The chain was still warm in her fist when the door at the top of the stairwell opened, and Morgana did not turn. She did not need to. The fel against her skin told her everything — the pulse of the web, the threads tightening, the sudden bright thrum of Lyra's approach through the stone. But it was the other thing that made her pause. Three other things. Three threads that were not there before, and all of them singing.

She turned.

Lyra came down the stairs first, unhurried, her bare feet finding the worn steps with the ease of someone who had walked them a hundred times. The harness sat high on her ribs. The sheer gloves caught the firelight and threw it back in points. And in her right hand, wrapped twice around her fist, the silver chain hummed — a low, almost musical note that Morgana felt in her teeth.

Behind her, padding soft on the stone, came the wolves.

The first one was grey, old, its muzzle scarred and its ears laid flat. The second was black as the fel itself, lean and long-legged, ribs showing through its coat. The third was smaller, a bitch, brindle, and she carried her head lower than the others, as though she had learned the posture somewhere she did not want to remember. All three wore collars of living black latex — the fel, unmistakably, glossy and shifting, seated snug against the throat with a small silver ring at the front of each. All three had eyes the color of old gold, flecked at the rim exactly the way Morgana's own had gone.

They fanned out at the base of the stairs without being told. The grey one went left. The black one went right. The brindle bitch stayed at Lyra's heel and watched the throne with an attention that was almost reverent.

Morgana descended the dais. Her bare feet whispered across the cold stone, and the fel dress flowed behind her like something poured rather than worn, the long cape dragging a half-inch above the floor. The silver rings in her nipples tugged with every step, and she let them.

"You've been busy," Lyra said.

"So have we."

Morgana did not stop walking until she reached the base of the throne, where Elara was already kneeling. The maid had not moved since the ritual — her hands folded in her lap, her honey-blond hair still pinned in its severe bun, her hazel eyes fixed on the floor. But her breath was wrong. Too shallow. And the fragment of fel sewn into her apron was trembling against her thigh like a small animal that had scented something.

Morgana reached down and caught Elara's chin between two fingers. She tilted it up. Slow. Far enough that the firelight caught the thin white scar running from her left temple to her jaw.

"Look at me," Morgana said. "Not at them."

Elara looked at her. Her eyes were wet at the corners, and her throat moved once, but she did not speak.

Lyra came to a stop three paces away. The wolves growled low — a sound more felt than heard, a vibration in the floor. She did not call them off. She stood with the chain coiled in her fist and looked at the two of them the way a wolf looks at a rabbit that has stopped running.

"Where did you find them?" Morgana asked.

"The forest road. They'd been tracking the nymph's scent for two days." Lyra's voice was still hoarse from the cross. "The big one tried to take my arm off. The bitch watched. The black one ran, and then came back, and then knelt."

"Knelt."

"On the road. In the mud. Snout down." Lyra lifted the chain a fraction, and the black wolf's ears flicked toward the sound. "I gave them the fel. They gave me everything else."

Morgana let go of Elara's chin — reluctantly, slowly, the way one sets down a cup of wine one intends to pick back up — and crossed the last three steps to Lyra. Close enough that the chain brushed her bare hip. Close enough that she could smell the pine and sweat and sex still on Lyra's skin.

"And what did the throne give you?" she said, very quietly.

Lyra's mouth curved. "Ask it yourself. It's yours."

"It was mine." Morgana reached out and laid one long-nailed finger against the silver ring at the front of the black wolf's collar. The wolf did not move. Its gold-flecked eyes tracked her finger, and its breath came hot against her wrist. "And now you have made it a kennel."

"I made it a pack."

"Same thing."

Morgana turned back to Elara. The maid had not moved from her knees, but her hands were shaking now — visible, unmistakable, the tremble of someone who has held very still for a very long time and is beginning to lose the argument with her own body. The fel fragment in her apron had crept up to the waistband, a thin black line against the white cloth, and it was pulsing in time with her heart.

"Elara," Morgana said.

"My lady."

"Stand up."

She stood. Her legs were unsteady. She kept her eyes on Morgana's collarbone, which was as close to meeting her gaze as she allowed herself, and she did not look at the wolves even once, though the grey one had crept two full paces closer and was sniffing the air around her like a man appraising a horse.

"You're afraid," Morgana said.

"Yes, my lady."

"Good." Morgana reached for the apron strings at Elara's waist and pulled them loose with one hand. "Fear is honest. Fear is the only thing in this room that has not been bought." She drew the apron down, off her shoulders, and let it fall to the stone. The fel fragment came with it — a black ribbon of living latex, no longer than a hand, twisting on the floor like a worm in salt. "Pick it up."

