A thousand candles flare to life, setting the walls of their tomb alight with dancing warmth. Impossibly quick, the ice melts and evaporates, and Marek draws her up to her feet. His fingertips linger on hers, but it's not her eyes he's staring so intently at. Confused, she looks down with him.

She jerks back in shock. The bones have crept onto the right side of her body now, down past her sleeve, all the way to her elbow.

"Hey, hey," he says as she feels her face and realizes, to her horror, that it is bone through-and-through. "You're gonna be fine. We're almost out."

She nods stiffly, throat too tight for words, as he leads her over to the book. A large, quickly drying puddle has formed around it, and he flips open its pages.

He offers her his hand. "Ready to go home?"

"Marek," she manages around the lump in her throat, "what I said—"

"Didn't happen." He nods, the same way she does when she's filing away unfortunate facts. "Don't worry. I know it was just a fairy game."

"Marek—"

He holds his hand up more insistently. "Let's get you out of here, Konnichiwa."

She bites her lip. "As you wish."

They join hands beneath the fake wedding arch, and as they jump, she looks back one last time at the rose-strewn room and thinks of all the could-have-beens and will-never-bes. Then blue and silver suffuses her eyes for one last time.

Except when she opens her eyes, she is not in the library. She's in a throne room with columns of towering, petrified trees. The floor is a smooth, faceless rock, and the throne more of the same, all hard right angles. And upon the throne sits the courtly fairy. Her face flickers between bone and flesh, but both expressions are equally dispassionate. "Well," she says, blowing across her nails, "hasn't this been enlightening?"

Marek steps in front of Constance, even though she grasps his arm in warning. "We've won your games," he says. "Let us go."

"Mortals, mortals," she sighs, and her blue hair casts eerie shadows across her face. "Always wanting something."

"My queen," Constance says, stepping around Marek lest the courtier curse him too, "why did you call us here?"

"To make you an offer, darling." She floats off her throne, hovering just to its side. "Here, sit."

Constance's throat dries. "I need no gifts."

The courtier's bony finger taps her phantom lips. "What was it you told my little fairyling? Oh, yes." She smiles with as much warmth as a wolf. "It doesn't have to be a gift. Just a loan."

Her finger flicks, and Constance flies through the air before dropping into the stone chair. She gasps as the world loses its color; everything divides into shades of grey and darker grey.

Marek rushes toward them, and the courtier yawns. A bubble surrounds him mid-step, trapping him inside. He pounds against it and his mouth moves, but Constance hears nothing.

"That's better." The courtier settles onto the wide arm of the throne. "He's a bit mouthy, no?"

Constance should be terrified, outraged, something, but the cold stone seeps into her bones and all she feels is increasingly numb. After cracking open her heart, facing her family and each one of her doubts—and after crying for a year before that, alone where no one could see, desperately trying to keep up a good face—after all of that, the nothing she feels now is wonderfully, impossibly freeing.

"I'll send him back," the courtier says, "if you want. Not that I suppose you want or don't want much of anything right now."

She really doesn't. Constance is gloriously dispassionate, empty, logical. "He'll die here, so that seems reasonable."

The woman shrugs languidly. "They all die eventually." But her hand twists, and the bubble disappears, Marek with it.

"I'll die too," Constance points out mildly, not sure what the courtier can want with her. His absence sends a strange echo through her, like dropping a pebble down an empty well.

"Constance, Constance." The fairy strokes her hair, fingers trailing down to the very end before she lets the strand drop. "You're smarter than that."

Then this is another test. Constance has aced every test she's ever taken; this one will be no different. She considers the facts. "The legend is true then."

"Which legend?" The fairy smiles, all teeth.

"That the courtly fae were once human." That would explain how the fairy planned to keep her; she would turn Constance into fae like her, thereby granting her immortality.

"Oh, you really are darling!" The fairy pats her head. Constance frowns mildly at the condescension. "Yes, yes, you pass. Are you ready for your prize?"

"I need no gifts from you," she says on reflex.

"It's not a gift if you've earned it. Look at you." The courtier unwinds the silk (red once but grey now) that Marek wrapped around her bloodied hand. There is no blood anymore—only bone. "Every wayward emotion you've let take you over, steal your mind and break your heart, has brought you here to this. You've stripped your humanity," she purrs. "You're ready to become one of us. And aren't you ready?"

