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.

Morgana felt the web open under her palm like a wound going soft — and Lyra took it the way a dry field takes rain. Her spine snapped straight. Her heels skidded on the stone. For three full seconds she did not breathe, and Morgana watched her face come apart and reassemble around something new, watched the gold in her eyes flood until there was no white left at the rim.

"Breathe," Morgana said. "You are not being drained. You are being taught."

Lyra's breath came back in a rush. Her hand was still locked around Morgana's wrist, and her nails had opened two small crescents in the skin there, and she did not let go. Her thighs were pressed together so hard the muscle stood out along the inside of them, and there was a shine on the stone between her feet, and Morgana noted it and said nothing because there was no need.

"That was—" Lyra's voice cracked in the middle. She tried again. "That was Elara."

"That was every thread at once. You felt the maid because she is the nearest. You felt the princess because she is the newest. You felt the mage in her bed and the vessels in the east wing and the wolf on the cross, and if you had held it one heartbeat longer you would have felt the factor asleep in an inn two days' ride from here, dreaming about a chest of silver he does not yet know is mine." Morgana lifted her hand off Lyra's stomach. The harness sagged where she had touched it, the fel remembering her fingers. "That is the loom. Now you learn to pull a single thread out of it."

She turned her head toward the cross.

The grey wolf hung silent in the brackets. The transformation had stalled halfway and would not finish; the throne had taken what it wanted and lost interest, and what remained was a body neither wolf nor woman, breathing slow, eyes half-lidded and gold. It would make a fine vessel. It would kneel and carry and hold, and it would never be more than that.

But the black one had risen.

It stood between the fire and the dais with its ribs showing and its head low and its collar pulsing, and it was watching Lyra the way it had watched her on the forest road — the long, patient, measuring look of an animal that had run once and decided not to run again. The brindle bitch had not moved from her place at the fire. She lay with her chin on her paws and her eyes open and her ears swiveled toward the black wolf, and there was something in the set of her shoulders that Morgana recognized, because she had worn it herself, once, in a house that was not hers.

"The black one," Morgana said.

Lyra followed her gaze. "He's the one who knelt."

"He is the second-weakest thing in this room. The bitch is smaller, but she is older, and she has been beaten into patience, and patience is a weapon. He is young and he is fast and he is frightened, and frightened is the only thing in a pack that can be taught." Morgana rose from the step and the fel dress ran down her legs to keep pace. "You took his submission on a road in the mud. That was a collar. Now you are going to take his strength, and that will be a rank."

Lyra stood slowly. She wiped her palm down her bare thigh — a nervous gesture she would not have made an hour ago, and Morgana filed it — and she crossed to the black wolf with the chain still coiled in her other fist.

The wolf did not retreat. He lowered his head until his muzzle was level with her knee, and his tail went down and stayed down, and he made a sound in his throat that was not a growl.

"He knows," Lyra said.

"He has known since the stairs." Morgana came to stand at her shoulder. "He has been standing in this room listening to a throne drink and watching a maid become a queen, and he has understood every moment of it, because a wolf understands rank the way you understand hunger. He is waiting for you to tell him what he is."

"And what is he."

"Yours. If you take him." Morgana laid two fingers against the silver ring at the front of the collar. The fel inside it woke at her touch — a slow, glossy ripple that ran around the throat and tightened, and the wolf's breath went short and his haunches dropped an inch. "The fel will carry what you give it. Open the thread and pull. His savagery, his speed, the thing in him that made him try your arm on the road — take it into yourself and leave him the shape. He will keep the collar. He will keep the pack. He will be less than he was and more than he could have been alone, and he will know it, and he will be grateful, because that is what a wolf is."

Lyra's jaw worked. "That's what you did to me."

"No." Morgana's voice went flat. "What I did to you, I did with your mouth open and your hands on me. You asked. He has not asked. He has only stopped running, which is the closest thing a wolf has to a vow." She stepped back. "If you want the pack, take the pack. If you want to stand in the corner with your arms crossed and call it mercy, then cut him down and put him in the east wing with the others, and I will not think less of you. But do not stand there and pretend the choice is not yours."