Elara knelt again, slowly, and gathered the fragment into her palm. It coiled instantly around her fingers, and her breath caught — a small, sharp sound, quickly swallowed.

"You have fed it once," Morgana said. "You have carried it against your skin for a week. You have felt it wake when you think of the merchant's throat in your hands." She stepped behind her, and the wolves shifted to keep her in view. "But you have never worn it. Not really. Not the way I wear mine."

"My lady—"

"Hold still."

Morgana laid two fingers against the hollow of Elara's throat, and the fragment leapt from Elara's palm to her hand — eager, hungry, recognizing its source — and then she pressed it to the skin just below the maid's collarbone and let it go.

It spread.

Fast, at first — a black bloom across the pale skin of her chest, branching like frost on a window, reaching for her breasts before Morgana had even drawn her hand back. Elara made a sound that was not quite a gasp and not quite a sob. Her hands came up, and then stopped, and hung in the air, because she did not know whether she was permitted to touch it.

"Breathe," Morgana said. "If you faint, the wolves will have you before I can stop them."

The latex found Elara's nipples and closed around them. Her whole body jerked — a single, ungoverned spasm from hips to jaw — and her mouth opened on a breath that had no sound in it at all. The fel kept moving. It ran down her sternum, split around her navel, and threaded itself between her thighs, and Morgana watched it go with the flat, satisfied attention of a woman watching a fire take a house she had chosen to burn.

"There," she said. "Now you know what it feels like to be worn."

Elara's thighs pressed together. It did no good; the latex was already inside the seam of them, and the sound she made when it settled against her cunt was small and wet and entirely involuntary. Her face had gone the color of the fire. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the middle distance, and her hands, at last, had come down to grip the front of her own skirt, knuckles white.

"Lyra," Morgana said, without turning. "Bring the chain."

"You want her on the throne?"

"No." Morgana walked back to the dais and sat down on the lowest step of the Dark Throne, where the obsidian met the stone floor. She spread her knees and rested her elbows on them and looked up at Elara across the six feet of cold floor between them. "The throne drinks what is given to it. But it is not the only thing in this room that is hungry." She lifted one hand and crooked two fingers. "Come here."

Elara came. Her steps were short and careful, the way a woman walks when every step moves the latex inside her, and by the time she reached the dais her breath was coming in quick, shallow pulls through her nose. She stopped in front of Morgana, and her eyes dropped to the floor, and she stood there trembling with her hands at her sides.

"Kneel," Morgana said. "Not for me. Face the room. Let them see your back."

Elara turned and knelt. The wolves had closed in while Morgana was not watching them — the grey one off to the left, the black one crouched low on the right, the brindle bitch sitting directly in front of the dais with her tongue lolling. Lyra stood at the edge of the firelight with the chain hanging loose from her fist, and her gold-flecked eyes were very bright.

"Watch how I teach her," Morgana said.

She reached around Elara's ribs and took hold of the fel where it crossed her chest. It answered her at once — it always answered her — and she pulled, and it came away from the maid's skin like a second skin being peeled, and Elara arched back against her with a cry that cracked in the middle.

"It hurts," Elara said.

"It doesn't."

"It—"

"It feels like losing a hand," Morgana said against her ear, "and you are calling it pain because you have no other word for a thing that is leaving you. That is the first lesson. The second is this."

She gathered the fel in both hands — all of it, the ribbon off the apron, the bloom off the chest, the thread out of the cunt — and she pressed it back down, and this time she did not let it choose its own shape. She made it. She pulled it into a single black column in her fist, thick as her wrist, glossy and warm and already slick with what it had taken off Elara's skin, and she held it against the small of the maid's back while Elara shuddered and made a sound that was very close to begging.

"Lyra," she said. "Come hold her."

Lyra came. She set the chain down on the stone — carefully, the way one sets down a sleeping animal — and knelt behind Elara, and took her by the shoulders, and pulled her back until her spine was arched and her thighs were spread and her throat was bared to the ceiling.

"She's wet," Lyra said. Not to Morgana. To the room. "You can smell it from here."

"I can." Morgana rose onto her knees behind Elara and set the head of the fel against her. It was not a cock yet; it was a shape, a heavy black length with a blunt tip, and she held it there, at the entrance, and did not push. "Elara. Tell them what you want."

"My lady—"

"Tell them. Or I will put it away and you will go back to your room and lie in your own bed and think about this until the factor arrives."

