The terrace air was colder than I expected, sharp enough to bite through the thin silk of my sleeves, and I welcomed it. It was the first thing in weeks that had actually reached me the way it was supposed to — cold *should* feel cold, and for a moment, standing there with my hands braced against the stone balustrade, I let myself simply feel that one true thing instead of searching for the twenty others I couldn't locate.
Behind me, through the tall doors, the orchestra had recovered its nerve and the ballroom's murmur had resumed its usual polite roar, already reshaping what had happened into something the nobility could gossip about without choking on it. I didn't go back in. I doubted anyone would come looking for me — not the Duke, who would rather let the scandal cool before acknowledging it, and not Alex or Killian, who both knew better by now than to crowd me right after I'd done something none of us had a name for yet.
I walked instead, following the terrace where it curved along the east wing, away from the light and the noise, until the palace gardens opened up below in dark, orderly rows of hedges, silvered faintly by a moon I hadn't noticed until now.
I didn't hear him until it was too late to have heard him at all.
One moment there was only the cold and the quiet. The next, something cool and impossibly thin pressed flat against the side of my throat, and a voice — low, unhurried, entirely too amused for the circumstances — spoke from somewhere just behind my shoulder.
"You walk very carelessly for a woman with as many enemies as you apparently have."
I went still. Not from fear — I registered, distantly, almost clinically, that fear was not what had frozen me — but from the simple, practical understanding that whatever was resting against my throat was a blade, and moving carelessly against a blade was how people ended their evenings bleeding on palace gravel instead of merely startled by it.
"Most people announce themselves before drawing a sword on someone," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected — steadier, if I was honest, than it had any right to be, given a stranger currently held a very sharp piece of metal an inch from my pulse.
A low, surprised laugh, close enough that I felt it more than heard it. "Most people scream."
"I'm not most people."
"So I'm gathering." The blade didn't move, but I had the sense — impossible to prove, and yet certain — that he was studying me now with real interest rather than the idle menace he'd opened with. "Turn around. Slowly. I'd rather not have to guess what you're doing with your hands."
I turned, slowly, exactly as instructed, until I was facing him properly, the sword still angled at my throat, close enough now that I could see the moonlight running silver along its edge. He was young — not much older than Killian, if I had to guess — dressed too plainly for a palace ball, dark clothes with none of the gold thread or ceremonial trim the other guests wore, as if he'd wandered out of a different story entirely and into the edges of mine. His face was handsome in a sharp, unbothered way, the kind of face that had likely never had to try very hard for anything, and his eyes — even in the dim light, I could tell they were assessing me with something closer to curiosity than menace, the way you might examine a puzzle box you weren't sure was worth the effort of solving.
"Who are you," I asked, and something in my own flatness surprised even me — no tremor, no plea, just a question asked the way you'd ask for the time. "And why are you pointing a sword at me?"
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not quite surprise. Recalculation, the same way Killian's face had recalculated on the stairwell, like I'd returned an answer his equation hadn't accounted for.
"That's an interesting question to lead with," he said. "Most people in your position ask what I want, or beg me not to hurt them. You're asking for my name."
"You're the one who's armed. I assumed you had the advantage in choosing which question mattered."
The corner of his mouth curved, not quite a smile, something more considering than that. "You're either very brave, Lady Eckart, or you simply don't understand your situation."
He knew my name. I filed that away the way I filed everything now — carefully, without urgency — though some old, learned instinct noted that a stranger holding a sword to my throat while already knowing exactly who I was should probably concern me more than it did.
"I'm not going to tell you my name," he said, before I could ask again. "Not tonight. Call it a habit of mine — I find people behave rather differently around a name and a title than they do around a stranger with a blade, and I'd like to know which version of you I'm speaking with before I decide that's worth losing."
"How diplomatic of you."
"I thought so."
I should have been afraid. I understood that, distantly, the way you understand a fact you've been told rather than one you've felt — a stranger, armed, at night, with no one near enough to hear if I called out. Old Elodie, or the fragments of her I carried in dreams, would have known exactly how to be afraid of a moment like this. And yet the fear I kept waiting for simply didn't come, the same absence I'd been living inside for weeks now, flat and undisturbed even with cold steel resting an inch from my pulse.
He tilted the blade, very slightly, catching the moonlight along its length, watching my face while he did it — testing, I understood now, not threatening. Waiting to see what I'd do.
Nothing. I did nothing, because there was nothing in me rising to meet the moment the way there should have been.
And then, without warning, the world tilted sideways.
It wasn't like the other dreams — slow drifting, wading into memory the way I usually did. This was a door kicked open. One second I was standing on a moonlit terrace with a stranger's sword at my throat, and the next, that same cold press of metal against skin split into two moments at once, layered over each other like glass over glass — the sword in front of me now, and another sword, smaller, closer, held by a hand I couldn't see clearly, years and years ago, against the throat of a child.
*Little Elodie.* Small enough that the blade looked enormous against her, small enough that her whole body had gone rigid with a fear too large for her frame to hold. A face above her — blurred, smeared at the edges the way all these memories were, but the laughter was clear, sharp, delighted, the particular cruel amusement of someone who found a child's terror entertaining rather than troubling. *Cry,* the blurred face seemed to be saying, though the words came to me the way sound always did in these memories, muffled, arriving late. *Go on. Cry. It's more fun when you cry.*
The blade moved. A thin, deliberate line opened along small Elodie's arm — not deep, not meant to maim, just enough to hurt, just enough to teach whatever lesson the blurred face had decided a child needed to learn that day — and the sound she made didn't come to me as sound at all. It came to me as a feeling, a raw, tearing panic that had nowhere to go, trapped inside a body too small to run and too frightened to fight, and it detonated through my chest with a violence that made the cold night air on the terrace disappear entirely.
I couldn't breathe.
I registered, distantly, that my hands had come up to my own throat, clawing at nothing, at empty air, and that a sound was coming out of me that I didn't recognize as my own voice — short, ragged, panicked in a way I had not been panicked once since I'd opened my eyes in this body. The stranger's sword was still there, still real, still an inch from my throat, and my mind couldn't seem to separate it from the other one, the small one, the laughing face, the thin cut opening along a child's arm while no one came.
*No one came.* That understanding arrived with its own separate, crushing weight, distinct from the panic itself. Somewhere in that memory, a child had screamed, and bled, and no one had come.
"Elodie—" The stranger's voice, sharp now, all trace of amusement gone, the sword already dropping away from my throat, but I couldn't process the absence of the blade fast enough to matter. My vision had gone strange at the edges, narrowing, darkening, the garden and the moonlight and the stranger's suddenly alarmed face all tunneling down into a single point of white-hot, wordless terror.
"Elodie, look at me—"
I heard my own breath tearing in and out too fast, felt my knees buckle beneath me before I'd decided to let them, and the last thing I registered, before the dark finally closed all the way over me, was a pair of hands catching me before I hit the ground — quick, careful, entirely unlike the cruelty of the blurred face in the memory — and a voice, closer now, low with something that might almost have been concern, if I'd had the ability left in me to care.
"Someone get a physician," the stranger said, to no one, to everyone, his composure cracking for the first time since he'd pressed a blade to my throat and found, instead of the fear he'd expected, something far stranger looking back at him. "Now."
And then there was nothing at all.