I stood and fled from my own imagining, up the stairs. In the great hall, the arrow-slit windows were dark; there wasn’t even a snatch of song outside to drift in. All the soldiers were sleeping. I kept climbing, past the laboratory and the library, green and violet and blue lights still flickering behind their doors. But they were empty; there was no one there for me to shout at, no one to snap back at me and tell me I was being a fool. I went up another flight and stopped at the edge of the next landing, near the fringed end of the long carpet. A faint gleam showed from underneath the farthest door, at the end of the hallway. I had never gone that way, towards Sarkan’s private bedroom. It had been an ogre’s chamber, once.

The carpet was thick and dark, with a pattern woven into it with golden-yellow thread. The pattern was all one line: it began in a tight spiral like the curl of a lizard’s tail. The golden line grew thicker as it unwound, and then went twisting back and forth along the length of the rug almost like a pathway, leading into the shadows down the hallway. My feet sank deep in the soft wool. I followed the golden line as it broadened beneath my feet and took on a pattern like scales, faintly gleaming. I passed the guest chambers, two doors opposite one another, and beyond them the hallway darkened around me.

I was walking past a kind of pressure, a wind blowing against me. The pattern in the carpet was forming into clearer shapes. I walked over one great ivory-clawed limb, over the sweep of pale golden wings veined in dark brown.

The wind grew colder. The walls disappeared, fading into part of the dark. The carpet widened until it filled all the hallway I could see and stretched away beyond. It didn’t feel like wool anymore. I stood on warm lapping scales, soft as leather, rising and falling beneath my feet. The sound of breathing echoed back from cavern walls out of sight. My heart wanted to hammer with instinctive terror. My feet wanted to turn and run.

I shut my eyes instead. I knew the tower by now, how long the hallway should have been. I took three more steps along the scaled back, and then I turned and put out my hand, reaching for the door I knew was there. My fingers found a doorknob, warm metal beneath my fingers. I opened my eyes again and I was back in the hallway, looking at a door. A few steps farther on, the hall and the carpet ended. The golden pattern turned back on itself, and a gleaming green eye looked up at me from a head filled with rows of silver teeth, waiting for anyone who didn’t know where to turn.

I opened the door. It swung silently. The room wasn’t large. The bed was small and narrow, canopied and curtained in with red velvet; a single chair stood before the fireplace, beautifully carved, alone; a single book on the small table beside it with a single cup of wine, half-drunk. The fire was banked down to glowing coals, and the lamps were out. I went to the bed and drew aside the curtain. Sarkan was sleeping stretched across the bed still in his breeches and his loose shirt; he’d only thrown off his coat. I stood holding the curtain. He blinked awake at me unguarded for a moment, too startled to be indignant, as if he’d never imagined anyone could barge in on him. He looked so baffled I didn’t want to shout at him anymore.

“How did you,” he said, pushing himself up on an elbow, indignation finally dawning, and I pushed him back down and kissed him.

He made a noise of surprise against my mouth and gripped me by the arms, holding me off. “Listen, you impossible creature,” he said, “I’m a century and more older than—”

“Oh, be quiet,” I said impatiently; of all the excuses he might have used. I scrambled up the tall side of the bed and climbed in on top of him, the thick featherbed yielding. I glared down. “Do you want me to go?”

His hands tightened on my arms. He didn’t look me in the face. For a moment he didn’t speak. Then harshly he said, “No.”

And then he pulled me down to him instead, his mouth sweet and feverish-hot and wonderful, obliterating. I didn’t have to think anymore. The heart-tree blazed up with a crackling roar and was gone. There was only the heat of his hands sliding over my chilled bare arms, making me shiver all over again. He had one arm around me, gripping tight. He caught at my waist and pulled up my loose falling-off blouse. I ducked my head through and my arms free of the sleeves, my hair spilling over my shoulders, and he groaned and buried his face into the tangled mess of it, kissing me through it: my throat, my shoulders, my breasts.

I clung to him, breathless and happy and full of uncomplicated innocent terror. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would—his tongue slid over my nipple and drew it into his mouth, and I flinched a little and clutched at his hair, probably painfully. He drew away, the sudden cold a bright shock on my skin, and he said, “Agnieszka,” low and deep with an almost despairing note, as if he still wanted to shout at me and couldn’t.

He rolled us over in the bed and dumped me in the pillows beneath him. I gripped fistfuls of his shirt and pulled, frantic. He sat up and threw it off, over his head, and I threw my head back and stared at the canopy while he pushed up the maddening heap of my skirts. I felt desperately greedy, urgent for his hands. I’d tried not to remember that one shocking, perfect moment, the slide of his thumb between my legs, for so long; but oh, I remembered. He brushed his knuckles against me and that sweet jolting went through me again. I shuddered all over, hugely, and I closed my thighs tight around his hand, instinctive. I wanted to tell him to hurry, to go slow, to do both at the same time.

The curtain had fallen shut again. He was leaning over me, his eyes only a gleam in the dark close room of the bed, and he was ferociously intent, watching my face. He could still rub his thumb against me, just a little. He stroked just once. A noise climbed the back of my throat, a sigh or a moan, and he bent down and kissed me like he wanted to devour it, to catch it in his own mouth.

He moved his thumb again, and I stopped clenching shut. He gripped my thighs and moved them apart, lifted my leg around his waist; he was still watching me hungrily. “Yes,” I said, urgently, trying to move with him; but he kept stroking me with his fingers. “Sarkan.”

“Surely it’s not too much to ask a little patience,” he said, his black eyes glittering. I glared at him, but then he stroked me again, gently, dipped his fingers into me; he drew a long line between my thighs again and again, circling at the top. He was asking me a question I didn’t know the answer to, until I did; I clenched up suddenly, wrung-out and wet against his hands.