A silence. The fire snapped. One of the wolves whined — the brindle bitch, low in her throat, as if she understood exactly what was being withheld.

"Put it in me," Elara said. Her voice was barely there. "Please. Put it in me."

Morgana pushed.

The fel went into her in one long, slow, unbroken stroke, and Elara's whole body bowed around it — spine curling forward, head dropping, hands flying up to grab at Lyra's forearms. The sound she made was not a word. It was the sound a woman makes when something she has been dreading and wanting in equal measure finally arrives, and Morgana felt it travel up through the fel into her own cunt, a hot sympathetic clench, and she had to close her eyes for a moment and breathe.

"There," she said, when she could. "That's the thing you've been carrying against your thigh all week. That's what it wanted."

Elara's answer was a moan that broke into a sob at the end. Her hips had already begun to move — small, involuntary rolls, taking the fel deeper and pulling back, and the latex stretched and thickened inside her with every stroke, filling her more each time, because it was learning her the way it had learned Morgana two hundred years ago, and it was a fast learner.

Morgana took her by the hips and set a rhythm. Slow. Deliberate. She drove the fel in to the root and held it there, and then pulled it out almost all the way, and then drove it in again, and on every stroke the latex rippled against Elara's walls and the maid's voice climbed a little higher. The wolves had begun to circle. She could hear their claws on the stone, the wet sound of their breathing, the click of the black one's teeth as it paced.

"Look at me," Morgana said to Lyra. "Not at her. At me."

Lyra looked. Her hands were still holding Elara's shoulders, and her jaw was tight, and her gold-flecked eyes had gone very dark.

"This is what the web is for," Morgana said. She was breathing harder now; she could not help it, the fel was feeding her everything Elara felt and it was a great deal. "Not to drain. Not to break. To make. Every thread you pull, you can also fill. Every vessel you empty, you can also shape." She thrust harder, and Elara screamed — a short, sharp, startled scream that echoed off the obsidian and came back changed. "The throne taught you to take. I am teaching you to give."

"You're teaching me to watch," Lyra said.

"That too."

Elara was close. Morgana could feel it through the fel — the tightening, the flutter, the way the maid's cunt had begun to grip and release in a rhythm that had nothing to do with her hips. Her scarred face was wet. Her hair had come loose from its bun and was stuck to her cheek. She had stopped trying to be quiet.

"My lady," she gasped. "My lady, please—"

"Please what."

"Let me—"

"Say it."

"Let me come."

Morgana leaned down over her back and spoke directly into her ear, and she did not slow the rhythm, and she did not stop. "Then come. On the throne's steps. In front of the wolves. And when the factor is in your hands tomorrow, you will remember that I gave you this first."

Elara came.

The scream tore out of her and hit the far wall and the runes on the throne flared — all of them, every carved line, a single deep gold pulse that ran from the base to the top of the high-backed seat and then went dark again. Under Morgana's knees, the stone rocked. Once. Gently. Like a ship taking a wave. The fel inside Elara clenched and drank, and Morgana felt the pleasure run up the thread between them and into her own body, and she let it, and her cunt tightened around nothing, and she made a small sound she did not intend to make.

The wolves had all gone still. The brindle bitch had her nose lifted toward the throne. The black one had crouched flat. The grey one was watching Morgana with an attention that was not animal at all.

Elara sagged. Lyra caught her before she hit the stone — took her full weight against her chest and held her there, and Elara's head fell back onto Lyra's shoulder, and her eyes were open and wet and looking at nothing, and her thighs were slick to the knee.

Morgana withdrew the fel. It came out of Elara with a wet sound and a last weak shudder, and she gathered it back into her hands and let it flow up her arms and settle into the dress, the whole length of it, warm and replete and faintly pulsing. The silver rings in her nipples tugged when she breathed. She was aware, distantly, that her own thighs were wet, and that she had not been touched, and that this was a thing she would deal with later.

She stood up.

Lyra was still holding Elara. The chain lay on the stone where she had set it down, and it was silent now — no hum, no note, just a length of silver with a hooked end. The wolves waited with their jaws open and their tongues out, and the firelight moved over their gold-flecked eyes and made them look, for a moment, like three more pieces of the throne.

Morgana looked down at Elara's ruined face and then up at Lyra's.

"Now you see what she can become," she said.

Lyra did not answer. She bent her head and pressed her mouth to the pulse in Elara's throat — once, briefly, the way one marks a page — and then she lifted her hand to the collar of the black wolf, and the wolf leaned into her palm and closed its eyes, and beneath all of them, deep in the obsidian, the Dark Throne hummed once and went quiet and waited.

