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Little bird, you are free!

‘Oh, Genevieve, Leander,’ Claire murmurs to herself, half delirious with fear and despondency. ‘I have failed you. I have failed you both.’

She spins, but there is nowhere for her to go. The path behind is now obstructed, as is the path in front. She notices, however, that the hedge before her looks different to the rest: closer to a bramble patch than a topiary, its branches slender and thorny. Blackberries are growing upon it—but when Claire reaches for one to pluck, the fruit is made of glass, and it shatters between her fingers.

She yelps in pain and uses her skirts to dust the shards from her palm. Her fingers leave trails of blood behind, the pad of her thumb pierced by the thorns. She puts it in her mouth to soothe the cut with her tongue, then considers the brambles before her: the glossy sheen of the fruit, shared by the perfectly curling stems, the uncanny stillness of the leaves.

It is glass, all of it.

With an axe or shovel, it would be quick work to smash it. But Claire has neither an axe nor a shovel. She has her hands, and her own desperation. She has Lady Reverie’s grace, her delight at Claire’s suffering. As long as Claire suffers, she will not allow the dawn to break.

Her mouth in a grim line, Claire sets to work.

She does not have the ability to be careful, not when time is so precious. She presses herself into the brambles, snapping glass branches with her torso and taking thorns in her fists. Shimmering shards of black and brown and green fall onto her shoulders. Lines score themselves into her flesh with such vigour and number they resemble an astronomical chart, red and furious, connecting each freckle and mole on her arms and wrists. Her vision blurs with tears, their salt burning the scratches on her cheeks. At first, the pain is nearly unbearable, a thousand tiny knives slicing at her skin, but then a cold clarity descends: the wounds and the stinging of her eyes become expected, then tolerable, then entirely irrelevant, as the glass brambles begin to thin. Soon, the patchwork prize of the labyrinth’s centre comes into view.

It must take only a few moments to clear enough space, but it feels as if hours have passed. Claire squeezes through, gasping as the thorns and shattered edges renew their attack and pierce through her corset. She emerges bloodied and weeping and triumphant, pieces of glass still embedded in her dress and her forearms. She plucks them from her skin and drops them onto the gravel.

She can see the shape of something horrifying at the centre of the labyrinth.

It is a heart, embedded in the gravel. A human heart, but enormous: the size of the lion fountain, larger, even, so large Claire’s arms could not encompass it, the arms of two Claires could not encompass it. As she looks at the thing, it expands, contracts, and she sees its flesh is budding with small sanguine roses—a twisted chimera of organ and petal, veins made of thorny vines. It beats slowly, the steady pulse of a behemoth.

The centre of the maze.

The heart of the Château.

Leander is not here, but this monstrosity is. Claire lets out a sob that resembles a scream. The air smells like blood and flowers. I have failed, she thinks. Surely I have, for now that I have seen this horror, the Lady will allow the sun to rise.

She steps closer. She does not know why. There is something grotesquely beautiful about the organ in front of her; something curiously soothing about the slow rise and fall of its beating. In the dim light of the rising sun, something glints on the ground before her, and Claire pauses to pick it up. It is the hairpin, Saliha Sultan’s dagger-shaped hairpin. She had left it in the false Genevieve’s chest, at the bottom of the tarn. And yet, now it is here, with her once more.

Her hand closes around the base of the pin. She feels regret, and sorrow, and fury—for has Claire not done all that was asked of her? Has she not bent and stretched herself around the Château’s whims all this auction, just as she had so long bent and stretched herself into the shape of Genevieve de Vienne? Claire has made herself a woman of wet clay, always willing to remould herself for another’s hands, and she has won nothing for it except fear and failure.

For a moment, her anger makes her the panicked, feral girl who ran from the carriage that night in Prairial; the girl with mud covering her skirts and tears tracking down her face. She becomes the woman who lost her only love and had yet to wear another’s face. The woman who had never met the man she would call grandfather, who had never met Leander Sterne, who knew only hollow loneliness and the guilt that would destroy her. And it is that woman now who feels her grip on the hairpin tighten. Who looks at the heart of Château Reverie and wants to end its beating.

She looks down at the pin. It has changed, she realises—the blade is more of a blade, sharper, longer, angrier. The hilt is a true hilt, heavy in her palm. It has become a dagger, a true dagger. A weapon fit for the task.

Claire steps forward. The beat of the Château’s heart is loud as a drum. She can hear nothing else, can feel nothing else, its movements making the gravel vibrate and tremble beneath her feet. The roses sprouting from it have their closed heads glazed in blood. She will sink this blade between their tangled stems, and for a moment she will feel satisfaction. Claire will kill this place. She will end the Château for good.

Claire raises the blade. She breathes in deeply.

And then she pauses. Because the stubborn creature has returned, after a night of silence, writhing within her chest. While she was Genevieve, that creature was Claire, the maw of a past she could not escape. But now it is someone else. It is the person she has become, after five years of being someone new.

Claire will always be partly Genevieve now. Lies told for long enough cannot help but become a little true. And it is that part of Claire, the Genevieve part, the part that has spent so long being cautious and quiet and fearful, that forces her to pause with the dagger hovering over the heart.

This Château is a living thing, she thinks. That much is clear. Another child of Lady Reverie—as much beholden to her as Orestes. As Leander.

It is cruel because she tells it to be. Because cruelty is all that it knows.

Claire throws the knife aside. She falls to her knees. Reaches out her hand to the rosebuds growing from the Château’s flesh, and trails her fingers over their closed petals. There are tears running down her cheeks, and she does not know why: exhaustion or regret, hope or fury. All these things are in the salt on her lips, within the tightness of her throat.

‘I forgive you,’ she says. ‘For all of it.’

And as she speaks, she knows that it is the truth.

The heart beats, once, twice—then faster. The roses growing from its flesh shudder and begin to bloom: red petals bursting open, releasing the scent of iron and honey into the air. As quickly as they grow, they wither, and the petals fall. The veins of thorny branches curl in on themselves, brown and drying, falling away from the flesh. The heart is left bare and bloody and beating still, more and more quickly. There is a hollow at its centre that had been previously obscured.

Lying in the hollow, fast asleep, is Leander.

If Claire had stopped the heart, she would have killed him, too.