With that declaration, the Puppeteer’s hands lifted, her wrists so fine, her forearms so fragile. This close, though, there was no missing how similar her fingers were to Iseult’s: thin to the point of knobby, and widely spaced when flexed.

The Puppeteer reached out, fingers curling and stretching like a musician at the harp.

Or a weaver at the loom.

The blacksmith’s Threads—the sunset-colored strands that still bound him to his distant Threadbrother—floated ever so slowly toward Esme’s hands, stretching thinner and thinner as they moved … then sliding into the gaps between her fingers.

Once the Threads had strained so thin as to be almost invisible, and had gathered so thickly around Esme’s fingers that they looked like a glowing ball of pink yarn, she drew her hands to her face. “Now all it takes is a little snip.”

Esme’s face dipped forward, and Iseult had the sensation of her mouth opening, of her teeth baring and the Threads slipping between …

Esme snapped her jaw shut. The Threads cracked like a misstep on a frozen lake. In a flash of light, the strands shriveled inward, shrank backward, vanished entirely.

The blacksmith started convulsing. He fell to his knees as fresh pustules rippled and popped across his body. Then Esme turned away from the window, and Iseult lost sight of him.

“The cleaving will burn through him completely now.” Esme dusted off her hands as if bits of Thread still clung. “He will be dead in seconds.”

Iseult had no response. Heat was rising in her chest. Boiling in her throat. This was not Thread magic. This was not Aether magic. This was not something Iseult could do.

She was not like Esme. She was not like Esme!

“What is wrong with you, Iseult?”

N-nothing, she tried to say. She needed to escape. She needed to wake up. I … want to try what you showed me, she lied. Anything to escape the Dreaming.

It worked. Esme smiled—Iseult felt the smile spread across a face that was not her own. Then Esme nodded, sending the view of the tower lurching. “Good, Iseult. Practice, and before long, we will be together.”

Esme clapped her hands.

The world went black, and Iseult finally toppled into true, dreamless sleep.

* * *

The Threadwitch made too much noise.

Aeduan never would have expected it from her. She was so stoic, so hard. Yet here they were: Aeduan attempting to finish his morning routine, and the Threadwitch constantly interrupting.

He had moved from the inner rooms of the ancient fortress at first light, finding an open area on one of the higher steppes. Fire had burned through here, recently enough to have cleared away saplings and underbrush in a storm-struck burst of flames. It happened often in the Contested Lands, almost as if the gods swooped through from time to time, clearing out the old. Making space for the new.

It was like the Nomatsi skipping rhyme.

Dead grass is awakened by fire,

dead earth is awakened by rain.

One life will give way to another,

the cycle will begin again.

That was the tune the Threadwitch sang this morning. She crooned wildly off-key, and it was wildly distracting for Aeduan, who meditated cross-legged atop a fallen column.

She cut off once she’d realized he was there, but it was too late. His concentration had been disrupted.

He would have cursed at the girl if he’d thought it would make a difference. It wouldn’t, though, and the instant he rose and slipped free of his Carawen cloak, she resumed her tune—a soft humming while she assembled a campfire with practiced ease.

Aeduan attempted to begin his morning warm-up instead, rolling his wrists and swinging his arms, but he couldn’t focus. Not with all her noise.

“Quiet,” he snarled at last.

“Why?” she countered, defiance in the lift of her chin.

“You distract me.”

The defiance expanded, moving from her face to her shoulders. She straightened. “I thought you were a monk no longer. So why are you meditating or … whatever this is?”

Aeduan ignored her and shifted into warming kicks, his legs loose as he flung them high.

“What was it like, being a monk?” She stepped closer.

Three more kicks, and he moved to squats. One, two—

“Anyone can become a monk,” she went on, striding in front of him now. “Regardless of their background or their”—she waved at him—“witchery.”

“No.” Aeduan knew he ought to leave this conversation and the Threadwitch alone, but he couldn’t let her words—false as they were—hang between them. “Trust me, Threadwitch,” he huffed between squats, “monks can be as cruel as the rest of humanity. They simply do it in the name of the Cahr Awen.”

“You left because of cruelty?”

Aeduan paused at the top of his next squat. The girl’s face was blank, and even her expressive nose was completely still.

He sighed. “Simply because I have lost faith in the cause doesn’t mean the training has lost all of its usefulness.”

Her head tipped sideways. “And why don’t you believe in the cause?”

What had Aeduan stepped into? One question begat another hundred, and now the girl had landed on the last subject Aeduan wished to discuss. Ever.

“Enough.” He turned away from her. “Leave this area or be quiet.”

He moved for a shaded patch in the clearing, where the grass was the shortest and no crumbling fortress could get in the way. Where he could spin and roll, kick and curl.