Morgana crossed to the cross.

The obsidian ran eight feet high, its surface drinking the firelight instead of reflecting it, and the runes carved down its length had gone dark again since the ritual — patient, waiting, the way the throne waited. Selussa still hung from the iron brackets at the top, wrists bound above her head, her gold-marked body slack with sleep. Morgana looked at her for a moment. The princess's breathing was even. Her hair had come loose and lay in a dark sheet across her face.

"Take her down," Morgana said. "Gently. She is not to wake with marks."

Lyra laid Elara against the base of the throne — propped her against the cold stone, still gasping, her thighs slick and her eyes half-closed — and rose. She crossed to the cross and lifted Selussa's weight off the brackets with one arm while she worked the clasps with the other. The princess sagged against her, boneless, and Lyra carried her the way one carries a sleeping child, and laid her on the furs before the fire.

The wolves watched. The brindle bitch crept forward and sniffed at Selussa's hair, then withdrew and sat.

"The grey one," Morgana said. "Bring her."

"Her?"

"The old one." Morgana turned back to the black wolf, which had not moved from its crouch. "The big one tried to take your arm. That is a soldier. The black one knelt — that is a survivor, and survivors lie. But the old one with the scarred muzzle went left when the others went right, and she has not taken her eyes off me since she came down those stairs. She is the one who decides."

Lyra's mouth pulled. "You can read a wolf's mind now."

"I can read a body. Hers has been a body longer than yours has."

Morgana walked to the grey wolf. It did not retreat. Its ears stayed flat and its eyes tracked her face, and when she stopped in front of it, it lifted its scarred muzzle and looked up at her with an attention that had no fear in it at all — only assessment. She crouched. The movement brought the hem of the fel dress across the stone, and the latex flowed to keep pace with her, and the wolf's nostrils flared at the smell of it.

"You have been fed already," Morgana said. "You have a collar, and it is warm, and it is alive, and it has been telling you things while you slept. I can hear it in you." She put two fingers under the wolf's chin — the same two fingers she had used on Elara — and the animal's jaw trembled once, and then stilled. "But a collar is not a leash. A leash is not a chain. And a chain is not a throne."

The wolf's tongue came out and touched her knuckles. Morgana felt the fel in the collar answer — a slow pulse, the collar tightening a fraction at the throat, the wolf's breath going short.

"Good," she said. "You understand that much."

She rose and turned back to the cross. "Lyra. Bring her to me. Face the runes."

Lyra came. She took the grey wolf by the collar and walked her to the obsidian, and the wolf went without a sound — ears flat, tail low, claws clicking on the stone — and when Lyra lifted her, the animal did not struggle. Morgana watched the two of them, the woman and the wolf, and the thread between them that she could now feel in her own chest, and she filed it away.

"The brackets," she said. "Front paws first."

Lyra bound the wolf's forelegs to the iron rings at the top of the cross. The position stretched her, lifted her onto her hind legs, and the wolf's body went rigid — not from pain. From the fel. The collar had begun to work against her throat, spreading down her chest in a slow black bloom, and the animal's eyes had gone wide and gold-flecked in the firelight, and her breath was coming in short, hard pulls.

"The hind legs," Morgana said. "Wide."

Lyra caught the wolf's back legs and drew them apart and bound them to the lower brackets, so the animal hung spread against the obsidian with her belly exposed and her sex open to the room, and she was panting now, a fast wet sound, and her claws scraped at the stone that would not give.

"Step back," Morgana said.

Lyra stepped back.

Morgana laid her palm flat against the cross above the wolf's head, and she pulled.

The runes lit.

Not the deep slow gold of the ritual — this was brighter, whiter, a pulse that ran down the obsidian in branching lines and reached the wolf's bound body and sank into it like water into dry earth. The animal screamed. It was not a dog's scream; it was higher, stranger, a sound that had a woman's shape inside it, and the fel collar drank the sound and gave it back changed. Morgana felt the pleasure come up the thread — the wolf's pleasure, animal and enormous and utterly without shame — and she held it, and did not let it go to the throne yet. She held it in her own body, and it filled her from the cunt outward, and her nipples went tight under the silver rings, and she let her head fall back for one long breath.

"It's working," Lyra said.

"Of course it's working."

"No — look at her."

Morgana looked.