The fire popped. The black wolf's tongue came out and touched the back of Lyra's hand.

Lyra closed her eyes.

Then she opened the thread.

Morgana felt it go — the web tightening, a single strand drawn taut out of the whole singing loom, and the strand ran from Lyra's chest into the collar and down into the animal's body, and the wolf's whole frame locked. His claws skated on the stone. His spine arched and his head went back and his mouth opened on a sound that started as a snarl and finished as something else entirely, high and thin and shaking, and the fel collar flared silver-white and began to spread.

It went down his chest first, a dark bloom under the black fur, and then it went deeper than skin. Morgana could see it through the thread — the savagery coming up the strand in a slow hot rope, the speed, the long-muscled fluidity of a body built to run down deer, the flat cold instinct that had made him circle her on the road and test her arm. It poured into Lyra and she took it standing. Her shoulders widened a fraction. The tendons in her forearms stood up. Her stance shifted, weight forward, heels light, and when she opened her eyes again there was a new stillness in them, the stillness of a body that had just been given a second engine.

The wolf sagged. His ribs worked. He was still on his feet — barely — and the collar had gone from silver to a duller grey, and the gold had drained out of his eyes and left them the plain amber of any dog, and he looked up at Lyra with an expression that was no longer measuring. It was settled. It was done.

He lowered his muzzle to the floor between her feet.

"There," Morgana said. "Now you have a pack."

Lyra did not answer. She was breathing hard through her nose and her hand had gone to her own sternum, over the harness, where the fel had thickened to hold what she had taken, and Morgana could feel through the thread that she was not entirely sure yet whether she had been fed or emptied.

"It will settle," Morgana said. "By morning it will feel like your own. That is the cruelty of it — the web does not tell you which parts of you it grew."

She turned toward the dais.

"Elara."

The maid sat in the Dark Throne with her amber eyes open and her silver tail curled around the base of the skull armrest, and she had been watching the whole of it — the collar, the thread, the wolf going down — with the fixed, hungry attention of a woman reading a language she had just learned she could read.

"My lady."

"You felt that."

"I felt all of it." Elara's voice had the burr in it still, the new lower register, and it came out of her mouth carefully, as though she were testing the shape of each word before she released it. "The taking. The — the strand. I felt where it started and where it went and I felt what he lost, and I felt what she gained, and I could have told you the moment before she opened it that she was going to."

"Because you are a thread in the loom now. You can feel the tension." Morgana mounted the dais and stood over the throne, and the runes under Elara's shoulders glowed a low, banked red. "But feeling is not doing. You have carried the fel against your thigh for a week and fed it a merchant's will. Tonight you learn the other half."

She looked down at Lyra, who had come to the foot of the dais with the grey-eyed wolf at her heel.

"Sit," Morgana said.

Lyra's chin came up. "Where."

"On the step. Facing me."

Lyra sat. The wolf lay down at her hip, and the brindle bitch rose at last and crossed the room and lay down on her other side, and the three of them made a small grey-and-black-and-brindle country at the foot of the throne, and Morgana noted the geometry of it and did not smile.

Morgana turned back to Elara and held out her hand.

"Give me your palm."

Elara laid her hand in Morgana's. The fel on her wrist had gone silver at the cuff and it had kept the throne's sheen, and when Morgana pressed her thumb into the center of the palm, the skin there answered — a slow warm pulse, like a second heartbeat under the pad.

"You have fed on a man," Morgana said. "You have opened him and poured him into the throne and watched the light go out of his eyes. That is the easy end. Any fool with a whip can empty a vessel. The hard end is the one you have not been taught." She turned Elara's hand over, palm down, and laid it against the side of her own throat, where the fel dress met the choker. "Do it to her."

