The counting house had been built to keep what was precious from leaching into unworthy hands, so reframing their capture this way gave Sister Isabelle a small burst of pride, Serpent be praised. Thick walls, narrow windows, and ironwork meant to turn a desperate hand away from a lock now held Ivath’s most precious: the Glinnel.

  Isabelle sat with her back against stone, which still held the night’s cold long after dawn began to thin the dark. The room was crowded with sisters in disarrayed veils and sore bodies, and it still felt vacant, because the space had been made for ledgers and silence, not for prayer.

  But then again, all spaces could be made right for prayer, given the motivation.

  Catherine’s guards stood at the doors and at the inner corners, foreign soldiers with a foreign stillness. They watched the room the way a steward watched a storeroom, eyes moving only when they had to, hands never straying far from their weapons. Isabelle understood the discipline. She admired it. What a shame that they were heathens.

  Her veil lay across her knees. One edge had come loose where a seam once held a line of gilt thread tight against the cloth. It had given the way everything in Ivath had given lately: under strain that accumulated until the stitch could no longer pretend to be stronger than the world.

  She had a needle she kept tucked with thread in her sleeve. Isabelle threaded the needle without looking for long, the motion belonging to her the way a litany belonged to the tongue. She began to stitch.

  In. Through. Draw straight. Set again.

  The small work steadied her breathing. It reminded her that the Order had been built out of repeated acts that looked unimportant to anyone who did not understand what they held together. It also gave her something to do with the anger that kept trying to rise. Anger was only useful when it was shaped. Anything else was indulgence, and indulgence was how people ended up praying to their own appetites. Patience was what was needed now. Because the Brighthand Army was coming, and soon they would be free.

  Across the room, a Sister murmured in a voice meant to be private, but the words still traveled. She caught a few words: Heat, antlers, collapse. They saw the city’s collapse as a moral event, rather than simply a physical one. They saw things this way because Isabelle had trained them to.

  The building shivered under a tremor. Dust shifted from a high beam and left a pale track on a guard’s shoulder. He brushed it away with the back of his glove before returning to stillness. The Sisters quieted for a moment, listening for the next movement of the ground.

  Isabelle did not look up. The tremors had become part of the day, like hunger. The city had lost the weight beneath it. The Underveins were rerouting themselves through broken stone, and the surface paid the cost. And while Anthony had called it punishment and still others had said the world was grieving, Isabelle had no use for either story.

  She had seen what was beneath their stories.

  At the end of last season, she had stood in the bowl chamber with the others while Morgan’s corpsebeasts had feasted upon Ivathi citizens. She’d been close enough to taste the iron in the air, close enough to see the chain-light flare across wet scales. She had seen the Underserpent’s bulk heave in the dark water, the cords and hooks biting into flesh that should never have been touched by human hands. She had watched the eye open, enormous and reptilian, and she had felt the Tuning seize the room from the inside out, as if every organ in her body had become an instrument.

  It had not been beautiful. It had been grotesque. It had been sacred the way fire was sacred, real and hungry and in need of a hearth to keep it.

  Even then, even with the eye on her and that song inside her, Isabelle had sensed something deeper than the creature in the bowl. The Underserpent was a conduit. It was a mouth and a vessel, a living bridge between their rites and the current beneath Ivath. The true divinity was the thing that fed the veins under the city. Isabelle did not have a language for it that she trusted. She did not need language.

  Now the conduit was gone, and everyone acted surprised that the city could not hold.

  But it would not be long before the Army arrived, and Isabelle was patient. She could wait.

  Isabelle pulled her stitch tight. The thread cut into her fingertip and left a bead of blood that she wiped onto the inside of her skirt without thinking. The veil’s edge began to regain its line.

  The news of the egg had arrived by hawk, to the desk where the Order’s messages were received and catalogued. High Glinnel Anthony had been the one to break the seal. Isabelle could picture him as he spoke afterward, the parchment held carefully, as if the ink might smear.

  Anthony, bless him, wanted to be steady. He had always wanted that. It was one of the reasons he was easy to guide. He had brought the message to Isabelle and didn’t say he was afraid, but he didn’t need to.

