Ferron finds Helena in his room and, after drinking, forces her to obey with his resonance. Helena tries to resist, but Ferron puppets Helena’s body into place and warns that obedience will be easier. Ferron then pins Helena in a chair and begins transference, pushing his consciousness into Helena’s mind.

The procedure overwhelms Helena. Ferron briefly sees through Helena’s eyes, then tears back out of Helena’s mind, leaving her disoriented, bleeding, and mentally unstable. Ferron reacts with fury and orders Helena out, but when Helena staggers to the balcony and considers throwing herself over to protect Luc’s secrets, Ferron stops her and drags her back to her room. Ferron skims Helena’s recent memories, discovers Helena’s attempts to plan around him, and warns that the High Necromancer wants Helena alive until her secrets are recovered.

After Ferron leaves, Helena collapses into fever and nightmares. She relives battlefield-hospital trauma, the burden of choosing who lives or dies, and visions of Luc, Lila, Titus, Rhea, the Council, the Eternal Flame, and Helena’s parents accusing Helena of causing their deaths. When Helena wakes, Ferron and a nervous medical man enter; Ferron removes poison vials from Helena’s reach and challenges the man’s claim that repeated procedures, arsenic, and brain fevers will not kill Helena too soon. The man retreats from certainty and promises to ask Stroud to advise.

Stroud arrives the next day with Mandl, now occupying a corpse, and a dead servant. Stroud examines Helena, finds Helena too weakened and inflamed after seven days, and decides the next transference must be delayed until Helena is stronger because premature death would lose the information. Stroud also blames Mandl for not reporting Helena sooner, noting that they might otherwise have preserved Boyle’s corpse for an Undying animancer. Helena reflects with disgust on the Ferrons’ use of murdered civilian servants as necrothralls and on the family’s betrayal of the Holdfasts and Luc.

The following day Ferron orders Helena outside on Stroud’s advice and gives Helena a red cloak so the thralls can easily spot her. In the enclosed courtyard, Helena sees Ferron’s newspaper announcing Helena as the captured last fugitive of the Eternal Flame, complete with Helena’s location at Spirefell and Ferron’s role as captor. Ferron explains that the notice is a trap meant to lure any surviving Resistance members into trying to rescue Helena. Horrified that survivors could be caught because of Helena, Helena runs through the rain, searches for the vanished Eternal Flame beacon, and fails to escape through the locked iron gate.

Helena returns toward the house but Ferron orders Helena to keep walking. Hidden in the cloister, soaked and freezing, Helena realizes hypothermia might kill her and begins letting herself drift away. Ferron finds Helena, uses heat or vivimancy to revive her, and forces Helena back inside. A dead housemaid cleans Helena’s muddy slippers at Ferron’s command, prompting Helena to think of the Faith’s belief that unburned, reanimated bodies trap and corrupt souls. Seeing the maid’s empty face under Ferron’s will, Helena calls Ferron a monster, and Ferron dryly acknowledges it.