The light came out of it like a struck bell.
Somewhere, far off, a voice was crying out in grief — a woman's voice, saying our youngest, our lost youngest, over and over.
She was standing in a place made entirely of mirrors.
The figure facing her in the nearest glass was not a blonde woman in a court gown. It was tall and black-haired and horned, with wings folded down her back, armoured in black — her own true shape, looking back at her with her own red eyes.
A consciousness space, she thought, steadying. Of course. My soul is still what it is; I am simply wearing Leonora.
"Little one," said a voice, from everywhere.
Her demon reflection stepped out of the mirror and stood beside her.
"Where are you?" She turned, and turned again, and the mirrors turned with her. "Eldest — is that you? Where is she?"
"You will have to go further in than this to reach your eldest sister," the voice said. "And you should prepare yourself. She is not an ordinary demon, even among us."
Images went past her on the mirrored walls, faces and places, too fast to hold. She stared at them with her heart going hard.
Then she saw them: three tall horned women standing together, beautiful and terrible, exactly as she had left them.
A hand closed around hers.
"I missed you," someone whispered.
It came over her all at once — her sisters' arms around her, all three of them, weeping into her hair, weeping with joy and with something else that had no joy in it at all.
"Tell me how to go back," she said, with her face wet. "Tell me how to be a demon again. I miss you — you have no idea how much I miss you, I have been alone in this place for—"
"We can't give you that answer, dearest."
Then something took hold of her and pulled.
"Wait—"
Her consciousness went backwards through a vortex of white light, and the voice came after her, gentle and implacable: You cannot have the answer until you have met your eldest sister.
A last flash took her sight.
She landed on her knees on a wooden floor.
Dazed, she looked around. A low ceiling. A window with a wooden frame. A table with nothing on it. The room was familiar, and it was wrong, and it took her a moment to understand why her whole body had begun to shake.
She knew this room.
This was the cabin. This was Enrique's cabin, and this was where she had died.
Inside her the demon shape came up screaming, and a voice spoke over it, level and cold:
"He took your magic and made it his. He tore your soul into pieces to do it. There was not much left of you when we found it."
She looked up.
Outside the window stood a woman with purple hair and horns, watching her.
"Third sister," she said. "Is it — is it really—"
"You're nowhere near ready," her third sister said.
Her fist closed until the nails went into her palm. Ready or not, she thought, I am going to take that human apart with my hands.
"We held your soul together with magic," the voice went on. "For five years, while your eldest sister looked for a vessel that was empty. Vessels are not easy to come by. You should be grateful."
Five years. So that was why she had woken up five years late, in a woman whose life had gone out of her on a balcony.
In the mirror over the fireplace a green-haired woman appeared, arms folded.
"Grateful," she repeated. "That's the word. Do you have any idea what we had to give up? We had to sit down and negotiate — negotiate — with the laws of causality. On your behalf. Because you wanted to marry a shepherd."
"Second sister."
"Troublemaker," said her second sister, with enormous affection.
"What is this? Where am I really?"
"You're in the middle of a test," her second sister said. "You have been since you opened your eyes in that bed. Now open the door, and do the thing you could not do the first time."
"There is one way back," the voice said. "Only one, and it runs along a desperate road. Open the door and you'll be told what it is."
"I'll do anything," she said. "Whatever it is. Say it and it's done."
From the window her purple-haired and green-haired sisters watched her without moving.
"A cruel future," the voice said quietly, "may turn everything you are happy about into grief."
She was black-haired now, and horned, and her hand hesitated an inch from the door.
Then the power went through her horns in a jolt, and she took her true shape entirely, and pushed the door open.
Beyond it was a hall full of light.
"Welcome, my child," said a woman's voice, from nowhere.
A man was looking down at her: brown-haired, broad-shouldered, with gold eyes. He gathered her up and held her, and she realised — with the ground dropping out from under her — that she had slipped into the child's form again, and that these small hands were hers.
She knew that face.