  Tracker Poe had reported that Elder Tanel and that scaled Ashborn had found the egg of a wyrm.

  The report had been written in the clipped language of field necessity, with none of the reverence that lesser Dagorlind would have poured into it. Isabelle respected the Trackers for that. Reverence was not a substitute for accuracy.

  Anthony had looked to Isabelle for interpretation, for a framing that would keep him from drifting into panic.

  Isabelle had given him what he needed, telling him that this was a fresh opportunity, a revival of the Order. She had watched his shoulders lower as if she had lifted weight from his spine. All they needed was the bell clapper, and making moves to take it had been simple.

  Then they sent the order back to Poe to intercept. Poe to Brighthand Army, Brighthand Army to Ivath. And when the Brighthand arrived, the Glinnel would be released from the counting house, and the work would begin.

  The egg would replace their lost Underserpent, using freshly made bindings, sized for a hatchling’s strength and growth, forged with the kind of care the Dagorlind put into anything that would touch the divine.

  They would anchor the new serpent to the Underveins and ease it to the peaceful sleep of the Tuning before it learned to listen to anything else. This type of stewardship was the only way the world could survive contact with such power. It would hold the city together, and all would be well once more.

  Isabelle set another stitch, then another, and kept her face composed. Her hands paused only when her mind slid, against her will, to the name that refused to settle.

  Lord Morgan Balthir.

  He was a discomfort she could not stitch closed. He had been present and then gone, like a blade that disappeared into a sleeve. He had stood against the Order and lived. He had brought forces into the world that did not fit Dagorlind taxonomy. He had turned their failed Bellborn into a discordant furie and shattered their chains with her. Now he was unaccounted for, and that absence made every certainty feel slightly less secure than it ought to.

  Isabelle drew her needle through the veil and watched the thread tighten into place. When the Brighthand banners reached Ivath, they would shatter Catherine and her puppet army. When the hatchling serpent was chained, the ground would close and still. The Order would draw the city into the light and Morgan Balthir would find no shadow within to haunt.

  The end of her work was coming, stitch by stitch, with every step towards Ivath.

  The barn stank of lanolin and sour hay and old dung baked into plank seams. Morgan lay on his side in the shadow behind a broken feed trough, cloak pulled over his shoulders, his mouth wet with a ceaseless hunger. His stomach held no warmth, his limbs weak. Each breath rubbed his ribs raw.

  Food had been scarce on the road, without the bloodwyrms. But his body began to fail in ways he had not prepared for. He’d tried to lie to himself about it, or treat it like inconvenience, but understanding hounded him until he picked it up and held it in his hands.

  He’d crossed a marsh at dusk and collapsed in the reeds, shaking so hard he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He’d risen again only when the smell of blood reached him from a mile away, the scent dragging him forward like a leash. He’d found a farm and a barn and a door. He’d crawled inside and pulled the door shut with his foot, holding his own throat as if he could keep the hunger from climbing out of him. The scent of blood was rich with other things, the tang of birth, the sour smell of a newborn.

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  It was a lamb, wobbly on its feet, its body still wet with wombwater and blood.

  Across the barn, sheep huddled in the far corner. Their eyes shone in the dark. They pressed together, bodies compact and trembling, watching him uncomprehending, their fear thick in the air.

  His mouth filled again, his tongue pressing against his teeth. He tried to turn his face away from them and failed, his gaze snapping back as if his eyes belonged to hunger and not himself.

  And under it all ran the bond.

  Lain.

  He did not need to reach for her. He could have stopped reaching. He could have cut himself off and saved his own mind. He had tried once, on the cliff path above the village, when he left her sleeping behind that door. He had tried to close the bond like a wound. But it stayed open.

  He lay in the barn and felt her as a pulse beyond the horizon, warm and alive. Held. The sensation penetrated his senses like a knifeblade. His throat seized with grief and want, and the grief made the hunger rise, furious at his weakness.

