Even without seeing them all yet, Niccola could sense the Talaks. They filled the silver forest, their presences creeping and slithering through the darkness, their minds pushing on her thoughts in whispers she could finally start to understand. This was a liminal space. It had to be, or else the hand she lifted would look more like a claw. It was still her own. Still the hand that had held Isaiah's every day they'd spent together. Still the hand that had kneaded bread and stoked fires in the Bel Ilan household for the last three months. Still the hand she'd held up in the moonlight countless times, checking for signs of transformation.

The Talaks that had flanked Dinah on the stump were already here. They circled her, and their voices, were the clearest yet. "Voices," though, was an inaccurate description. Like the crows she had so often spoken with in human form, they communicated in impressions: ideas, concepts, feelings, thoughts, all conveyed to her as if imprinting their experience, just for a moment, on her own.

"You broke the contract," hissed one. Niccola could feel its hunger. But it was a different hunger than the one that buzzed against her consciousness on Crow-Moon nights.

"Give it back."

"Want it back."

"Give what back?" returned Niccola, hoping her thoughts would speak the same way.

"Transform. Give it back."

They wouldn't answer her. Of course they wouldn't; Talaks only cared for themselves and their hunts. They had long ago lost the full intelligence of the humans they'd once been.

"Give it back."

Others were approaching. The Talaks could not yet attack while she retained her human form, but if enough of them gathered, that barrier may be overcome. Dinah certainly seemed convinced it could. If that was the case, Niccola had only minutes of conscious existence left. The shifting sentience of the silver forest crowded her senses. She could not feel her own heartbeat, though with the fear coursing through her body, it should by all rights have been pounding. She had to think. She had to find a way out of this.

Scars. Dinah had worn scars, visible after she'd removed her coat. Blood. That was her maintenance offering, slippery and ever-growing, for the Talaks never accepted less than the most they'd ever received from a barrower. If Dinah's knife had slipped even once, back in the early days, she would have reset her baseline offering. Increment by increment, her Crow Moon requirements for maintaining her magic would have increased. They had now been increasing for more than sixty years. At some point, Dinah would not have been able to keep using her own blood. It would kill her. And Erelah had said as much: Dinah sickened in her final moons under house arrest at the Talakova's edge. She would have to switch to others' blood eventually.

Niccola snatched the thought and followed it. For a time, Dinah might have made do with smaller game: rabbits or crows, whose deaths could still spill more crimson than she herself could spare. Those would graduate to larger animals. Goats, perhaps, stolen from Drevo under the guise of beast attacks. A pig or two from the realm on Drevo's other side. And then when even those proved insufficient—or perhaps by an accident or panic-kill—Dinah's Crow-Moon offerings had turned to human murder.

That would explain why human disappearances were only a recent phenomenon. It would explain why Dinah was in her endgame, no longer trying to hide the deaths. She had not started out as a necromantic, and she did not want to remain one.

That revelation hit Niccola with such clarity, it cleared her thoughts despite the Talaks all around. Dinah had started her own magic-line with a modest offering, but been forced to increase it over time. She'd done it to prove it could be done, and if Erelah's word was to be taken, the Calisian royals had responded with violence and shut her down. Only then had Dinah turned to more extreme views.

Yet she didn't want the life her deal had given her. She wanted to return to the Ring of Thirty, sit on Varna's throne, and walk mountain paths without fearing for her safety. And somehow, she needed the Varnic royal line to die in order to buy that freedom. First the former queen and king. Then Phoebe alone, before Niccola had gone and messed up Dinah's plans with an action that finally dawned on her. She had opted into her family's magic-line, at the cost of a new one. Before she'd made that contract, Phoebe had been the final barrower in the Varnic royal line.

Dinah must be trying to end it, then. To cut a deal with the Talaks, trade a magic line for a magic line, and end her own.

The solution to the puzzle shocked Niccola back to reality. Talaks were crawling into the clearing one after another. More lurked between the trees. The cacophony of their thoughts hit Niccola like a wall the moment her focus wavered. She stumbled backwards. They were hungry. Powerfully hungry, but not for her—or at least not her alone.

"Give it back."

They wanted her magic.

"Want it back."

