Thisbe chuckled. “I’m a witch.”

“What?”

What?

“Did you imagine Bridger was the only one with powers? The child plays with toys. I’m a grown-up, I play with grown-ups.”

“A witch?”

“You needed punishment. You can’t just waltz into my house, or meet with enemies like Dominic, without permission.” Thisbe prowled around Carlyle, the cat circling a sparrow too wounded to flee. “Let’s get things clear here, Carlyle: this house is my domain. I may bring in strays like you, and Esmerald Revere, and Mycroft Canner, but that doesn’t make you any more important than those plastic toy soldiers. You jump when I say jump, you dance when I want you to dance, and you’ll bite your own tongue out and choke to death any instant I choose.”

Carlyle tried to rise, but tremors pinned her, helpless. “A witch?”

Mycroft, is this really happening?

“I’ve been watching you.” Thisbe raised two fingers to her forehead as if to point out a third eye hidden beneath the skin. “Ever since you stumbled through my door I’ve been watching. You fool, you’re not Julia’s pawn or Dominic’s, you’re my pawn, and you’re going to stay my pawn, and stay alive, precisely as long as I want to keep you that way.”

Thisbe’s black eyes were too harsh for Carlyle to meet. The sensayer looked at the ground, at the toy knife lying in the grass before her. “You made me do that just now? You made me try to kill myself!”

The witch shrugged, basking in the web of hair around her shoulders, blacker than night’s black. “I was bored. You think I want to listen to your whiny theolo-gibberish? Besides, you needed to learn the lesson. Forget Julia and Dominic: you’re my puppet, mine alone. My hexes are worked into your flesh too deep for anyone to break.”

Mycroft, what is happening?

I’m sorry, reader. I failed to prepare you for this, just as I failed shivering Carlyle. I tried my useless best, but with the sensayer my warnings were too subtle, and with you, I think, too blunt to be believed. She is a witch. I told you from the start. I still can’t make it sound sane. It’s fear that makes me fail, fear of Thisbe, her spells that can cripple me as fast as Tully’s Canner Beat, while my eclectic skills provide no armor against her craft. I fear her, rare for me. It isn’t that I’m otherwise fearless—I fear a thousand things: Tully’s scheming, MASON’s left hand, Bridger—but the witch is altogether different. She should not be part of this, that’s what it is. She is an unexpected threat, outside the palette of the possible, as when a fortress city, whose death-stained towers have stopped a hundred battle lines, is brought low by a pestilence within. Why would this stage of Gods and Emperors suddenly contain, of all backwards absurdities, a witch? I fear, abjectly, and will fear still, even if you tell me limping science can explain away her spellcraft. When Utopians forge Earth’s rare metals into dragon fleets that feed on sunlight as they bear their masters across the sky-white surface of the Moon, they are wizards, even if they use science to deny it. Just so, when a black-hearted spinster lures a stray priest to her bedchamber to rape her soul and laugh, she is a witch.