The first dream came the night he left.

  Lain slept in the same bed they had soaked with sweat, and the sheets held a heat that should have been comforting, a memory pressed into the cloth. Yet her body refused comfort, suspecting it a trick. She woke with her hand between her thighs as if she were checking for blood, as if she were checking whether she had been used while she slept, and when she found only damp skin and the ache of what she had chosen, she lay there staring at the ceiling until her eyes burned.

  When sleep took her again, it was by force.

  The Dóthain circled above Ivath like a carrion bird that had forgotten what it fed on. Its wings cast long shadows across the Dawn Spire’s broken crown. The city below looked wrong from that height, too small and too fragile, its rooftops arranged like teeth in a mouth with a broken jaw. The Dóthain cried out, panicked, with a sound that did not belong to any creature meant to rule the sky. It circled lower, and lower, and each pass brought it closer to the empty wound where the Spire’s bell had once hung.

  Lain woke with salt at the corners of her mouth.

  The next dream came with the Under veins.

  They came in lines under the ground, threads sewn into the world, running beneath floorboards and packed earth and sea-wet sand. She saw them from inside her own body, as if her bones had turned to glass and the world beneath her feet had turned to ink. The lines pulled north. They tugged patiently. They had time.

  She tried to turn away from them in the dream, to walk toward the sea, to walk toward Grainne’s warm kitchen and Finn’s whale and Orla’s shy smile. The threads tightened in response, and she understood with a clarity that made her want to scream: the Underveins did not care what she wanted. They simply recognized what had been braided into her life, and pulled accordingly.

  When she woke, her hooves ached as if she had been walking all night.

  By the third day, the dreams stopped being metaphors.

  They became scenes. Angles. A certainty that the Dóthain would return to Ivath whether she ran or stayed, and that it would come crying like a lost child that did not know its own strength. She saw it circling over broken stone. She saw figures in the streets looking up, hands raised to shield their faces. She woke with her hands curled in the bedsheet as if she could keep that chain from moving.

  In the daylight, she tried to act alive.

  Morgan had left coin. It sat in a small leather pouch on the table. The sight of it made her stomach turn. It meant he had left her a way to eat, a way to survive, a way to walk out of his story and into her own.

  It also meant he had thought about her as a dependent, a woman to be provided for whether she wanted it or not, and that thought made her fingers tense when she counted the coins and tied the pouch again.

  The innkeeper knocked and announced herself; Lain bid her enter. She was carrying a bowl with porridge and a cup of tea.

  “You look pale,” the woman said. “Eat what you can.”

  Lain forced down a few spoonfuls. The grain sat heavy in her belly, the sweetness of honey clinging to her tongue, and her body accepted it as if it had been waiting for her permission to live.

  The innkeeper made the bed while Lain ate at the small table by the window. “You heard about the bridge,” she said, fluffing a pillow.

  Lain’s spoon paused halfway to her mouth. “What bridge?”

  “The big one,” the innkeeper replied. “The stone span north of here. The one everyone uses if they want to go up toward Ivath.”

  Lain put the spoon down. “What happened?”

  The innkeeper made a face. “Quake,” she said. “Not as bad as the stories we hear from the cliffs, but bad enough. Folk ran into the street, I heard. Little village right by the water lost a few houses. Some people buried under. Shame, saints preserve them.”

  She gave the sign of the Underserpent, then continued, “The bridge died, too. Cracked right down the middle. Half went into the river.”

  Lain stared at the steam rising from her cup, watching it curl and vanish, and through it she envisioned the cart driver who had died in the quake on her way to this inn. She pictured Morgan turning her away from the scene. Her eyes swelled with tears and she blinked them away.

  The Underveins tugged at her mind, northward, threading under riverbed and stone foundations, and she knew that the quake had not been a random tantrum of the earth. The world had begun to respond to what Morgan kept doing to it.

  “Any travelers come through?” Lain asked.

  The innkeeper shrugged. “Some,” she said. “More than usual. People are nervous. They keep saying Ivath has trouble again, though no one agrees what kind. Trouble brings pilgrims.”

  Pilgrims.

  Lain set the spoon down and pushed the bowl away. She thanked the innkeeper, forced herself to drink the tea, and spent the rest of the morning staring at the wall until the light shifted across the boards.

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  She told herself she would go out. She should buy bread, fruit, anything that made her feel like a person who chose her meals. She told herself that she would do one small act that belonged to her.

  When she finally stepped outside, the air smelled of seaweed and wet wood. The village moved around her with the pace of ordinary life: doors opening, boots on packed earth, the distant call of someone selling fish in the market. She pulled her cloak tight and kept her head down, as if hiding her ears could hide the war inside her.

  The market square sat near the center of the village, a cluster of stalls and baskets and carts arranged around a fountain whose water ran clear and cold. Lain drifted between people with careful caution. She focused on practical details: a loaf here, pies there, the price of dried kelp, the smell of clams offered in a bucket of sea water. Her stomach gave a dull complaint, then settled again, and she tried to see that as a blessing rather than a warning.

  She was examining a basket of pears when she heard his laugh.

  It was rough-edged and familiar, carried over the noise of the square. It had the shape of a man who had no time for ceremony and no patience for being liked.

