Iseult did not obey. “Please!” she shouted, continuing to climb, unable to stop with Aeduan so near. “I am Iseult det Midenzi. Please! We need your help!”
For another two muscle-burning rungs, there was no reply. However, Threads all along the cliff—Threads Iseult was only just now sensing—shifted into alarm. Only then did Iseult realize the woman above her had no Threads, or at least none that she could see.
And only when she reached the end of the ladder and hands had grabbed hold of her did Iseult finally see who had called down to her. It was, of all the people in the universe, the one girl Iseult would have preferred never to see again. The one girl she had spent her entire childhood hating and avoiding.
Her mother’s favorite apprentice: Alma det Midenzi.
TWENTY-NINE
Alma.
There were thousands of people Iseult would have been less surprised to see. She felt sick. Like the world was closing in and she might retch at any moment. She was certainly on all fours, her stomach rebelling. Owl had curled into a ball several paces away, shivering. Her Threads doused again in shock.
“Get them water,” Alma said, no inflection, only command. Threadwitches couldn’t see other Threadwitches’ Threads, so her emotions might have been anything. Rage, annoyance, shock, horror—Alma was so adept at stasis that Iseult had no way of knowing.
“Hunted,” Iseult croaked, finding Alma’s beautiful heart-shaped face beside her, with its ice-white skin and frozen undertones. “A Carawen monk … hunts us.”
Alma nodded, as if she’d already known this. “He will be dealt with by our—”
“No.” The word cracked out, interrupting in a way no Threadwitch would ever do. “He cannot be stopped easily. He is…” Iseult had to swallow. Gulp back the water now shoved into her hand. “He is a Bloodwitch. He will heal from anything you do.”
Again, no reaction from Alma, even as the two women with her showed surprise in their Threads and on their faces.
It was incredible really. Alma had to know it was the same Bloodwitch who’d first hunted Iseult in Dalmotti—it was too rare a magic to be someone new. Yet she wore only perfect, unflappable calm as she declared, “We do not plan to harm him. Only capture him.”
“There’s … more.” Iseult wiped water off her mouth. “A creature with silver Threads—I don’t know what it is, but it has been following us for a day.”
“Silver Threads?” Alma’s voice betrayed skepticism even as her face did not. Then she turned to the cliff and pressed a brass spyglass to her eye. “I see nothing. It would seem only the monk followed you through.”
In that moment, despite Iseult’s heart still clattering too fast, despite her skin still searing with the memory of acid fog, and despite the fact that she seemed miraculously safe, the brightest sensation inside her was a foul, gray-tinged heat. It consumed her. Congealed in her belly.
Two months ago, she wouldn’t have recognized it. She’d have had to assess and analyze and tease through emotions she wasn’t supposed to have. Now, though, Iseult knew. Here was loathing, here was anger, and here was shame all tangled together in a knotted, clotted weave.
And as she sat there, watching Alma’s perfect figure stare with perfect calm into the Solfatarra, an image formed in Iseult’s mind. Fat from a borgsha pot.
Iseult stiffened. That was not her own thought, but the weasel’s. The creature was nearby. So easy to read, she’d once said when she’d still been human. All your fears gather at the surface, and I can skim them off like fat from a borgsha pot.
Teeth clenched, Iseult schooled her face as best she could. She grabbed the shame and the loathing and the rage, and she muscled them down until they were locked in that tiny little corner behind her left lung.
Then, feeling slightly cool, slightly calm, Iseult sent Esme a thought of her own: Stay hidden or they will kill you. She hoped to frighten the weasel, or at least jolt her into silence. But her command only earned more borgsha, more fat, and the sense of cackling, gloating glee. As if she were truly Wicked Cousin. As if Iseult had fallen neatly into her trap.
And maybe she had. After all, the weasel had known exactly where she was leading Iseult and Owl, and she’d known exactly who waited at the end.
“He has been caught,” Alma declared, fixing her golden-green eyes—beautifully wide set above her high cheekbones—on Iseult. “Is there anyone else we should be looking for?”
“Maybe. Yes.”
“Then we will post more guards.”
We. Iseult didn’t have to speculate who that we might be. There was only one person Alma could ever mean.
The last time Iseult had seen her mother, Gretchya, had been two months before in Dalmotti beneath a willow tree’s draping branches. Gretchya had tended an arrow wound in Iseult’s biceps and declared that she and Alma would be traveling to Saldonica to join a tribe called Korelli. She had claimed she’d always planned to invite Iseult—that they wouldn’t have left without warning—but Iseult hadn’t believed her then.
And now she saw her instincts had been correct: this was not Saldonica, and this was not the Korelli tribe. The hunters wore thick wool and thicker furs, a style distinctive to eastern Nomatsi tribes. And Alma wore velvet pantaloons beneath her black Threadwitch gown, while a black scarf encased her neck and a vest of thick bear fur covered her torso. Nomatsis from the southwest wore neither fur nor hide; they believed it an insult to Little Sister.
Shame on Gretchya, Iseult supposed, for teaching her daughter too well. Now Iseult had caught her in all her lies—though it gave her no pleasure to be right. Only more loathing that she couldn’t keep tucked away. It bled out from behind her left lung, feasting like some parasite upon her chest.
“Can you walk?” Alma asked, still watching Iseult. Scrutinizing her as if she could read her thoughts.
Iseult set her jaw. “Of course.” She pushed to her feet and helped Owl rise. Then they hurried after Alma, already striding into a new stretch of forest, the Solfatarra’s bite vanishing behind.
It felt as if they walked for miles before Alma finally led them into a Nomatsi encampment. There was no sign of the camp from afar—no smoke to plume. No noises to split the forest. Only old walls thrust up amidst the trees, crumbling ruins from a forgotten past.
As Iseult and Owl trailed around a curved stretch of wall that might have once been a tower, magic dusted Iseult’s skin. It pulled the breath from her lungs, plucked the hairs on her arms. Glamour, she realized, even as the individual Threads of the spell shifted and fell away, revealing a new world.
It was at once so familiar and at once so strange. The round tents spaced evenly throughout the wide clearing were the inspiration behind the round structures in the Midenzi settlement, yet in place of roofs and walls, there were animal hides stretched over wooden scaffolding. Cooking fires were spaced throughout the camp, but they’d been recently doused, the embers covered with thick blankets. The only sound was the snuffling of horses hidden behind tents and ruin walls—which was where the people were too, their Threads animate. Alert. Ready.
They had been waiting for an attack, Iseult realized with a twitch of her nose. She must have triggered some warning system along the trail. But when, what, where? And for that matter, how was this tribe so well equipped? Alarm-spells were expensive, while the cost of a glamour-spell was unfathomable.