Elara's eyes went wide. "My lady—"

"Not the spike. Not the drain. You are going to give her what she just took, and you are going to give it back to her through her own body, and you are going to make her feel every thread in this room at once and understand that she is holding one of them." Morgana let go of her hand. "Start with her mouth."

Elara looked at Lyra.

Lyra looked back at her. There was a long moment in which neither of them moved, and the fire cracked, and the black wolf's breathing slowed, and Morgana stood over both of them in the red light and watched the loom decide.

Then Elara slid down off the throne.

She crossed the step on her hands and knees — the fel on her arms silvering as it met the throne's glow, the new tail dragging across the obsidian — and she stopped in front of Lyra with her face very close, and she reached up and took Lyra's jaw in her hand, and she kissed her.

It was not a gentle kiss. Elara had kissed no one in a decade and had never kissed a woman in her life, and what she did instead was open Lyra's mouth with her thumb and take it, and Lyra made a sound low in her throat and let her, and Morgana felt the thread between the two of them snap taut.

And then Elara gave.

Morgana saw it happen — the pulse leave Elara's palm where it lay against Lyra's sternum, the harness darkening under her hand, the fel taking the gift and carrying it down into Lyra's body in a slow running wave. Lyra's back bowed off the step. Her hands came up and caught Elara by the waist and held on, and the sound she made was not a word, and the black wolf lifted its head and the brindle bitch pressed her nose into Lyra's hip and the whole small country at the foot of the throne came alive at once.

"Again," Morgana said. "Slower."

Elara did it again. She had her mouth on Lyra's throat this time, and her hand between Lyra's thighs, and the fel ran down her forearm and into Lyra's cunt the way it had once run into her own, and Lyra's hips rolled up off the stone and her heels dug in and her voice climbed, and Morgana watched her new strength come apart under a maid's hands and found that she could not look away.

"You feel it," she said. "That is the loom. That is what the throne does not teach you, because the throne only knows how to drink. You can pour."

Elara's answer was to push two fingers into Lyra and curl them, and Lyra's whole body convulsed, and the fel in the harness flared silver-white, and Morgana felt the pleasure come up the thread and into her own cunt with a sharpness that made her close her eyes for one beat. When she opened them, Elara had Lyra's thigh over her shoulder and her mouth where her fingers had been, and Lyra had both hands tangled in the maid's loose honey-blond hair, and the wolves had all three of them gone still with their collars pulsing in time with Lyra's heartbeat.

"Stop," Morgana said.

Elara stopped. Her mouth was wet and her chin was wet and her new eyes were entirely amber and she was breathing hard, and she looked up at Morgana from between Lyra's legs with an expression that was equal parts terror and hunger and something that had no name yet.

"Now do it while she takes the wolf."

Lyra's head came up. "What?"

"You heard me. Elara will keep her hand on you, and you will open the thread to the black one, and you will take the rest of what he has. Not the speed — that is spent. What is left is the last of his fear, and the last of his loneliness, and the last of whatever he was before he ran down that road and found you." Morgana crouched at the foot of the dais, level with both of them, and the fel dress pooled around her knees. "You will take it while she is inside you, and you will hold it, and you will not come until I tell you to. That is the lesson. Everything else tonight has been the approach."

Lyra's jaw was tight. Her eyes were entirely gold. She looked at Elara, and Elara looked back at her, and something passed between them that Morgana could feel through the web and did not name.

"Do it," Lyra said.

Elara put her hand back on Lyra's sternum. Lyra reached out and caught the black wolf by the collar and drew it in against her side, and the animal came without resistance, and its plain amber eyes went half-shut, and the thread opened.

What came up it was not speed and not savagery. It was smaller than that. It was the long cold nights on the forest road, and the smell of a nymph's blood in the trees, and the moment on the mud when the big grey had gone left and the black one had gone right and then turned back alone — and it came up the strand in a thin grey rope and into Lyra's chest and she took it with her teeth bared and her hand fisted in the wolf's collar and Elara's fingers moving inside her, slow and deep and certain, the way a woman counts coins.

