In Maius 1789, Helena wakes in darkness, in severe pain and desperate to escape. Kaine is beside her, older and visibly shaken, and Helena first reaches for him in relief before remembering Spirefell, transference, the manacles, and his identity as High Reeve. The contradiction between Kaine as her lost ally and Ferron as her captor triggers agonizing mental collapse as her buried memories begin breaking through.

Helena asks whether Kaine was behind the obsidian messages and Mandl’s supposed network, and Kaine admits it was always him. Kaine tells Helena that Lila Bayard is alive, that a false body was produced because Lila was pregnant and being hunted, and that Lila now has a son. Helena wants to believe Kaine but cannot trust him after months of cruelty and deception.

As Helena tries to describe memories of Kaine spying for the Eternal Flame, her damaged mind seizes. Kaine catches Helena, explains that her transmuted mental barriers are coming apart, and says Helena has been unconscious for a week after pregnancy made the Toll too much for her to sustain. When Helena asks why Kaine killed everyone, Kaine says he was trying to find her: he searched wreckage, prisons, files, Central, the Outpost, and Hevgoss, and became responsible for tracking missing Resistance members so the task would not be reassigned.

Kaine explains that Morrough has eyes in Spirefell and sometimes watches from the hall, so Kaine’s treatment of Helena had to account for the possibility of being observed through Helena. Helena begins to understand that Kaine was performing for Morrough, though she still cannot reconcile his tenderness with Ferron’s monstrosity. Kaine sedates Helena and says that when everything is over, Helena will take care of Lila as promised.

After waking again, Helena recognizes the necrothrall who brings soup and receives a written instruction to rest. Helena pieces together that transference and the manacles came from Shiseo’s knowledge, not Kaine’s, and that Morrough used the method for the repopulation program. When Kaine later returns, he tells Helena the plan: wait for the summer Abeyance, send Helena south to Lila, and let Shiseo take her there. Kaine also reveals Morrough is weakening, has mutilated himself with Holdfast’s bones, and is vulnerable enough that foreign powers may soon intervene to secure Paladia’s lumithium and industry.

Over the next days, Kaine withdraws while Helena suffers fits and drugged stupors under Davies’s care. Kaine briefly returns tenderness by holding Helena’s hand and touching the ring on her finger, but he remains emotionally distant. Helena learns Kaine is married to Aurelia Ingram by Morrough’s order and asks whether Kaine will come south after Paladia is dealt with; Kaine says he will if that is what Helena wants, but Helena feels the answer may be a lie.