No one in the history of the Ring of Thirty had traded a magic-line for a magic-line before, but it made sense by the rules of the deals Talaks made. The offering and the reward were of equal value.

"Give it back."

That meant Dinah would kill Phoebe the moment Niccola was gone. Niccola would be unable to protect her sister. Unable to stop Dinah. Unable to do anything but join the ranks of the Talaks in the forest's bowels, doomed to prey on living things until she eventually died or faded, or whatever happened to Talaks at the ends of their preternaturally long lives. And her transformation wouldn't just rob Varna of its most competent ruler—Phoebe certainly wasn't ready to take the throne alone. It would also pave the way for Dinah to win.

The moment Niccola let herself die to the world outside, Dinah would win.

"Give it back."

"Wait," returned Niccola, strengthening her thoughts in the desperate hope that they would reach around the clearing. "There are still two of us, and we both offer live prey every moon. Do you want us, or do you want the one who only gives you blood instead?"

For the first time, the clamor of thoughts lulled. Niccola knew it was a dangerous offer. To keep this promise, Dinah had to die, before Niccola's own nine moons were up. And Niccola herself would have to do the killing. Besides fulfilling her contract, it would spare her sister that trauma—Phoebe did not have it in her to take down a shapeshifter-turned-necromantic alone.

Dinah had never had children. She'd been banned from it when her family discovered she'd made herself a barrower, a terribly harsh punishment for a magic that had once been so tame. Yet it meant she was the only one in her own magic-line. If it was magic the Talaks wanted back, Dinah was a target equivalent to both Phoebe and Niccola combined, and all she offered was blood.

Talaks would settle for blood, but they didn't prefer it. Not as much as live prey.

The brutal but sound logic of her offer had caught the Talaks' attention. Now they clustered around Niccola, thoughts inquisitive and frighteningly hungry. They were tired of blood. They were tired of Dinah. They didn't like how her contract denied them live prey each moon, forcing them to drain a corpse dry, but not consume it.

Niccola forced her way through the melee to make her proposition. "If you give me until the end of my contract, I will use her to fulfill it. No more blood. And her magic-line in exchange for my safety."

She had to stay safe. She had to come back to the human world in order to thwart Dinah's plan, to fight and defeat her, to protect Phoebe, to rule Varna, to make up with Isaiah and make good on their alliance—and more. There was more than an alliance that she wanted there. Things she'd never thought she could give herself the luxury of, back when she'd been so willing to give her life for Phoebe's, she wasn't sure she would live another year.

But in denying herself that, she'd done more than send her end goal into a spiral. She'd left Isaiah to stand alone against his parents in a realm that would collapse if it went up against Madeira and Drevo alone. She'd left Varna without an alliance, which Phoebe was years away from making, if she reached out to Calis at all. She would most likely not. Left alone on the throne, she would turn her sensitivities towards her own people, ruling well, but redoubling the isolation Varna had experienced ever since the Catastrophe. Varna needed that sensitivity, but not alone. It needed both of them.

She and Phoebe had to return to Varna and rule together. Phoebe could teach Niccola what their mother had passed on about speaking to crows, a skill Niccola had been forced to muddle through alone after gaining magic without the guidance of ancestral experience. And Niccola, in turn, would handle diplomacy with the other realms, an alliance with Calis included. Standing up to Madeira was a daunting prospect, but not if she had an equal—and an opposite—at her side. Calis to Varna. An ally.

The Talaks were communicating furiously amongst themselves. Dinah had promised them Niccola and Phoebe both. Niccola had turned that offer around. On the surface, it was a toss-up, but from the tone around the clearing, it looked like luck and favor were falling on Niccola's side.

Consensus was reached a minute later. All around the clearing, mental silence fell as Niccola found herself pinned by hundreds of silver eyes. She felt their affirmative—and their opportunism, should she fail—a moment before they began to fade. Human outlines returned beside the stump and against Phoebe's tree. The silver Niccola had first seen through silvering eyes was the last to vanish, leaving the little clearing lit by nothing but barrower night vision and Dinah's lamp.

Niccola lifted her head with a smile, as Dinah's satisfaction turned to confusion, then a slow, dawning horror.

"I had a chat with the Talaks," said Niccola, unable to resist capitalizing on the element of surprise. "It's not me they want."