Lyra came.

Morgana had not told her to. She came with her back against the step and her heels braced and one hand still fisted in the wolf's collar, and the wolf pressed its muzzle into her ribs and whined, and Elara did not stop, and the throne flared a deep banked red behind them and the runes ran gold up the obsidian of the cross and died.

Morgana let it happen. She had not said now, and Lyra had come anyway, and that was information, and she filed it with the rest.

"You disobeyed," she said.

Lyra's breath was ragged. Her hand had not left the wolf's collar. "You were going to make me wait until the factor."

"I was." Morgana rose. "And now you know what it costs you to decide for yourself in a room where I am teaching." She reached down and took Lyra's chin in her hand — the same gesture, the fourth time, and it had become a language — and turned her face toward the firelight. "But you held the thread while you did it, and you did not drop it, and the wolf is still alive and still yours. So the cost is only this: tomorrow night, at the crossroads inn, you will bring me the factor's letter unopened, and you will not read a word of it, and you will not ask me what is in it."

Lyra's gold eyes narrowed. "That's the cost?"

"That is the cost."

"And if I read it anyway?"

"Then you will have learned a different lesson, and I will still have my letter." Morgana let go of her chin and straightened. "Elara. Up."

Elara rose from between Lyra's legs. Her skirt was ruined, her hair was down, and the silver tail moved behind her with a life of its own, and she stood on the throne-room floor with her new amber eyes and her unmarked face and her hands wet with Lyra, and she did not look like a maid at all.

"You did well," Morgana said. "Better than I expected. Tomorrow you will do it to a merchant, and the day after that you will do it to whatever the princess brings home from the elven court. But tonight you sleep." She looked at the throne and then at the cross and then at the three wolves and the two women on her floor, and the web sang in her chest, and she counted the threads. "All of you. The manor is full."

Lyra pushed herself up off the step. The black wolf rose with her and stood at her heel, and the brindle bitch came and leaned against her other leg, and the grey one on the cross lifted its half-wolf head and watched them all with its plain dull eyes and said nothing, because it could not.

Elara bent and gathered the fallen apron from the floor. The fel in it had gone quiet and silver, and she folded it over her arm, and she looked at Morgana with the new eyes and the new face and the new tail, and she said, in the careful voice of a woman who has decided to keep choosing her words:

"My lady. What am I now?"

Morgana looked at her for a long moment. The fire had burned down to embers, and the throne's red had banked to almost nothing, and in the low light the maid's amber eyes and the wolves' collars and the runes on the cross all glowed the same dull gold, as though the room had been lit by a single lamp and everything in it had been dipped in the same wax.

"You are the second thread," Morgana said. "And you will not be the last."

She turned and walked toward the stairwell, and the fel dress flowed behind her across the cold stone, and behind her the loom hummed and the throne drank and the manor settled into its night around the thing it was becoming.

She made it four steps up the stairwell before the throne called her back.

Not in words. The Dark Throne had never needed words with her — it spoke the way a deep current speaks to the underside of a boat, a pressure that arrives through the soles of the feet and the small bones of the ear and the place behind the sternum where she had kept her ambition for two hundred years. It said: stay.

Morgana stopped. Her hand was on the iron rail, and the fel dress had pooled at her ankles, and above her the stairwell ran up into the dark of the manor where Lyra's bare feet were already fading toward the east wing and Elara's new tail was already dragging across the flagstones of a corridor she would not walk again as a maid. The web sang behind her, thin and bright, five threads and counting. She could have climbed. She had climbed away from better offers than this one.

She turned around.

The throne room was empty now except for the cross and the thing on it. The grey half-wolf hung slack in the brackets with its dull amber eyes half-closed and its breath a slow wet rasp, and the runes down the obsidian had gone dark, and the fire had burned down to a low red bed of coals that threw no useful light. Morgana crossed the floor and the fel flowed with her, and she did not stop at the lowest step this time. She went up.