  Morgan pressed his forehead to the plank wall and breathed through his teeth, trying to hold on to thought and language. He told himself to stand, to find a man on the road and take what he needed and keep moving toward Ivath.

  He could not see through the narrowing of his sight. He could only smell the blood.

  And there was the lamb. Still glistening. Reaching for its mother for the first time.

  He fell upon the lamb like a fox and opened its fragile steaming throat and pulled the lifeblood from its veins in long, hard swallows, its uncomplicated life unspooling down his gullet. It let out one strong bleat, then several weaker ones, its flexing jaws drawing lifeblood up and up and into Morgan’s mouth.

  When he came to, the lamb was dead and the sheep were screaming, and he was still starving. It was not enough. He would need three, four of them to equal what he would gain from a single human life.

  He brought the lamb’s body to its birthing corner, where steam was still rising from the fluid there. The farmer might see it and decide the lamb was stillborn. If he looked carefully, he might conclude a dog had been at it.

  Morgan returned to the other end of the barn and leaned, exhausted, against the wall, licking the blood from his hands.

  A footstep sounded outside. The barn door creaked. Cold morning air slid in, carrying frost and smoke and the bite of dawn.

  Morgan froze.

  A child entered with a bucket in one hand and a stick in the other, boots too large for her feet. She wore a heavy wool dress and a scarf tied tight around her neck, and she moved as if she owned the whole barn and everything inside it. She set the bucket down, looked toward the sheep, then turned her head and saw him behind the trough.

  She stared at him, shocked, then her expression shifted, and she glared like he was an inconvenience she would have to manage.

  “Aye, what is this rogue among my sheep, then?” she said.

  He pulled the cloak up and wiped his face on the inner lining, lest she see the blood on his mouth. His muscles trembled with the effort. He kept his gaze low, and his mouth closed.

  The girl stepped closer, slow and careful, stick raised like a tiny spear. Her braid swung against her back. Her cheeks held the red of cold and health.

  Morgan’s mouth watered.

  He felt her fear bloom only when she came within a few steps of him. It arrived in him with a shock that made his eyes widen. He had known fear from the outside for centuries. He had watched it play across faces. He had used it like a tool. He had never taken it into his own body like this, full and immediate, as if his skin had become a door.

  The Underserpent had left him with the curse of empathy. He had thought it was his proximity to Lain that made it so. But it seemed he would not escape it, after all.

  The girl swallowed. Her chin lifted.

  “You,” she said. “Are you a thief?”

  Morgan forced sound past his teeth. “No.”

  The girl stared harder. “Some kind of ghost then, I reckon?”

  Morgan almost laughed, but it turned into a cough. He pressed his palm to his chest and tasted blood at the back of his mouth. Not the lamb’s.

  The girl’s eyes widened at his weakness, then narrowed again, offended by it, as if he should have had the decency to look less pitiful in her presence.

  “Fine,” she said. “If you’re not a thief and you’re not a ghost, then you’re a wolf.”

  Morgan blinked. “Wolf?”

  “Yes,” she replied, as if this resolved everything. She lifted the stick and pointed it toward him with great authority. “I’m the warden, right?”

  Morgan’s hunger surged at the word. Warden. The sound dragged up an old memory: iron, collars, hands that held him down while he breathed through pain.

  Lain.

  He flinched before he could stop himself.

  The girl saw the movement and nodded, as if his fear were about her.

  “Stay there,” she ordered. “If you move, I tell my father, right? And then you’ll be sorry for sleeping here, because my father, he’s meaner than a goat on a line.”

  Morgan’s eyes flicked to the barn door. He could reach for it if he had the strength. He could tear her throat open and drink and feel life return to his limbs. He could do it before she finished her next breath. It would be painless, or nearly so; he was hungry, but he was not cruel.

  His body leaned toward the idea.

  Then her fear struck him again, sharper this time, and behind it ran a thin thread of pride and a stubborn urge to be brave. She was terrified and refusing to show it. She was making herself large because she had no other weapon.

  Morgan’s stomach turned.

  His hands curled into fists in the straw.

  He reached for Lain without meaning to, seeking the anchor of her presence. She was still there, warm and wounded and steady in a way he had not earned.