The fur was going. Not falling out — receding, drawing back into the skin like water into a sponge, and under it the skin was not grey and not wolf. It was pale and smooth and the shape beneath it was changing, hips widening, shoulders narrowing, the long muzzle shortening and softening and the ears — the ears — flattening and then rising again, pointed and tufted and set higher on a skull that was becoming a woman's skull, and there was a tail, a long grey tail with a white tip, curling down between the bound thighs and then lifting, and Morgana watched it lift, and something in her chest went very still.

The wolf's eyes opened. They were no longer gold-flecked. They were gold, entirely, ringed with black, and they were looking at her with a comprehension that had not been there a moment before.

"Morgana," Lyra said, and her voice had changed. "What is she."

"She is a thread," Morgana said. "The throne is making her into one."

She reached for the collar. The fel had spread down the wolf's — the woman's — chest now, and it was doing what it had done to Elara, but slower, and with more purpose, and Morgana could feel through her palm that it was not just pleasure it was building. It was a shape. A pattern. The throne had learned something from the cross, and the cross had learned something from Selussa, and now the two of them together were writing on this body the way a scribe writes on a page that has already been ruled.

The woman's mouth opened. Her teeth were still wrong — too long at the canines, and the tongue behind them was not a wolf's tongue, and when she spoke, the sound came out in two registers at once, one of them human and one of them not.

"Mistress," she said.

Morgana's hand tightened on the collar.

"Again."

"Mistress." The word came out cleaner the second time. The human register had won. The woman's hips rolled against the obsidian, and the fel had reached her sex now, and she was wet in a way wolves are not, and she was looking at Morgana the way Elara looked at her, which was to say: the way a body looks at the thing that has finally told it what it is.

Morgana turned. "Elara."

Elara was still propped against the base of the throne. She had pulled her skirt down over her knees at some point, and her hair had come fully loose, and she was watching the cross with an expression that Morgana recognized — the same expression she had worn on this floor two hundred years ago, the first time the fel had taught her what her own body could be made to feel.

"My lady."

"On your feet. The throne."

Elara's head came up. "My lady, I am not—"

"You are. Sit."

She stood. Her legs were not steady, and her skirt was stained, and she crossed the floor to the dais with the careful, deliberate steps of a woman who has decided not to look down. The wolves parted for her — the black one and the brindle bitch both, without being told — and Morgana noted that, and filed it, and said nothing.

Elara climbed the dais and stood in front of the Dark Throne.

"Sit down," Morgana said.

"My lady, I have never—"

"I know what you have never done. Sit."

Elara sat.

The moment her weight settled between the skull armrests, the runes at her shoulders flared — not gold this time, but a deep, bruised red, the color of a wound just opened — and Elara's back arched against the high seat and her mouth opened and no sound came out. Her hands found the armrests. Her fingers dug into the carved bone. The fel in her apron uncoiled and ran up her arms to meet the throne's light, and where it met it, it changed — thickening, silvering, taking on a sheen that was not latex and not metal but something between.

"Breathe through it," Morgana said. "It is not hurting you."

"It is—"

"It is filling you. There is a difference. You will learn it the way you learned the spike." Morgana crossed to the dais and stood at the foot of the throne, and she could feel the throne's hunger through the soles of her feet, and it was not the deep slow hunger of the vessel-room drain. It was a different appetite. It was a maker's appetite. "You are going to take what the wolf gives," she said, "and you are going to become what I need you to be."

"What do you need me to be."

Morgana looked at her. The maid sat in the throne with her scarred face tilted back and her honey-blond hair spread over the skulls, and the throne was already writing on her — the pale skin of her throat going faintly gold at the edges, the line of her jaw sharpening, the tired hazel of her eyes filling from the pupil outward with a slow warm amber that was not quite the wolf's gold and not quite Morgana's own.

"Something the merchants will open their ledgers for," Morgana said. "Something they will invite into their counting-houses and their bedchambers and their confidence, and never once think to ask what it is."

She reached up and took Elara's chin — the third time tonight, and the gesture was becoming a language between them — and she turned the maid's face toward the firelight, and watched the amber finish filling her eyes.

The scar was gone.

Not healed. Gone. The thin white line from temple to jaw had smoothed and vanished, and the skin beneath it was unmarked and faintly luminous, and Morgana ran her thumb along the place where it had been and felt nothing but warmth.

"My lady," Elara said, and her voice was not her voice. It was lower, and it had a burr in it, and it was still careful — still formal, still the voice of a woman who chose her words like she was choosing which foot to put on ice — but it had been made over, the way a room is made over by new light. "My lady, I can feel them."