The seat took her weight the way water takes a stone — no resistance, no give, only the sudden enveloping cold of the obsidian warming under her thighs and back as the runes woke one by one and began to pulse against her spine. The skulls under her hands were smooth as river-glass. The high back rose above her head and the whole room narrowed to the width of the armrests, and Morgana let her head fall back against the carved bone and closed her eyes and felt the throne come up through her like a tide.

It began the way it always began: with an inventory.

She felt the throne count her. Not her possessions — her. The two centuries of swallowed insults and paid-back cruelties and beds she had left before dawn. The house she had taken from a man who had thought he was taking her. The magic she had stolen out of his library on her way out the door. The fel, asleep in the vault for a thousand years until she had put her hand on it and it had chosen her, and the throne laid all of it out in front of her like a jeweler setting stones on black velvet, and it said, in the way it said things: look at what you brought me.

And then it began to pay.

Morgana had expected the warmth. She had not expected the specificity. The throne did not flood her — it tallied, and the tally was pleasure, and the pleasure arrived one item at a time, each one placed exactly where the memory lived. The night she had walked out of her father's house with nothing but the clothes on her back and a spell she had copied wrong, and the throne took the cold of that night and turned it over and gave it back to her as the heat of a hearth she owned. The first man she had ever killed, and the way his surprise had looked, and the throne gave her that too, wrapped in something that made her thighs shift against the obsidian. The week she had spent starving in a hedge-town while she worked out how to be beautiful enough to be invited indoors, and the throne gave her the memory of every door that had opened since, and every one of them opened by her own hand.

Her cunt clenched around nothing. She felt it — a small, involuntary grip, the first honest thing her body had done all night. The rings in her nipples had gone tight and warm, and the fel dress had begun to loosen at the collar, sliding down her shoulders of its own accord, and she did not stop it. The throne liked her bare. It always had.

More, she thought, and the throne obliged the way it always obliged — patient, generous, the way a creditor is generous with a client who has proven she will pay.

It gave her this week.

Elara on her knees in the study with the fel learning her shape for the first time, and the small cracked sound she had made, and the way she had said yes, my lady afterward with her voice still shaking. Dorian's wrists in the brackets and the light going out of his eyes. The nymph's blood in the trees. Seraphine's sending scroll, sealed and gone, and the mages of the Eastern Order already walking toward a manor they did not know was a mouth. Valerius's mind coming apart in Elara's hands like wet paper. The princess Selussa kneeling and giving her name, and the childhood behind her eyes that Morgana had walked through like a house with all the doors open. Lyra remade on the throne, gold flooding her eyes. Lyra remade again in the corridor, taking the fel into her own hands and turning it on Morgana and pinning her to the four-poster and taking her apart with her mouth and her fingers and her new, terrible patience. The chain. The cross. Elara's scar vanishing under her thumb.

Each one arrived in her body as heat. Not memory-heat — real heat, low in her belly and spreading outward, and by the time the throne had finished its accounting Morgana was wet to the crease of her thighs and the fel had opened along the whole front of her like a coat unbuttoned, and the silver rings in her nipples had begun to ache with every breath.

She opened her eyes.

The runes were glowing. All of them — every carved line from the base of the seat to the top of the high back, a slow deep gold that pulsed in time with her own heartbeat, and the pulse was coming faster than it had any right to. The skulls under her hands had warmed to the temperature of skin. And beneath her, through the obsidian, through the fel, through the seat of her own body, she felt the throne shift its attention the way a lover shifts in a bed.

You have been giving, it said. All week. Give me an hour and I will show you the other half.

Morgana's breath went shallow. She had taken the throne's power tonight — the threads, the gold at the rim of her eyes, the cross raised beside her like a second crown — and she had thought that was the whole of the bargain. She had not understood that the throne had been holding something back.

She understood it now.

The seat beneath her began to move.

