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The water you drank before entering the vault rooms. Not optional. You could not pass through a vault entrance without it. It found whatever truth lived in the memory you were reaching for and brought it forward without asking whether you were ready, and when it was done it made you say aloud what you truly wanted. Worse than a memory stone in her opinion. At least with a memory stone you chose what it held. Truthwater chose for you.

She was in no condition for that and had no interest in dredging up another lifetime of memories while bleeding through her clothes.

She would rather be thirsty.

She kept walking because she was in no condition to indulge ancient rituals, and even less condition to die. The distinction mattered to her, at least marginally.

The guard post at the gate was empty.

She moved through it and into the passage beyond and stopped.

Bodies on the ground. Three guards by their uniforms, their postures carrying the particular wrongness of people who had not chosen where they ended up.

A Slykar rushed from the shadow to her left.

She hit it with what she had, which was not enough and had to be anyway. It fell. She stood over it breathing harder than she found acceptable and looked at the passage ahead.

The door at the end was open.

The Vaultkeeper lay just inside the threshold, face up, his expression frozen in something that read less like pain than like shock. Whatever he had seen in his final moments had exceeded his capacity to process it. His face was extremely clear on this point.

She stepped past him. She had no time to worry about the dead. She needed blood before anything else. She moved further in, her vision blurring at the edges, the wound in her stomach still making its opinion known in the persistent way of wounds that had not decided yet whether they were serious.

She thought of Aviaryn. Of the rare unguarded expression the child did not know she was giving when something pleased her. Of the gap in her teeth. Of the way she looked at people she was deciding whether to tolerate.

Irritating child.

She needed to get back.

She needed to get Aviaryn out of Morrath because it was now clear that what she had spent years preventing had finally arrived anyway.

There was no point in checking the vaultline to see if the amulet was there, because she already knew the answer.

She had felt it the moment she reached the Vaultline. In the bodies. In the open gates. In the Slykar numbers, far beyond what Morrath's normal dark could account for.

Dali had arrived.

Part Five

CHAPTER 44

The Change

Istepped through the ward and he was waiting on the other side. The moment his eyes found mine he went still.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. Whatever had happened inside that hut, whatever the Arrolyn had taken or given, we were both still trying to understand it.

“It worked,” he said.

“It did.”

“Undress me,” I told him. “You must see everything.”

He reached for the laces without another word, fingers careful as they freed the back of my dress and let it fall. The thin shift beneath followed, then the last wrap of linen at my hips. When I stood bare he took in the bruises blooming across my ribs, the dark line across my shoulder, the half-healed cuts along my thighs. His jaw tightened once.

“Come,” he said quietly.

He turned on the bath and guided me in, the water warm against skin that still felt too thin. For a long time the only sound was the soft drag of cloth and water as he washed me—slow passes over each bruise, each cut, his hands steady and quiet. He spoke after a while, voice low, telling me about the children. Fiorakis had pulled herself up on the edge of the bassinets yesterday. Aviaryn had sat with them for most of the afternoon, reading one of the old stories in that careful way she had. He told me how Ari had watched his sister with that bored look, as though weighing whether he should bother learning the same trick.