Wain had never yet found a boundary she would hesitate to cross if the Black Road led her that way. Was that why she felt this aching hunger in her chest? Something in her had stirred and glimpsed a far horizon that promised much. Whatever it was, Aeglyss had woken it. Yet he had woken revulsion in her too.

The shadows shifted. The dark pools in the room flowed and parted and Aeglyss was standing by her bed. He was reaching out a single thin hand towards her. She opened her mouth to cry out, commanded her body to strike out at him, yet she made no sound or movement. Fear rattled in her head, but it was short-lived. Something else displaced it; something still and soft that settled over her. Aeglyss took a step closer. He leaned into the shaft of moonlight. It put a bar of light along his cheekbone. Wain lay quite still, yet she felt as if every muscle in her body was quivering in urgent terror. New thoughts were laying themselves down in her mind, crossing the gap between Aeglyss and her like silent whispers. They were not hers, yet alike enough to her own that she could not turn them away.

“Have you ever been refused, Thane’s sister?” he was asking her. “In anything?”

His voice was a living thing that eased itself up against her skin, curled around her shoulders and throat and touched itself against her lips.

“I have grown so weary of it, you see,” Aeglyss murmured, and he was close to her. She felt his hand on her breast, gentle. She felt him in her head, and she could not tell what was him and what her.

“All my life I have been denied by those who thought themselves my betters,” he whispered. “Not any more. Not in anything. I am learning, slowly. Each day I see afresh what is possible, each day I grow. I can turn back the Anain themselves; I can taste thoughts in minds half a world away; I can hear my mother, can call her… no, no. Not my mother.”

He blinked and shook his head, wincing. For a moment, Wain recovered herself and drew breath to cry out. Then the na’kyrim ’s eyes were on her once again and his hand was clamped over her mouth. Her sense of herself flickered and receded as smoothly and steadily as a soft tide.

“Hush, hush. This isn’t for anyone but you and I. This is to be love. Only that, for ever. It’s what you want, if you’ll but listen to your own desires. I’ll show you the way. We’ll go together.”

As he lifted the sheets away, some silent part of Wain cried out one last time in horror and fear. It was a vanishing, vanquished part, and soon it was gone altogether.

Aeglyss stood in the milky early-morning light, talking intently with Hothyn and half a dozen more White Owls. Wain looked down upon him from the window of her room in the inn. She could see him clearly, below in the yard, yet he was there in the window with her too. He was entwined about her thoughts like ivy on a tree. She would never be without him now.

She was aware that the sensations coursing through her, the certainties fortifying themselves within her head, were not her own. It seemed unimportant; just as unimportant as the faint, faint voice of guilt that survived somewhere inside her. That voice murmured of betrayal. She had betrayed her brother. How, she could not understand. The accusatory voice spoke in a language that she did not comprehend, though she knew that once – before last night – it had been the tongue of her own thoughts. She found it easy to disregard even that strangeness. The Black Road followed whatever course it must, and never had she felt her feet, and all the world’s, to be more firmly upon it.

She had been awake, in the small hours of the night, when Aeglyss was restlessly turning in his sleep. Moonlight lit the trails of tears on his face. He had wept and cursed without waking and she had heard the torment in his voice.

In the dawn, while he still slept, she had lain beside him and watched him. His face was at peace, by then. His eyes were moving beneath their lids, his breathing was heavy and slow. There was nothing left of the repulsion she had once felt at his inhuman features. It was a distant memory, the legacy of a different person. Instead, she saw a rigorous beauty in the way his bones shaped his skin and in the graceful white-nailed fingers lying upon the sheet.

He had passed in an instant from seemingly deep sleep to wakefulness. His grey eyes flicked open and met her own with a clear, alert gaze. A thrill of fear ran through her in that instant, as if she was a child caught observing some forbidden scene. He said nothing. He barely acknowledged her, in fact, beyond that first, piercing stare. He rose, doused his head and face with cold water and dressed.

Wain had sat naked on the bed and watched him moving about the room. She did not need him to speak to her. He was there, already, behind her eyes. Only when he was about to leave had he looked at her. He regarded her dispassionately. He crossed to her and turned her so that he could see the marks he had left on her back.

“Someone told me once that I had a dog’s heart,” he said. For some reason that made him laugh, bitter and pained. “But he underestimated me. I’ve a bit of the wolf in me, at least, from the look of you. I have been broken, and remade. He would not recognise me now.”

“You had bad dreams,” she said.

He took his hand away from her shoulder, but remained standing behind her. She did not dare to turn around.

“What is in me is never still,” Aeglyss said. “I always dream. Of more things than you can imagine. I dreamed K’rina.” There was a note of longing in his voice. Wain could hear his breathing. She wanted to look at him now, but was afraid of what she might see. He was too potent, too unbounded, for the eye to bear.

“She loved me, I think. Not as you do, my beloved. Not as you. But in her way.” He sighed. “We’ll see. I’ll have her with me, and we’ll see. My hounds are on her trail.”

He kissed the nape of Wain’s neck. Ice ran through her body, caressed her.

“Wait for me here,” he whispered. “I need to talk with the White Owls. They must be made to understand what happened. If not… these savages, they live in awe of the Anain. I can’t have them running back into Anlane telling tales of… I must… they must trust me. They must submit.”

Wain felt his fingernail slipping down her back, tracing her spine. It was a cold, transfixing sensation.

“I must set my hand firmly upon them. There can be no trust between me and them without that. There cannot be trust… except you. You I can trust, Wain, for you are mine. We are one, now. It was the only way I could be certain. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she had breathed, and then, soundlessly, he was gone.

She watched him now, and felt herself to be perched atop a towering cliff, gazing down from some unimaginable height upon that slight figure. Slight, yet wreathed about with terrible glory that none save she could see; radiant with the promise of power, utter and complete.