Not the stone — the stone was stone and would be stone in a thousand years. But the fel had spread across the seat while she sat, a thin black layer between her and the obsidian, and the throne was working through it. Morgana felt the first touch at the base of her spine: a slow warm pressure, the width of a thumb, sliding down the groove of her back and between her cheeks, and she arched involuntarily against the high back and her hands came down hard on the skull armrests and her mouth opened on a sound she did not recognize as her own.

"Oh," she said. Just that. One syllable, in a room with no one in it to hear, and she did not care.

The fel thickened under her. It had learned her body two hundred years ago in a vault under a house that was no longer hers, and it had never forgotten, and it was doing now what it had done then — reading her, matching her, taking the shape of what she wanted before she knew she wanted it. The pressure at her back split into two: one tendril sliding down between her cheeks and pressing, warm and blunt and patient, against her asshole; the other curling forward under her hips and finding her cunt from below, and Morgana's whole body locked when it slid into her.

She was wet. She had not known she was that wet. The fel went in without resistance — one long flexing length of it, thick as two of her fingers and getting thicker — and the throne pulsed gold and the runes ran brighter and Morgana heard herself make a sound that had no dignity in it at all. The tendril behind her pressed harder, not pushing in yet, just holding there, a promise, and she found her hips rolling forward against the thing inside her before she had decided to move.

"Yes," she said. To the throne. To the fel. To the empty room. "Yes—"

The throne gave her another thread.

Not a memory this time. A body. She felt Elara first — the maid in her new bed in the east wing, still awake, still wet from what she had done to Lyra, one hand between her own thighs and the amber of her new eyes open in the dark, and the throne let Morgana feel it through her, a hot secondhand clench that made her own cunt grip the fel inside her. Then Lyra — in her quarters, the black wolf at the foot of the bed, the brindle bitch on the floor, Lyra's hand fisted in her own hair and her teeth in her lip and her body still humming with everything she had taken tonight, and Morgana felt the gold in Lyra's eyes burn through the thread like a coal. Then Selussa, asleep on the furs before the dead fire, dreaming something slow and gold. Then Seraphine, dreaming of power. Then the vessels in the east wing, empty and warm and waiting.

The throne laid them all against her skin at once and said: this is what you have made. Feel it.

Morgana felt it. Every thread at once, every body she owned, and the fel inside her began to move — slow at first, drawing back and pressing in, and the tendril behind her pushed in on the same rhythm, and the two of them worked her from both ends with a patience that was not human, and Morgana's hands came off the skulls and her nails dug into the carved bone and she stopped trying to be quiet.

"Harder," she said. "You can do harder."

The throne could.

It took her faster. The fel in her cunt thickened and lengthened until she felt full to the mouth of her womb, and the tendril in her ass pushed in to the second knuckle and then deeper, and the runes under her back ran gold so bright the whole throne room took on a color, and Morgana rode it with her heels braced against the base of the seat and her head thrown back and her hair coming loose from its tie. Her nipples ached under the silver rings. The fel spread up her belly and closed around her breasts and began to work them — a slow milking pressure that had no mercy in it — and she felt her own cunt clench around the length inside her and knew she was close, and the throne knew it too, and it pulled back.

"No—"

Not yet, it said, in the voice of her own ambition. You have not been given everything.

It gave her the web.

Not the threads one at a time. The whole loom, all at once, dropped into her body like a second heartbeat, and Morgana screamed. Every pleasure she had ever taken from anyone she owned came up the threads and into her at the same moment — Elara's, Lyra's, Selussa's, the wolf's, the mage's, the vessels' — and it did not arrive as separate things. It arrived as one thing, a single enormous wave that had all their names on it, and Morgana's spine came off the high back of the throne and her legs spread wide on the seat and the fel fucked her through it, hard and fast and without pause, and she came.

She came the way a storm comes — not one crest but a series of them, each one breaking on the last, and the throne held her inside it and did not let her down. The runes flared white. The cross answered from across the room, a low chime in the obsidian. On the furs, Selussa turned in her sleep and made a small sound. In the east wing, Elara's hand stilled between her thighs and her new amber eyes went wide in the dark, feeling something she could not name come through the web. In her quarters, Lyra sat up straight on the edge of the bed and said one word — Morgana — and the black wolf lifted its head.