"Feel what."

"The threads." Elara's amber eyes were fixed on the middle distance. "All of them. The princess. The mage. The ones in the east wing. The wolf on the cross. They are — they are singing, my lady, and I can hear every one of them, and I can feel where they are, and I can feel what they want."

"Good," Morgana said. "That is the web. That is what I have been carrying alone for a week."

She let go of Elara's chin and stepped back, and the throne's light dimmed to a low red glow, and Elara sat in it with her hands on the skulls and her new eyes wide and her new mouth slightly open, and Morgana could see the tail now — not a wolf's tail. A fox's. Long and silver-tipped and curled around the base of the throne like a thing that had always been there.

Behind her, the grey wolf on the cross had gone still. The fel had finished with her. She hung slack in the brackets, breathing slow, and when Morgana looked at her she saw that the transformation had stopped short of the woman it had been reaching for — the tail was there, the ears were there, the skin was smooth and the eyes were gold, but the face was still partly wolf, and the mouth was still wrong, and the collar at her throat had gone silver and was no longer pulsing.

"She is done," Morgana said. "Cut her down. She will be a vessel, not a thread. She has given everything the throne could take."

Lyra did not move. She was standing at the edge of the firelight with her arms crossed and her gold-flecked eyes on Elara, and her jaw was tight, and she had not looked at the wolf on the cross in some time.

"Lyra."

"She was a wolf this morning," Lyra said.

"She was a wolf this morning because no one had shown her anything better." Morgana crossed to her. She stopped close — close enough that Lyra had to either step back or hold her ground, and Lyra held her ground, and Morgana felt the thread between them pull taut. "You are angry."

"I'm not angry."

"You are watching me make a queen out of a maid and a woman out of a wolf, and you are standing in the corner with your arms crossed, and you are not angry." Morgana reached up and laid her hand flat against Lyra's sternum, over the harness, where the fel had thickened against her ribs. "You are something else."

Lyra's breath went short. Not from fear. Morgana could feel it through the thread — the sharp, hot, unnameable thing that had been building in Lyra since the throne room, since the cross, since she had watched Morgana take the chain and pull the web and turn gold at the rim. It was not jealousy. It was not rivalry. It was the thing a predator feels when it realizes it has been circling something that is also circling it.

"You took the factor," Morgana said, very quietly. "You claimed the right. Tomorrow night you will go to the crossroads inn and you will bring him back, and he will be yours to open, and I will not touch him first. That is what I promised."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight you are going to learn what I have been learning." Morgana slid her hand up Lyra's sternum, along the collar, to the hinge of her jaw, and Lyra let her, and the fel in the harness answered her touch with a low pulse that Morgana felt in her own cunt. "You have been taking. You have been draining. You have been good at it, and I have been proud of you, and I have let you take me apart on my own bed and call it a lesson." She turned Lyra's face toward the firelight. "But the web is not a mouth. It is a loom. And you have not yet learned to weave."

Lyra's hand came up and closed around her wrist. Not to push her away. To hold her there.

"Show me," she said.

Morgana smiled — the faint, cruel thing at the corner of her mouth, the one she had not shown anyone in two centuries and did not show now except by accident. She turned, keeping Lyra's hand on her wrist, and drew her toward the dais. Elara sat in the throne with her amber eyes and her silver tail and her new face, and the throne's light moved over her, and Morgana could feel the web singing through her — every thread alive, every vessel accounted for, every promise kept and every promise still to keep.

She sat down on the lowest step of the dais, between the throne and the fire, and she pulled Lyra down beside her, and she did not let go of her wrist.

"Watch her," Morgana said. "Watch what the throne is making. And while you watch, I am going to teach you what a thread feels like from the other end."

She laid her palm flat on Lyra's bare stomach, just above the harness, and she opened the web, and she gave.

Lyra's whole body bowed. Her head went back and her mouth opened and the sound that came out of her was not a word — it was the sound a woman makes the first time she feels another woman's pleasure arrive in her own nerves with no hand on her at all. Her thighs clamped together. Her hand dug into Morgana's wrist hard enough to bruise. And Morgana held her there, and did not stop, and let the throne's red light move over both of them, and behind them Elara sat in the dark seat with her new eyes closed and her new tail curled and her new mouth moving on a name that was not yet spoken.

The wolves had lain down. All three of them, in a loose ring around the dais, their collars pulsing in time with the throne. The grey one on the cross hung slack and silent. The fire burned low. And in the obsidian under all of them, the Dark Throne drank and drank and drank.