Ana summons Din to help her to the table, has him dim the lamps, and prepares another brutal meal of raw liver and kizkil mushrooms. Din is sickened by the sight and worries about the dosage, but Ana insists on silence because she means to use the reagents to think through Pyktis's motives and hidden plans.

As Ana sits in the dark, Din senses a disturbing transformation in her. A strange smell fills the room, Ana's body and voice seem to change, and Din feels as if he is trapped with a predator. In that altered state, Ana fixates on the central puzzle: if Pyktis had such reach, why has he still not attacked the Shroud? She then reexamines the earlier murders and asks how Pyktis could have poisoned the king and struck Gorthaus without being recognized, leading her to revisit the clue that the king had a twin and that other key figures were also born in pairs or multiples.

Ana suddenly pulls off her blindfold, asks Din for his knife, and goes to Pyktis's corpse. Instead of cutting the body, she pries out one of Pyktis's teeth and studies it, concluding that it had been recently grafted and therefore does not fit a man supposedly long hidden in the jungle. That clue, combined with her sudden memory of Pavitar's dogs being killed first, gives Ana the missing piece of the puzzle. She realizes Pyktis kept an essential part of his design off the board, sees the full shape of his strategy, and announces that she now knows where the other weapon is hidden.

Ana quickly regains enough control to issue orders. She asks for her lyre, calls Thelenai and the others back, and says Din will lead her and the wardens to the High City so they can return Yarrow's wealth and expose the entire scheme. The group races to prepare under Ana's shouted instructions from inside her carriage, while Thelenai receives a separate assignment and is told to signal completion with a red rocket. After confirming that Kardas should already have received their earlier message, they load the treasure and begin the night journey uphill, while Din remains haunted by Ana's monstrous-seeming transformation and wonders whether the true hidden horror is closer than he thought.