And Morgana, on the throne, came again.

The second one was worse. Or better — she had stopped keeping track. The fel had her from both ends and the web had her from the inside and the throne had its whole attention on the small of her back, a warm hand the size of a house, and she was shaking apart on the seat of an artifact that had been built to make god-emperors and had decided, tonight, to make her first. Her cunt clenched and released and clenched again around the length inside her, and the fel answered every clench with a slow deliberate drag, and the tendril in her ass pushed deep and held, and Morgana's voice broke on a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob, because it was too much, and she was not going to ask it to stop.

"Again," she said. "Again—"

The throne gave her again.

She lost the count somewhere after the third. The room went away — the cross, the fire, the grey half-wolf hanging in its brackets, the skulls under her hands. There was only the pulse of the runes against her spine and the two lengths of fel working her and the web singing in every nerve she owned, and she had been alive for two hundred years and had never once been taken like this, by anything, by anyone, with no hand on her and no mouth on her and nothing in the room but herself and a chair and the thing she had made of it. She came until her thighs were slick to the knee and her voice had gone raw and her hands had left dents in the bone of the armrests, and the throne drank every one of them and gave her back the echo, and the echo built on itself, and it was the echo that finally finished her.

The last one took her by surprise.

It came from behind — from the tendril in her ass, which had been holding still for a long time, patient as the throne itself, and which now began to move in a slow deep rhythm that Morgana had not braced for, and the fel in her cunt matched it, and the web pulled every thread taut at once, and Morgana's whole body seized from the jaw down. She did not scream this time. She could not. Her mouth opened and nothing came out of it and her vision went gold at the edges and then went entirely gold, and she shook on the throne for a long time with her heels braced and her head back and her cunt gripping the fel like a fist, and the runes under her pulsed in time with the convulsions until they were the same thing, and then — slowly, the way a tide goes out — they were not.

She came back to herself in pieces.

The fire had burned lower. The runes had banked to a dull red glow. The fel was withdrawing from her body, slow and careful, the way a lover pulls out after — first the tendril behind her, then the length in her cunt, and Morgana felt each one go and made a small sound at each one, and did not apologize for either. It gathered itself up her belly and her breasts and her throat and reformed into the dress, high-collared and deep-plunged and whole again, and the silver rings in her nipples settled back against her skin, and she sat in the Dark Throne with her hair down and her thighs wet and her breath coming in long slow pulls through her nose.

The throne was quiet. Content. It had shown her what it had, and it had watched her take it, and now it waited the way it always waited — patient, and full, and certain she would be back.

Morgana lifted her head.

She felt the web. All of it — five threads and counting, and every one of them still singing, and the loom humming under her ribs, and the manor around her settling into its night with its doors locked and its vessels breathing and its wolves asleep at the feet of the women she had made. She felt Elara finally close her eyes in the east wing. She felt Lyra lie back down with the black wolf's head on her hip. She felt the cross behind her, patient as the throne, with the half-wolf still hanging in its brackets, waiting to be cut down in the morning.

She drew the fel dress up over her shoulders. She gathered her hair and twisted it back and pinned it with the silver pin she had not lost. She stood up out of the throne and felt the last of the throne's warmth leave the back of her thighs, and she did not look back at the seat.

At the foot of the dais, the embers shifted and a log fell in on itself, and the room went a shade darker.

Morgana walked to the cross. She looked up at the grey half-wolf — the flat amber eyes, the wrong mouth, the woman's hips under the matted fur — and she put two fingers under its chin, the same two fingers, and the animal's jaw trembled once and stilled.

"Tomorrow," she said, "you will be useful."

She turned and walked toward the stairwell, and the fel dress flowed behind her across the cold stone, and above her, somewhere in the dark of the manor, a door opened and closed.