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The throne of children's shoes began to come apart.

Not violently — not an explosion or a shattering, nothing dramatic enough for a fairy tale's climax. The shoes simply loosened. Laces unknotted themselves. Buckles unclasped. The hundreds of small shoes that had been fused and woven into Vellum's seat separated, drifting apart like a flock of birds taking flight in slow motion, and each one floated gently to the floor of the rotunda and landed with a soft, final tap.

Vellum sat on nothing. And then Vellum stood, because sitting on nothing was not something even an ancient fairy could manage with dignity.

"You have won your wager," Vellum said. The fairy's voice had lost its multitonal quality. It was a single voice now, thinner and older and somehow more real. "Take the girl. Take them all."

All around the rotunda and through the corridors of the Remembering, Kael heard the sound of waking — gasps, murmurs, the bewildered voices of children returning from dreams they'd inhabited for years, or decades, or in Callum's case, nearly half a century. The alcoves emptied. Children stumbled forward on unsteady legs, blinking in the dim silver light, reaching for each other's hands.

"Lira," Kael said. "Where—"

"Here," said a voice from behind Vellum's ruined throne.

Lira stepped into view and Kael's knees almost gave out. She was wearing her nightgown from the orphanage, the one with the fraying hem and the constellation print, and her feet were bare, and her dark hair was tangled, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She looked at him with clear, bright, fully present eyes.