There’s a guide to dream-walking, and even a small snippet about failed attempts at reanimating the dead. They’re all observational notes, of course, for although Eridysi had been able to touch some magic, she had not been a Weaverwitch.
But that doesn’t matter to Iseult, for the person Eridysi had observed had been the Void Paladin of a thousand years ago. Portia had been her name, and she had been able to cleave and weave and break and bind. She had even made the first Loom, binding people who would eventually become the Hell-Bards.
And she’d forced Eridysi to watch every step of the way, to record every detail. Now all her methods, all her experiments, all her thoughts on the power of the Void—the power that lives inside Iseult—are written out for Iseult to read.
Except that this is only part of the diary. Only a few stolen pages.
“Where’s the rest?” Iseult asks when she gets to the final damaged paper. Her nose is going numb; her fingers already are.
A vision of Poznin appears in Iseult’s mind, of Esme’s tower, and the meaning is clear. If Iseult wants to learn more, she must go to Poznin. There, she can learn exactly as Esme did. She can lay claim to what the girl-turned-weasel left behind.
“I … can’t.” It is surprisingly hard for Iseult to say this aloud. Never has she been so close to understanding her own power. Never has she been with someone else who has a magic like hers.
Had a magic like hers.
“I have to stay with Safi. But what happened to you, Esme?” Iseult extends a tentative hand, and the weasel nuzzles against it. For a moment, she feels far more feral than human.
Then the images begin anew.
A man shrouded in darkness, tall and lithe with no face and only limbs made of shadow. “It will all be over quickly,” he tells Esme in Nomatsi before his shapeless hands close around her. Heat spears through her body. Cold too. She stretches and shrinks, painless yet more pain than she has ever known. But as he’d said, it is all over quickly. Her vision changes; the old world vanishes and a new one begins.
“Find her,” he commands. “Find the dark-giver and keep her safe.”
Iseult sucks in sharply as the memory fades. “Who…” Another gulp of air. She felt that pain as if it had been her own skin rearranged. “Who was that?”
Esme seems to shrug. She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t care. For all that she was once a young woman—once the Puppeteer—she is now an animal with a tiny brain. Some of her humanity remains, but not everything.
She leans into Iseult’s hand, almost feline in her desire for a good back scratch. Study the pages, she seems to say. Then we will go to Poznin.
Iseult sighs, steam puffing from her lips, and though she knows she shouldn’t, she finds herself grasping the torn pages once more and holding them high for a reread. She does not want to learn. She does not want to sever, sever, twist and sever …
But she has to. It is the magic she was given by Moon Mother. The only way she can protect herself, protect Safi. She spent all her life trying to be a Threadwitch, powerless and cast aside. Stumbling every step she took and weighing Safi down. Now Iseult has a magic like Esme’s and the descriptions from this diary. She has saved lives with it before; perhaps she can learn how to do so again.
With a second sigh, Iseult settles into a cross-legged seat beside the oak. Esme coils across her lap, and with shadows to cloak them completely, Iseult studies what a Voidwitch did a thousand years ago.
And she studies what it will take to become the next Puppeteer.
SEVEN
Iseult hadn’t meant to sleep, but exhaustion would not be denied. It wasn’t surprising really, she’d slept so little these past two months.
Fool. Iseult had promised the weasel that she would keep watch tonight; she was lucky no one had appeared while she slept.
The nightmares had come, though. They always did. Except it wasn’t the faces of the Cleaved or the killed that haunted her tonight. It was Safi, a week before she’d been wed and had her magic shorn away. Iseult had been so selfishly focused on herself, so selfishly consumed by her longing for simpler days and her hatred for the lingering eyes of Cartorra, that she hadn’t been ready.
She had failed at her one and only task in this life: protect her Threadsister because, as she’d been told, No one can protect Safi like Thread-family.
“I’m coming,” she whispered to the shadows of the hut. Owl slept beside her, Threads faded with sleep, the weasel curled nearby. “I’m coming.” Iseult shoved down all the maggots burrowing in her chest and fumbled for a nearby lantern. It guttered, the oil sloshed. Less oil than before she’d fallen asleep. Fool, fool.
Iseult pushed to her feet. Owl did not awaken, but the weasel did. She followed Iseult to the table and watched with glittering eyes as Iseult removed a roll of tattered papers from inside her woolen tunic. Torn, water-damaged, and flattened, these eight diary pages had been Iseult’s salvation. And her curse. The final stick upon the pyre. The final step away from Moon Mother’s light.
Her eyes briefly slid to the black circle on her hand. The ink sucked up all light; a tiny doorway into death. It had hurt when the Witchmark master had tattooed it, but as Henrick had told her and Safi: The world must know who you are. The world must know that here, in this palace, lives the Cahr Awen.
Iseult and Safi had complied because they’d thought that giving the Emperor what he’d expected to see would allow them to cut the purse more easily. How wrong they’d been. How wrong she’d been. They had gone to Praga to find Safi’s uncle and save him from death as a traitor. Instead, Safi had been turned into a Hell-Bard and Iseult had been forced to flee.
Iseult smoothed down the pages. The weasel had not been elegant when she’d ripped apart Eridysi’s journal, and there’d been the wear of travel. Esme had crossed marshes and mountains, farms and forests in search of Iseult.
There was so much missing too. So much Iseult didn’t know and could not figure out on her own. Even with the weasel’s mental images to guide her, Iseult needed more words, more diagrams, more explanations.
What I need is the full journal. But Poznin was still at least three weeks away. Probably closer to a month, even with horses. Which meant for another month, these eight pages were all Iseult would have to learn by.
“Dream-walking,” Iseult said, removing a single page. It was the one skill in these pages that Eridysi had been able to do herself. Iseult had done it before as well, when she’d had her Threadstone and Safi had had hers …
But Henrick had taken those stones, just as he had taken everything else from them. And although Eridysi wrote of ways to dream-walk and to find someone without a personal item of theirs, Iseult hadn’t been able to make it work. She hadn’t even been able to enter the Dreaming to search.
Perhaps tonight would be different, though.
Resting her palms upon her thighs, she took several long, relaxing breaths. She let her eyes rest on the lantern’s flame, vision unfocusing. In. Out. In. Out. Not so different from the way Aeduan had taught her to meditate.
Aeduan. Thinking of him sent her mind spiraling sideways and her pulse rising. She’d lost her silver taler somewhere at the Monastery, which meant Aeduan could not find her. Might never find her again …