  Her hand froze above the pears.

  Her breath caught.

  She knew that voice. She knew the way it wore humor like armor. She knew the way it snapped at the world and somehow made it kinder by refusing to pretend it was kind.

  She turned, slowly, not yet daring to hope.

  Mallow.

  Mallow, standing in a pilgrim cloak thrown over his usual clothes.

  Mallow, with his hood pushed back so his hair spilled out in that familiar, unruly way.

  Mallow, alive, no wound in his chest, no blood on his shirt, not lost to the darkness. Just here. Achingly, brilliantly here.

  He stood near a stall selling bread and late winter fruit. His face looked older than it had when she last saw him, not by years, but by tensity. He held a loaf under one arm. His other hand gestured as he argued with the woman at the stall.

  “You’re telling me this apple costs the same as a loaf,” Mallow said, voice pitched for the audience he always gathered without trying. “Your apples better sing.”

  “They’re good apples,” the woman snapped, cheeks red either with anger or pride.

  Mallow lifted one apple and turned it in his palm like he was inspecting a gemstone. “It has a bruise,” he announced. “This one has suffered. You can’t charge extra for suffering. That’s a priest’s job.”

  A few people laughed. Someone called, “Saint Mallow,” with the sort of delight that made Lain’s gut twist.

  At his side appeared a young Kelthi man, arms folded around a wrapped bundle the side of a child. The bundle was held close to his chest. His posture carried the same vigilance Lain remembered from darker places, a man who did not relax even among friendly faces. He scanned the square with a quiet threat that made people step around him without realizing they were doing it. And suddenly she remembered who he was: Harka, a Kelthi from Valeun.

  Before the how or why of it could strike, Lain’s heart lurched toward them so hard she nearly doubled over.

  For a single heartbeat, she was back in the world where Mallow looked at her like she was worth saving. She was back in the version of herself that had believed she could be stubborn and hopeful and unbroken and still survive. She was back in his orbit, and it felt like sunlight.

  Then the shame arrived.

  It came from everywhere at once: the memory of Morgan’s mouth on her, the bruise on Morgan’s cheek, the way she had held Morgan while he remembered his dead family, the coin on her table, the possibility of a child inside her belly that belonged to a man she could not follow. It came with the Dóthain circling in her dreams and the Underveins tugging under the ground. It came with the knowledge that she had chosen love and chosen violence and chosen both in the same night, and she did not know how to stand in front of Mallow and let him see what she had become.

  Mallow’s head turned a fraction, as if some instinct had caught on her presence. His gaze swept the square with searching impatience, and for an instant Lain thought his eyes might land on her.

  She stepped back, fast.

  Her hoof caught on a stone. She steadied herself on the edge of a cart, breath coming too hard, and forced her body to move before he could see her face.

  She turned away.

  She walked as if she belonged in this village, as if she had not just seen the man she had mourned. She walked past the fishmonger calling out prices, past a child chasing a dog, past a woman holding a newborn close in the cold.

  Behind her, someone’s voice rose again.

  “Saint Scaleborn,” a man said, earnest, almost pleading. “Could you bless her?”

  Lain stopped without meaning to. Her hand braced against the tavern’s outer wall, cool stone beneath her palm, and she listened with the sort of attention that hurt.

  Mallow sighed the way he always did when he was pretending to be put upon.

  “I’m not a saint,” he said, and his voice carried irritation that could not hide a softer worry beneath it. “I’m a man who has been unfortunate in public.”

  “Please,” the woman said. “Just for luck.”

  Mallow muttered something under his breath that made a couple people laugh. Then, with the flippant grace of someone mocking ritual even as he performed it, he lifted his hand and made the sign of the bell, a quick flick as if he were waving off a fly.

  “There,” he said. “Your child is blessed by my tremendous incompetence. May she grow up to be smarter than any of us.”

  The woman’s eyes shone as if he’d given her sacrament.

  Lain pressed her forehead against the stone.

  The cold steadied her for a moment. Then it failed, and grief reared like a terrified horse.

  She brought both hands to her face and covered her mouth to keep from making a sound that would turn heads. Tears came anyway, hot and relentless, soaking her fingers. Her shoulders quavered with the force of holding herself together while the world stayed ordinary around her.

  She wanted to run to him.

  She wanted to cross the square and throw herself into Mallow’s arms and let him call her stubborn and alive and worth the trouble. She wanted to be his Little Hooves, the version of herself that did not have Morgan’s fingerprints on her skin and the Underveins in her bones.

  She could not.

  She stayed with her forehead against stone, weeping into her hands like a woman praying to a wall, while the sound of Mallow’s voice moved farther away, still joking, still bargaining, still searching without knowing he had been close enough to touch.

  When she finally lifted her head, her face damp, her eyes burning, the square had shifted.

  Mallow and the Kelthi were gone. The market noise filled in the space they left as if nothing had happened.

  Lain stood alone against the stone wall with bread money in her pocket and coin on her table and the Underveins tugging north under her feet, and she understood with a brutal clarity that safety did not mean peace. It only meant she had room to fall apart, and no one to hold her through it.