Something about the silk bothers Constance, and she frees it from the fairy's hand. "What do you get out of this?"

"Oh, things." The courtier floats off the chair to lay horizontal in the air, hands propping her chin up on nothing. "I get to grant a wish. All fairies' fondest pastime." Idly, Constance notices her teeth look sharper than before.

The numbing effect of the chair is cutting the edge off Constance's thoughts. With a frown, she tries to push up, but the fairy crowds in closer. Constance tries to bite her tongue but finds she no longer has one (how is she talking then?). She squeezes her eyes shut and flicks them open, trying to wake herself up. "I... never wished for anything."

"That old lie," the fairy sighs, rotating so that she floats on her back. Her hair falls in waves to the floor. "We both know what your deepest wish was, Constance Wylf, when you entered my library."

"To free you."

The courtier tuts. "To not feel anymore. To not want. All those human emotions are pesky business, no?"

"I didn't make a wish."

"You didn't have to. We know." Even as numb as Constance is, there is something in the queen's upside-down smile that strikes a chord of fear. "The chair isn't perfect," the queen says, as if reading Constance's thoughts. "But my gift would be. You would have everything you ever wanted: your freedom."

The queen's voice hums like a lullaby. It would be easy, so easy. "No emotions?"

"None you don't want." The fairy shrugs one shoulder and flashes a wicked grin. "Immortality is a long time if you don't play pretend now and again."

Pretend is a game Constance is good at. She's hidden her feelings forever from everyone. But to think, not to have to conceal feelings, not to struggle against them, but rather dabble in them, like makeup to put on and wash off again.

Like she played pretend with Marek. A dull pressure in her chest makes breathing harder for a moment. But Marek... She blows the breath through her lips. Marek will be fine. He will find a girl who doesn't have to pretend to love him, who is normal, who doesn't enjoy feeling nothing.

Constance meets the fairy's eyes. "There's another reason too. Things, you said, plural. I want to hear it first."

"Ah, we really are going to have such scintillating conversations! No one these days catches that." The fairy pats her head.

"That's not a reason."

"Isn't it?" she giggles.

The silk is soft in Constance's hand, warm in a way it has no right to be; warm for the hands that tore it and held it and tied it, and she clutches it tighter in sudden clarity. "You're lonely."

The fairy scowls, and the skull flashes beneath her illusion. "I didn't say that."

"You are. That's the answer. You are." Constance pushes up, and this time the fairy retreats. Feeling floods back into Constance, slow at first but mounting with each step. She holds Marek's silk up like the flag of her army, her proof, her conviction. "You're so lonely you'd do anything for a moment's respite, but you're not supposed to be lonely because that's human, it's beneath you, because the people around you can't know you care."

Constance marches forward with the scrap of silk, and the queen's feet brush the ground in her haste to escape. "You think you can read my mind," Constance says, "but I can read yours. And this, my queen," Constance says, pressing the red silk Marek so lovingly wrapped around her wounds into the fairy's hand, "is my gift to you."

"It means nothing," the fairy sneers, though her fingers clutch it tighter, and she stumbles against the ground, flight going out of her.

"Nothing except that you want what I have. And I can give it to you."

Her fangs flash. "You'd give me your human boy?"

Fear darts through her, but Constance, for once, welcomes it, uses it, appreciating the way it sloughs off the numbness. "I'd give you the chance to be like me again. Human wants and fears and all. Marek's not mine to give. My wish is, though." She looks at her meaningfully, and the fairy's eyes widen.

Her illusion flickers wildly. "Don't you dare."

Constance reaches out to take her hand. "I won't if you don't want me to. But I think for all the emotions the fae removed when they granted your wish, they couldn't remove them entirely." She squeezes the once-human's hand. "What else is magic, after all?"

The woman's lips twist bitterly. "All the hurt you've gone through and you want to subject me to it?"

"Yes," Constance laughs, surprising herself a little, and leans into it, not caring if it's proper or smart. She beams at this terrifying queen who could turn her to dust as easily as to fae. "If you can handle it, my queen. Let's both go get hurt."

"You humans are absolutely mad," she mutters.

"Better mad," Constance insists, alight with conviction, "than empty."

"Yes, yes." Her fingers waggle, and the red silk twines itself into her hair: a gift accepted. It pushes back the shadows from her face. Then her hand spins, and the stone room dissolves into a shower of blue sparks.