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The water was circling our calves. The circle of salt dissolved. Callie was trembling. Priya cried silently. Jess had her eyes screwed shut. I continued, repeating each line as Clemency delivered it inside my head:

“That which was bound without our leave, we do unbind.

That which was wedded in our sleep, we do unwed.

That which was drawn from us as tribute, we summon home.

Along the marriage-thread we send this reckoning,

One hundred refusals, and four besides.”

Then her voice changed:

“Bear the cup down to the water and spill the offering.”

I took the cup from the rock that I’d perched it on and drained it into the tide. It swirled and dispersed, scarlet into seafoam. Then a wave broke against the cave mouth, and the spray came down on us like flung gravel. A candle drowned. The mirror went black—not clouded, black—and the voice in my skull cut out mid-word.

Silence, except the water. Callie’s whimper sounded like a hinge. He was still feeding. I could feel it now without being told, a wet, greedy pull somewhere behind my sternum. And I understood that if we stopped here, everything we had spilled into that water was nothing but fish food. So I kept talking. Not her words but the ones I’d been saying since the night I stood thigh-deep in the Pacific in my underwear.

“What was taken is returned,” I said, and the remaining candle flames stood up straight. “What was forced upon us, the mark and the bind, we reject and return. What we now choose is ours alone.” The water shoved at my calves and I raised my voice over it. “Drink that.”

The mirror cleared. Clemency looked out at me for a long moment, and something crossed her face that almost looked like respect.

“Acceptable,” she said. “Now finish it properly.”

I repeated the words she spoke into my head:

“Drink, Verzeal. Drink as thou hast ever drunk:

Without heed, without witness.

This is thy final cup.

Undone. Unwedded. Unclaimed.

By salt, by blood, and by the turning tide,

The ring is loosed, the threshold sealed,

And no soul within these waters

Shall henceforth be thine.”

And then we felt it, right as the tide took the candles, a snap behind the sternum, like a stitch being cut. My ears popped like the whole cave had changed altitude. Then the thread gave back what it had carried away. It came up through me just like the bile drawn up from tea, except this wasn’t poison leaving me. Heat rushed to every place Aurora’s cloth had wiped: my throat, the sides of my neck, my face, as if my life were being pressed back in through the same doors it had left by. The cold that had sat coiled under my sternum since the first night at the fire dissolved so fast my knees buckled. My mouth flooded with the taste of pennies and rot, then salt, then nothing at all.

All four of us doubled over, retching, vomiting, gasping, rasping in air, Callie sobbing through it, Priya laughing in a way that scared me more than the dark did.

And in the mirror, for the first and only time, I saw him. The face from our identical dreams emerged, gleaming with writhing eels, its throat packed with wildflowers and wedding rings. Then it folded inward like wet paper, emptying until what hung behind the glass was a pale husk.

The glass went dark.

“It’s done,” Clemency said, and for once, she sounded tired. “Now get out, before you drown.”

We broke the circle. Callie vomited all over again, right into the water swirling at our feet. We grabbed everything in a blind scramble. The water carried the candles and sea thrift out to sea. We waded out, sobbing, cursing, stumbling, clutching our sodden robes at hip height. But we were also livid.

“You left us. You LEFT US, Jess,” Priya said as we turned the shoulder toward the beach. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“She’s a fucking traitor, that’s what,” Callie muttered.