Sigsimondo reached into the fountain of pain and diverted some of the agony into himself.

It was not much, but it was enough.

Isabelle grasped the flow, teased it into the studio, and began to work it into her identity, but where to put it?

She immersed herself in the stream to find its source and nature. It felt as if every inch of skin had been flayed from her body, her muscles and innards scraped from her bones. She was pinned to a table with a steel spike, like an insect in a specimen box, while the flensing worms consumed her flesh.

But the worst of the pain was not physical. Standing in the gallery, their faces shadowed by harsh alchemical lights on the domed ceiling above, were her mother and father, her brother and her grandfather, the patriarch of the clan. Each had their piume on full display, their crest feathers flared out in great fans around their heads.

“Why?” Brunela sobbed, her voice a husk from shrieking. “Why are you doing this to me?” What had she done wrong? What had she done? She’d always been a good daughter. She loved them. Why?

Abandonment, loneliness, betrayal: Isabelle’s soul swelled to take them in, for these were emotions she knew well. She painted them into the history of her own father, le Comte des Zephyrs, who had always despised her. It might not be possible to explain anything to the dead, but Isabelle painted Brunela into her understanding of her family’s treachery. Her family had been trying to avoid being targeted in a four-hundred-year-old vendetta, and sacrificing Brunela had been the only way. Not that it excused their cowardice.

Brunela’s soul stuff burned like acid, but stroke by sizzling stroke, Isabelle smoothed Brunela into her memory until the frontiers between them disappeared. The physical pain lessened to an ache like the last days of a bad flu. The pain of betrayal burned on like a coal fire in a collapsed mine.

Isabelle’s own fever made it hard to concentrate, which slowed her laborious progress even further. She had no idea how much time had passed in the outside world, or if any had passed at all.

At last she looked up and found her task complete. She had no more ghost pigment left, and the Ravenous Gate had disappeared. Sigsimondo was there with her, and another silent presence: Brunela, a ghost bled down to a wisp, without color but not without form.

Isabelle was almost too exhausted to ask the question, but she sorted herself out and reached out to the misty memory. Have you seen a fever such as this before?