“No one,” Sarsine said, “thinks that you are a coward.”

Kestrel took the sheathed dagger onto her lap, gripped it with both hands. It felt irrevocably hers. It would pain her to give it back. She thought from the way Sarsine looked at her that the other woman understood this. Kestrel relaxed her hold. The dagger was hers, and it was all right. She was trusted with a weapon, and that was right, too.

Sarsine drank her milk.

Kestrel said, “Is this dagger like the dresses?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It was made for me. Do you have other things of mine from before, like the dresses? Like this?”

Sarsine hesitated, as if she wanted to speak but the words lodged in her throat. Finally, she said, “Your piano.”

The instrument rose before her eyes: black, massive, too large for her heart, which suddenly strained with desire. “Where?” she managed.

“Downstairs, in the salon.”

The surge of remembered music. The arch of her fingers. Glittering notes.

“I want it,” Kestrel said. “Now.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure you’d make it down the stairs.”

“But—”

“You could be carried, though not by me.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not that light.”

Kestrel was silent.

“Shall I arrange for it?”

She knew whom Sarsine would ask. “No.”

“Then eat your breakfast.”

She did, without another word.

Sometimes she’d step gingerly out onto her memory and it would creak and sway beneath her like a bridge that couldn’t bear her weight. She’d retreat into what she knew best: the prison. There, she’d learned to love the earth beneath her cheek. Dry, cool. The sunless smell of it. The way it heralded sleep. She’d drink the nighttime drug. She’d swallow and swallow. Then she’d drift, and love the guard who led her, and love the moment right before sleep, because it was only a moment, and in one mere moment she wouldn’t have to think about how she’d given in—and given up. She’d never had any other kind of life. This was all there was.

Sleep was there. It shoved her down. Pressed her lungs. The drug crept soft fingers across her mouth and shaped it into a loose smile.

No one stayed with her anymore at night. Not Sarsine. Not him. And she didn’t need company, she was no child. She wasn’t frightened by nightmares, or by the way she couldn’t remember them after she woke, like now.

Her fingers trembled as they reached for the low-burning lamp on the bedside table. She took the lamp. The keys. She pulled on a robe and made her way through the suite, through the sunroom, and out onto the rooftop garden. Her feet were bare on the egg-shaped pebbles. The darkness was velvety, and warm enough that Kestrel knew that she shouldn’t be cold.

She should know whether it was cold or warm.

She should know whether it was normal to be nervous. Would her pulse race like this if she were still the same person she used to be?

She tried the heavy keys on the ring until she found the one that fit into the door set into the opposite wall of the garden. Opened it. Saw another garden, just like hers. She tried to walk on the pebbles without making noise. Failed. It occurred to her that the pebbles were there for the very purpose of making noise. She thought about this, about why someone might want to hear another person coming, and this distracted her from the forgotten nightmare that seemed to have snapped her in two.

She felt like she was both her body and her shadow, like she was her own ghost.

She had done all this before. Had opened those doors, had crossed these twin gardens.

His sunroom was dark.

She opened its door anyway. Moved past the potted plants. Lamp lifted, she found the door to his suite. The hallway. Her footfalls were silent now, treading plush carpet. A set of silent rooms. The furnishings masculine in a way that didn’t look like what he would have chosen, yet suited him. Or what she knew of him.

Which was little.

The lamp lowered. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. Maybe she wanted to frighten him awake, to rip him out of sleep. Make him feel the way she’d felt when she’d woken minutes ago. She imagined screaming into his sleeping ear.

Or what if she woke him a different way? She seemed to see herself as if looking at a painting of a girl from a tale, kidnapped by a creature who showed his true form only at night. The girl held the lamp over the bed. Crept closer. A drop of hot oil fell to his bare shoulder. He woke.

Maybe Kestrel had come for answers. He had them . . . or pretended that he did.