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She pulled the blanket higher, covering the stars once more. She watched him a moment longer. The light caught the side of his face and his throat. He looked tired.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Mm."

"How does a Severant truly fight a daemon with no Current?"

A long pause. He didn't turn his head.

"Severants don't need the Current," he said. "We drink Eitr. From a young age, measured doses. The first dose almost killed me."

Idonea's stomach tightened. Children. They gave it to children.

Lysander continued, "the Order calls it a sanctification. It builds something in the blood. The daemons are repelled by the Eitr presence within us."

She didn't speak, an undercurrent of realisation about what made Severants dangerous to daemons. They were ingesting the blood of dragons, of witchwyrms, the very things that hunted daemons across boundaries between worlds.

"It costs," he said. "We don't sleep well. We don't father children. The Order considers it a fair trade for what we can do. We're built not to want. Not to keep. The Eitr makes sure of it. Or it's supposed to." He still didn't look at her.

"Why are you telling me this?" She wanted to tell him to stop.

A small shrug. "You told me about Jovana."

"That's not the same thing."

"No. But it's close."

"Will it kill you?" She had to know.

"Yes. Eventually. The Order says forty. Some make it to forty-five. The longest-lived Severants are kept in monasteries where the public doesn't see them. Their eyes change. They begin to sense the Nexis without trying. The Order says it is sanctification. I think it is the body remembering, finally, what the blood is."

"Becoming."

"Becoming, yes. Whatever the witchwyrms were, the Order has been making echoes of them in human bodies, and the longest-living ones begin to remember what they are echoes of. The Order does not tell the candidates that part. I don't think the Order tells itself."

Idonea was quiet a long time. "Lysander."

"Yes."

"I am sorry."

"Do not be."

"I am anyway. I am sorry for the boy who was ten. I am sorry for the boy who was twelve. I am sorry for what you carry."

A very quiet sound from the floor beside the bed. He didn't say anything for a while.

When he spoke again, his voice was lower than it had been. "Thank you, witchling."

"Mm."

Neither of them said anything else for a long time.

True night called to her. Lysander’s breathing, low and steady, sounded beyond the bed.

She waited, counting the rise and fall of his breath. He had said he never truly slept, but surely that was jest. The weight in her chest pressed tighter the longer she lay still. She couldn’t stay, she needed the chapel for answers.

She slipped from the bed and padded across the cold floor. Lysander’s prone form blocked the door; one arm tucked beneath his head. He looked peaceful.