I had been raised to be useful. Awe was a luxury for people who could afford to be slow.

The cart reeked of old wounds, iron-slow and bitter on the tongue, a scent that clung to the back of my throat like damp rot. The wooden slats beneath me pressed sharp ridges into my thighs, unyielding as the cold metal of the bars caging me in. A low creak hummed through the wheels, steady as a pulse, as we rolled forward. I sat with my hands folded in my lap because I had learned at nine that movement invited correction, and the cart had three guards and one driver and a road that lay too straight for the country it crossed. The country was Solara. The country had decided I was its bill, and I was being delivered.

We had crossed the border at dawn. Beyond it the land had stopped trying to grow anything, and the sky had stopped being a sky and become a colder thing, blue-black and patient. My father had not come to see me off. He had sent his steward. The steward had read my titles in a voice that made each title a small assault: "the bastard," "the substitute," "the witch's get who serves the kingdom in her sister's stead." I had thanked him for his service. The steward had not flinched. He had been raised to be useful, too.

My sister had escaped. That was the thing my father could not forgive. Lyssa had been promised since she was twelve, and years ago she had walked into the dark and not come out, and the kingdom had needed a body, and my body had always been available because my father had never quite gotten around to deciding what else it was for.

The cart slowed. Beyond the bars, the obsidian gates of the Hollow opened on hinges that did not creak. I could not decide whether silence was an improvement.

Three lesser demons unlatched the cage. Hunched. Pale. They would not look at me. I noted the way they stood, the side of the cart they preferred, the way the leftmost one shifted weight off his right foot. None of this was useful. All of this was habit. My mother's third grimoire said attention is the only inheritance the unloved have, so take it seriously. I had been taking attention seriously for thirteen years.

"Walk," one of them said.

I walked.

The hall swallowed us. Black stone underfoot, polished to a wet shine that was dry to touch, smooth as a lover's whisper against my worn soles. Silver fire in the sconces, cold to look at, colder past the eyes, casting shadows that licked at the edges of my vision. Tapestries that shifted when I did not watch them, their threads rustling like a breath held too long. The air tasted of incense burned for so long it had outlasted its priests, sharp and resinous on my lips, and beneath the incense a fainter old-blood note that the Hollow had not bothered to hide, curling heavy in my chest.

We passed a courtier who looked nearly human in a dim light. He inclined his head a fraction as I went by. The lesser demons missed it. I did not. I filed the inclination where I file gestures that might be levers later.

"How long before he realizes I'm killing him?"

The thought arrived clean. I did not yet know what it meant. I would.

The throne room opened the way a door opens at the end of a long argument. Wide. Final. The court was assembled along the sides in shadow and silk, and the air there was a degree colder than the hall, prickling the skin of my arms beneath my thin shift. The dais was at the far end, and on the dais was the only thing I had been told would matter.

Lord Azrael of the Hollow was not what the bards had prepared me for. The bards had used words like terrible and splendor and fathomless, which were the words bards used about anything they had not seen. He looked, in fact, like a man who had not been touched in a long time. Tall. Lean. Dark formal coat without ornament because he had never required ornament. Hair gathered at the nape with a thin leather cord. Skin the wrong shade of pale, the way cold marble is pale, as if it might chill my fingers should I dare to brush against it. His face had been beautiful once, before something quiet had cut the warmth out of it, and a thin scar ran across his right cheekbone like a line drawn by a careful hand, and his eyes were iron-grey, piercing with a weight that settled low in my belly. I looked at him once and did not look at him again. Some faces charge interest on a second glance.

"The substitute," he said. His voice arrived already in the room. Layered. Old. Calm in the way that very deep water is calm, rolling over me like a tide I could not swim against.

"Your Majesty," I said, because my father had drilled the form into me, and I would not give him the satisfaction of forgetting it now.

"Kneel."

"I would prefer to negotiate first."

A noise rippled through the court, the small sound a body makes when it does not laugh because it does not yet know the joke is permitted. The lesser demons at my back shifted. I had broken a rule of the building. I had heard the rule break and had not minded.

Lord Azrael tilted his head. The motion was wrong, not in any way I could draw, but in a way my spine knew, a shiver tracing down it like a fingertip I could not see. A predator considering a piece of meat that had asked for a contract before being eaten.

"Negotiate," he said.

"My kingdom owes you fifty years of peace," I said. "I am the payment for it. I would like to know the terms of my draining before it begins. Will my body be returned with my face intact, or will my father have to identify me by my teeth? Will any part of my magic be returned to my mother's coven, or is that not part of the debt? When I die, will it be quick?"

"Such considerations are not customary."

"Customs are renegotiable," I said. "I have come willingly. I am not screaming. I am not hexing. I have not even spat. I think I have earned ten minutes of contractual specificity."

He tilted his head again, and this time the motion sent a pulse through me, unbidden, a heat low and unfamiliar, as if my body had mistaken threat for invitation. I did not enjoy it the way a girl in a story might. I filed it where I file a small advantage one cannot afford to spend in the hour one has been given it.

"Approach the altar," he said.

The altar was carved from a single piece of obsidian into the shape of an open palm, its surface glassy and cold, biting into my skin as I climbed up. I lay down, and folded my hands across my chest because my mother's grimoire had said if they bind you, give them less of you to bind. The court had stopped breathing in the way courts pretend to breathe. Lord Azrael came and stood at the altar's edge and put one hand upon the obsidian, and the silver fire in the sconces flickered as if a wind had passed, the air around us thickening with a charge I felt in my bones.

He spoke the binding in a tongue I did not know. The words moved through my chest like cold water, slick and invasive, pooling in places I had kept guarded. I felt the magic find the bond it had come looking for, and I felt it open me up, raw and trembling, and I felt it, for one half of one second, doing what it had been written to do.

Then it reversed.

I cannot describe a reversal of magic in a way that does it justice. I will say only that the silver light that had been moving from him toward the altar began to move from the altar toward him, and from him into me, and the cold water in my chest became cold water in his. My body arched faintly against the stone, not by choice, but by the pull of something older, something that dragged a gasp from my lips as the look on his face changed. It changed the way a man's face changes when he steps onto a step that is not where he expected the step to be, and I saw the strain in his jaw, the flicker of something unguarded as our boundaries bled into one.

The altar was gripped under his right hand. White-knuckled. He did not release it.

I felt his hunger then, sudden, ancient, surprised, a ravenous ache that clawed up my own throat, a need I had no body for but felt in every nerve, my pulse hammering as if it sought to answer him. He felt my fear, and I felt my fear become his, a mirrored trembling that tightened my skin, and I lay on the altar with both of us in me at once, my breath shallow, my thighs pressing together against the stone as if to contain the storm of it. A single thought arrived, clean, in my own voice, said only to me.

How long before he realizes I'm killing him?

I closed my eyes. The court did not move. The silver fire in the sconces went a shade dimmer, and the wall behind the dais went a shade colder, and Lord Azrael of the Hollow did not let go of the altar. I understood, with the part of me that had been raised to be useful, that I had just been handed leverage I had not asked for, a shared exposure that burned through us both, his gaze on me now a weight I could feel against my skin, heavy with unspoken intent.

He did not understand it yet. He would.

"Rise," he said. The word arrived already in the room.

I rose.

His hand was still on the altar.