The last time Sabine had left Ursula after a kiss, she’d meant it to be forever. She’d made a promise to herself not to betray her own soul. She could not love a queen. Would not.

Sometimes you have to break a promise to mend your heart.

While Ursula headed up the tower stairs, Sabine was returning to the dungeon. The place of rats and bones. The place her parents had died. And on this visit, she wasn’t just passing through, as she had been the last time. She was saving the weres. She could smell them, the goats, the foxes, the raccoons.

Two guards stood at the top of the stairs. Sabine swatted them aside, thinking of her parents. No one had come for them. No one else would come for these children. No one else could. She mustn’t fail.

The dungeon stairs were old and steep, remnants of a former castle that had long ago fallen. In some ways, it reminded her of the woods. When trees fell, new ones grew on top of them, sometimes even wrapping their roots around the downed logs. Then the fallen trees rotted away, leaving nothing but a grasping fist of roots, circling empty air. Ghost logs. The dungeon was full of ghosts too. She could feel them.

All this time, she’d thought the forest and the castle had nothing in common. That one was alive, and one was not. But they did have something in common. Both were haunted. As trees rise from the dust of their dead ancestors, men put castles on the bones of the old ones. Death comes for stone just as much as it comes for living tissue. Death would come for Ursula, and Sabine did not want this to happen before they’d had a life together. She did not want to be haunted by her own stubbornness. She wanted to find something in between stone and soil, a place where flesh and fur could thrive.

She raced down the stairs, desperate with love for Ursula, desperate to save the little weres. She met guards at the bottom too. Every movement was controlled and deliberate. Every blow landed with her full weight behind it.

In the space of a song, Sabine vanquished every guard. Every last one without shedding a single drop of her blood. She wished she could have saved her parents. She wished her they could have seen her now. But then again, amid the ghosts of the dungeon, perhaps they already had.

There was the matter of the key. She stood outside the cell that held the children. She could hear them crying, their bleats and squeals. She’d done her best to console them. But they were locked inside. She realized one of the guards must carry the key. So she shifted to her human form and returned to where she’d left them, broken on the stones.

The first guard she searched had nothing in his hands and no light in his eyes. She’d killed this man, far from her first. She’d had to kill in self-defense, many times. Any preciousness she might have felt about dealing out death was long gone. She would prefer not to kill. But she lived in a world that demanded it of her. She saw no reason to love her life any less than certain men hated it.

She rolled over the second guard and found the key at his waist. She pulled at it, and then his fingers closed around her wrists. She jerked her hand away and looked at him in the dim torchlight. He suffered. The pain he felt was written on his face in his own blood, and she felt a stab of pity. It was not fair, a bear against a man.

Then a sound rose from his throat. Rough, hostile. He spat on her face.

“Damned frisser,” he said.

She’d considered mercy. No longer. She wiped away his spittle and put her hand to his throat. Her fingers, slender, long, and exceptionally strong, did what needed to be done. In her swiftness, she did show mercy of a sort.

She took the key. She unlocked the door. The children surrounded her, all but Nicola in their animal form.

“I knew you’d come,” Nicola said. “I kept telling them. I kept telling them that this was the bad part of the story and that it would have a happy ending, that the bear would come to us on a puff of smoke.”

“That’s right, Nicola. That’s right,” Sabine said. “Shall we go find Ursula?”

She didn’t need an answer. She never would, when that was the question. After Nicola shifted, Sabine followed. They raced up the stairs, and as they did, Cappella’s pipe called them. It called them, and it called the rats, a river of them, flowing upstairs.