somewhere in the midst of the smouldering love-lies-bleeding.

“Oh, let’s not draw this out. Make a clean break with your old life and be done with it.

” Avern made a gesture, and a circle of cold fire sprung up around the garden, high as the walls, licking the stones with ice.

More fires began to eat away at the garden beds, clearing any remaining hiding places. “Kill her now.”

Mal leaped, an inelegant but swift puppet, suddenly only a few feet away.

She couldn’t be afraid of him, not even as he approached with his claws sliding free.

His pupils had narrowed to pinpricks, and his beautiful neckcloth was hopelessly crumpled into a state he’d never normally allow.

His gaze fixed on hers, the unfamiliar golden eyes in a face she knew better than, perhaps, any other face in the world.

Dagger , he mouthed, eyes flicking to the ground beside her. Use it .

It took her a moment to work out that he meant for her to use it on him.

His eyes burned with grim determination, the simple, uncompromising willingness to give everything of himself, and regret pierced her with sudden clarity.

She should have let him say the words last night.

She should have trusted him enough. This wasn’t the same man who had left her to her fate, nor was it love insufficient.

This was a man who would never stop trying to save her, who would never draw a line beyond which he was unwilling to risk his comfort for her life, and it was its own peculiar grief to realise this now, when it was too late.

“Oh, my Malediction,” she murmured. “No.” Because she could no more kill him than herself.

He shivered, his unwilling prowl towards her stuttering.

“Rumpelstiltskin!” Avern’s command was a whip, and Mal jerked back into motion with a gasp.

The wrongness of it grated. “My Malediction,” she repeated, replacing the wrongness with her own name for him.

This time Mal came to a complete halt. His eyes widened.

Avern’s command came again, an invisible thunder of force, and Mal’s muscles shook with the urge to obey, but he didn’t budge. He took deep gulping breaths, his gaze fixed on her face as if it were the only thing left in the world. “Say it again?”

“My Malediction. Are you?” she asked him softly.

“Yes,” he said, with a half-smile. “I am. Always.” He exhaled, all the tension sloughing off him like water. Golden light gathered in the air, tiny firefly sparks of it.

“Come here!” Avern commanded again, holding out a hand.

Mal didn’t react at all. Instead, he half-closed his eyes and drew in a long breath.

With it came the golden energy. Avern lost his unnatural vibrancy; Mal gained it.

He was abruptly, painfully beautiful, each one of his freckles a fleck of pure gold against his glowing skin.

His hair turned red as embers. When he opened them, his eyes burned like sibling stars, one cold, one hot, and her heart leapt to see the eyes she knew.

Mal’s insignia rolled out across the garden, extinguishing the cold fires as it went and bringing instead the scent of parchment and metal and something new: crushed grass at high summer.

He turned back to Avern, the initial glow dimming but the imprint of vitality remaining. “You are not welcome here.”