I frowned. Her tone had changed. “What?”

She reached across the table and cupped my cheek, her thumb brushing my lips. I nearly flinched but managed to master the reflex in time. That seemed to please her; I felt her smile.

“Such a lovely girl,” she said again, and sighed with what might have been regret. “I might be able to persuade Nahadoth to let you live, provided Itempas still suffers.”

“What do you mean?”

“If, perhaps, you were to leave him…” She trailed off, letting her fingers trail away from my face. I stiffened, sick with understanding.

When I finally managed to speak, I was shaking inside. I was angry at last, though; that steadied my voice. “I see. It’s not enough for you to hurt him; you want me to hurt him, too.”

“Pain is pain,” said the Nightlord, and all the small hairs on my skin prickled, because I had not heard him come into the room. He was somewhere behind the Lady, and already the room was turning cold. “Sorrow is sorrow. I don’t care where it comes from, as long as it is all he feels.”

Despite my fear, his careless, empty tone infuriated me. My free hand tightened into a fist. “So I’m to choose between letting you kill me and stabbing him in the back myself?” I snapped. “Fine, then—kill me. At least he’ll know I didn’t abandon him.”

Yeine’s hand brushed mine, which I suspected was meant to be a warning. The Nightlord went silent, but I felt his rigid fury. I didn’t care. It made me feel better to hurt him. He had taken my people’s happiness and now he wanted mine.

“He still loves you, you know,” I blurted. “More than me. More than anything, really.”

He hissed at me. It was not a human sound. In it I heard snakes and ice, and dust settling into a deep, shadowed crevice. Then he started forward—

Yeine stood, turning to face him. Nahadoth stopped. For a span of time that I could not measure—perhaps a breath, perhaps an hour—they stared at one another, motionless, silent. I knew that gods could speak without words, but I was not certain that was happening here. This felt more like a battle.

Then the feeling faded and Yeine sighed, stepping closer to him. “Softly,” she said, her voice more compassionate than I could have imagined. “Slowly. You’re free now. Be what you choose to be, not what they made you.”

He let out a long, slow sigh, and I felt the cold pressure of him fade just a little. When he spoke, however, his voice was just as hard as before. “I am of my choosing. But that is angry, Yeine. They burn in me, the memories… They hurt. The things he did to me.”

The room reverberated with betrayals unspoken, horrors and loss. In that silence, my anger crumbled. I had never been able to truly hate anyone who’d suffered, no matter what evils they’d done in the aftermath.

“He has not earned such happiness, Yeine,” the Nightlord said. “Not yet.”

The Lady sighed. “I know.”

I heard him touch her, perhaps a kiss, perhaps just taking her hand. It reminded me at once of Shiny and the way he often touched me, wordlessly, needing the reassurance of my nearness. Had he done that with Nahadoth, once upon a time? Perhaps Nahadoth—underneath the anger—missed those days, too. He had the Lady to comfort him, however. Shiny would soon have no one.

Silently, the Nightlord vanished. Yeine stayed where she was for a moment, then turned back to me.

“That was foolish of you,” she said. I realized she was angry, too, with me.

I nodded, weary. “I know. Sorry.”

To my surprise, that actually seemed to mollify her. She returned to the table, though she didn’t sit. “Not wholly your fault. He’s still… fragile, in some ways. The scars of the War, and his imprisonment, run deep. Some of them are still raw.”

And I remembered, with some guilt, that this was Shiny’s fault.

“I’ve made my decision,” I said, very softly.

She saw what was in my heart—or perhaps it was just obvious. “If what you said was true,” she said, “if you do care about him, then ask yourself what’s best for him.”

I did. And in that moment I imagined Shiny, what he might become, long after I died and had turned to dust. A wanderer, a warrior, a guardian. A man of soft words and swift decisions and little in the way of kindness—yet he would have some, I understood. Some warmth. Some ability to touch, and be touched by, others. I could leave him that much, if I did it right.

But if I died, if his love killed me, there would be nothing in him. He would distance himself from mortalkind, knowing the consequences of caring too deeply for us. He would snuff that small ember of warmth in himself, fearful of the pain it brought. He would live among humanity yet be wholly alone. And he would never, ever heal.