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“I won’t harm you.”

Her eyes widen. Her gaze drops to the grille over my mouth, where she can’t see my lips. She shakes her head.

“You are safe with me,” I say again, just as softly. “I will not harm you, I swear it.”

She narrows her eyes and shakes her head a second time. She lifts a hand and points to her ear.

“I can’t hear you,” she says. “I’m deaf.”

I stay where I am, frozen.

She can’t hear my voice. She just said so, but I need a moment to be sure I’ve understood it. I can’t remember the last time I spoke aloud to a human. I’ve avoided it like their lives depended on it, because every person I ever spoke to came back for more, unable to leave. This woman is close enough to touch, and she can’t hear a word I say. My song could still work on her body, but it can’t make her want me for it.

I feel so much joy that I think I might cry. I haven’t cried in centuries. In fact, I don’t know that I ever have. She’s real, and she might be able to stay herself with me.

I lift my hands and reach toward her again. She pulls back into the corner.

“I can read lips,” she says. “If you remove your mask, I will read your lips.”

I draw my hand back and graze my fingertips over the grille that covers my mouth. I can’t do it. She’s frightened enough, and what’s under the mask would frighten her worse. The one thing she’s asked for is the one thing I can’t give her.

I have nothing to write with. I look at my hands, at the boat, at her.

I gesture toward the boat. Then I bow to her, low. I lay my hand over my heart. She follows my hand with her eyes, and when it settles on my chest, she goes stiff. I hold still and keep it there. Slowly, some of the shaking in her bones eases. She lets her arms loosen around her knees and leans forward.

“I…” she says. “I don’t understand.”

I pull the cage door all the way open. Then I move to the far end of the boat, away from the lamp, kneel and bow my head.

The lamp lights her while I’m mostly shrouded in darkness. Before I lower my eyes, the last thing I see is her hair, gold now instead of silver, inside the edge of the light. I keep my head down.

I listen to her breathing, I listen to the water lapping at the hull, and I leave her the space to decide what to do.

Chapter Six

Aveline

The monster kneels at the far end of the boat with his head bowed. The door of my cage is open. I don’t move.

I don’t understand why Callum sent me down here. I don’t understand why this creature broke the lock, then went away from me instead of coming closer. Tonight, nothing makes sense, and I wonder again whether I might be dead and this is what comes after. Then I feel how cold the bars are under my palms and how much my legs ache from crouching. I let the thought go, because the dead wouldn’t feel any of that.

The lamp at the front of the boat provides enough light for me to see and assess the situation. The monster has made himself small, or as small as something his size can be. He keeps his hands where I can see them, resting on his knees. The shaking in my shoulders eases, and my fingers come loose from the bars one at a time. He doesn’t want to hurt me, I think, or he doesn’t want to yet.

I look at him, because I need to know what he is.

He’s so tall that even folded onto his knees he doesn’t look right, with a build that’s powerful and lean at the same time. The length of his arms is a little wrong. They’re almost right, and that’s what bothers me. Long, black hair falls over dark, formal clothes, high in the collar and embroidered with gold gone dull. The skin at his wrists and throat is pale with a gray cast under it, and his hands are large, with long, fine fingers that end in black claws. Over his face there’s a full mask of white bone-porcelain with no expression at all, a death mask with narrow ribs set over the mouth in a grille, so close together that I can’t see his lips. Above the grille, his eyes are black from edge to edge, with no white, no color, and no pupil I can find.

That’s all there is to see. When people speak and I can’t hear them, I read their faces, the tightening at the corner of a mouth and the way a brow drops before a person says no. He has no mouth I can see and no brow that moves, and there’s nothing in his eyes to change and warn me about what he thinks. He holds so still that I can’t read his hands either. With him, I’m left with nothing.

I’m cold. The boat floats a little closer to the platform. I’m dizzy.

Before the bride market, I’d never seen a monster. Rosemere keeps them out, and it keeps the market outside the city, so no one has to look at them. The ones in the field were giants and furred things, but none of them looked like this. I don’t know what he is, and I don’t know what he can do.

I tip my head back and look up the way I came. The rails go up through the broken floor above me and into darkness. That’s all there is. There are no torches, no people at the edge of the pit, no altar, and no auditorium. I can’t tell how far I’ve come down, only that the light up there is gone, and I’m deep underground.

I put it together, then, because there’s nothing left to stop me. I remember the torches in the streets, the crowd singing words I couldn’t read and kneeling as I passed, the stage dressed as an altar with gifts heaped on it. I remember Sabrina telling me to rest for the ceremony, Callum in his white and gold, and his hand closing on my arm hard enough to bruise when I stepped back from the cage. He never meant to marry me. He never meant to keep me in his house and let me scrub his floors. They brought me here for whatever lives under these ruins, and if the people of Nivallia kneel to it, then what they did up there was a sacrifice. I was…

I am the sacrifice.