"You," she said. "You're that boy. From the banquet. Why are you—"
He smiled at her, warm as bread. "Do you like this appearance?"
And then she understood.
"Eldest sister."
"It has been a while," her eldest sister said, and hugged her properly.
"Why?" She pushed back to look at her. "Why that child's face? And older, too — you've made him older —"
Her sister took her hand and walked her out of the hall and into a vastness.
Her eldest sister was not a demon lord the way the rest of them were demon lords. She was the thing that stood behind the fates of gods and men and read them like weather: the primordial dark, in whose keeping are life, death, and causality itself. In that space her true scale became apparent. There was a hand beneath the small horned figure, and it was as wide as a country, and she was lying in the palm of it.
"I have something for you," her eldest sister said.
It was a dagger — ornate, pale-bladed, precisely the dagger she had touched in the banquet hall. Inside it she could feel a thread of each of them, a portion of all four sisters' power, folded down small.
"There is a condition."
"Name it."
"You must drive this into the heart of the human you truly love."
She stared.
"Living blood, from a living heart that you love, on this blade. That is the door. There is no other door. It is the only way you come home."
"What are you talking about," she said. "What in the world are you talking about?"
"I have sent you a man," her eldest sister said, "whom you are likely to love. I did it in hope. I would rather you had a target than that you wandered a hundred years looking for one."
The young man from the banquet came into her mind whole — the gold eyes, the furious blush, the box held out in both hands.
"That boy? You put that boy in my path?"
"Your second sister chose him. She said your tastes have been perfectly predictable for nine hundred years and she found it very funny."
Are they really that obvious, she thought, with enormous irritation, and then admitted to herself that his face had come to mind before anyone had mentioned him.
She shook it off. There were larger things in this room.
"I have no intention," she said, "of ever loving a human again."
Her hand went to the necklace at her throat, and under her fingers she felt what she had felt on that cabin floor, the whole weight of it, the surprise more than the pain.
A soft image of him came anyway. Enrique in the field, holding out a straw hat.
Never again. She had said it into a pillow only a few nights ago and meant every word.
And now the way home ran through it: fall in love, honestly, all the way down — and then destroy it herself, with her own hand, on purpose.
"It is cruel," her eldest sister agreed. "I won't pretend otherwise. It is also the only trial that would open the road. It need not be that boy; it may be anyone at all. The requirement is not the person. The requirement is that you feel again the same thing you felt for the man who killed you."
"And if I can't cut it?"
"If you cannot sever it yourself, you will weep blood." Her sister's voice did not change. "And without that sacrifice, you will never be a demon again."
"Then I stay in this body."
"You do not stay in that body. You become it." The great hand shifted beneath her. "Fail the trial, and you will finish turning human — completely, permanently. And you will forget. Every memory of what you were will go out of you like heat out of a stone. You will not even know to grieve it."
She gasped, and her hands went into her hair, and for a moment she saw it happening: her power coming apart, her soul coming apart, the whole thousand years going quiet.
"You will simply become something else," her eldest sister said, almost gently. "Not dead. Different. A woman who has always been a woman."
A finger the size of a bridge touched her hair, very lightly, and she understood that this too was thinning — that the connection between them was already going.
Her green-haired sister's voice came out of the dark with the last lesson, and it was the coldest thing said that night.
"So don't love him all the way, little one. Love him exactly enough to kill him. That's what we are. That's the work."
Love like a demon, the void said. Not like a wife.
The three horned figures stood together against the stars, and she looked up at them with her whole chest aching and whispered their name.
Then the space began to fold.
"Wait—" She scrambled up. "Wait, don't — don't go, I'm not finished, let me—"
The light took hold of her and dragged.
"No—"
A demon's business is pleasure, the voice reminded her, as everything went white. Never devotion.
The last thing she saw was her eldest sister, serene, immense, curved around her like a sky.
Her eyes snapped open.
She was standing in the banquet hall of the palace of Nyx with two fingers resting on a pale blade, and everyone in the room was looking at her.