  The pain of that steadiness made his eyes burn.

  “Warden,” he said hoarsely. “What is your name?”

  The girl hesitated, suspicious, then decided the question proved he understood the game. “Callie,” she said. “And you don’t get to know my family name.”

  Morgan nodded once. “Callie.”

  She stepped closer again, stick raised higher, then stopped when his gaze rose to her face. His hunger pushed through his eyes. She felt it. Her fear surged so hard it made his own stomach lurch.

  Morgan’s hands slid back, palms flat on the planks, keeping his body from lunging.

  Callie’s voice tightened. “You can’t look at me like that, right?”

  Morgan forced his eyes down. “Then don’t come closer.”

  Callie looked offended again. “You’re my wolf prisoner.”

  “Then keep your distance, Warden.”

  She considered this, lips pursed in a way that must have mimicked one of her parents. “Fine,” she said, and backed up two steps as if granting him a kindness. She pointed the stick toward the sheep. “Those are my flock. You can’t eat them. You can have bread, if you behave.”

  She turned and marched toward the feed shelf, climbed onto a crate, and began rummaging through sacks with the confidence of a queen searching for tribute.

  Morgan stared at the sheep corner. Their bodies pressed together. The girl hadn’t seen the lamb yet – it was tucked behind the ewes. Their fear perfumed the air. His vision narrowed until he saw only warm bodies and throats and the soft pulse beneath skin.

  Underneath the animalness, they smelled faintly of Lain. The lanolin. The meatless diet.

  He rose on shaking legs.

  The plank floor creaked under him. Callie spun around, stick whipping up.

  “I said stay –”

  Morgan crossed the barn in three unsteady steps and seized the nearest sheep by the neck. The animal bleated and kicked, hooves scraping wood. His grip tightened. Its panic struck his body now through the new empathy, a rush of confusion and pain that made his eyes widen.

  He almost let go.

  He did not.

  Callie’s voice rose. “Stop! I’ll tell –”

  Morgan looked at her, his voice low and raw. “Open the door.”

  Callie froze. Her eyes darted to the sheep in his grip, then to his face, then to the door.

  “Open it,” he said again.

  Callie’s fear surged and slammed into him, her urge to run, the part of her that refused to run because she had named herself warden and she meant to act like one, and anyway what would her father say if she let this man steal one of their ewes?

  Her hands shook as she crossed the door. She fumbled the latch. The door swung open, letting in a strip of morning light that made the dust in the air glitter.

  Morgan dragged the sheep outside. He hauled the animal across the frost-hardened earth toward the tree line, each step burning with effort. The sheep fought, then sagged, then fought again. Its breath came fast. Its fear kept flooding him. He kept moving anyway, jaw clenched, because if he stopped, he would turn back to the barn and the child and the warm blood he could taste in his mind.

  He reached the woods and shoved the sheep against a trunk. The animal struggled, hooves digging into leaf litter. He pressed his mouth to its throat and bit down.

  Warm blood filled his mouth. Relief hit him so hard his knees buckled. He drank in savage gulps, hands locked around the animal as it thrashed then weakened.

  The taste fed him and failed him at once. It kept his heart beating. It did not fill the hollow in his gut.

  When the sheep went slack, and the heart stopped pulsing blood into his mouth, and the last pull brought him nothing, Morgan released it and leaned against the tree, breathing hard, blood on his mouth and chin, hands shaking with effort and need.

  He listened through the bond again, and Lain’s presence came.

  Warm. Alive. Held.

  He closed his eyes and let the grief roll through him until it burned.

  Behind him, somewhere near the barn, he heard the child scream.

  She must have found the lamb.

  A man’s voice rose, further away, panicked. He heard Callie’s footsteps in the grass, hesitant now, her courage fraying at the edges, as she called for her father.

  Morgan wiped his mouth with his sleeve, stood as straight as his shaking legs allowed, and turned his face west.

  He had chosen his path. Ivath waited. Hunger waited with it. And the new empathy, pressed into him by the Underserpent, made every step cost more than the last.