Iseult looked for an escape. All night and into the dawn, she studied Aeduan’s and Evrane’s Threads and waited for moments when one of them was off guard. She scanned the trees for anything she might use as distraction. And she called and called to the weasel.

Pointless. The weasel held her silence. The Threads held no answers, and anytime Aeduan’s attention wandered, Evrane’s did not. Or it was reversed, with Evrane’s eyes meandering into the woods while Aeduan observed Iseult like a wolf. The one time both monks were distracted—by a strange, scuffling sound in the forest—Iseult couldn’t wriggle free from her bindings upon the ash tree.

“Can you sense what that was?” Aeduan asked after yanking the gag from Iseult’s mouth. His voice was all wrong, wrong, wrong. The morning’s cold had turned his nose red.

“No,” Iseult croaked between coughs. “I cannot … sense animal Threads, if they even have them.”

“All life has Threads.”

“You don’t.”

He tensed before her, Threads sputtering with surprise.

“The real you,” she added. “The Bloodwitch whose body you stole.”

He sniffed, the sound almost lost to a breeze biting through the trees. Then: “Interesting. I did not know such a thing was possible.”

“Portia once told me it might be,” Evrane inserted. She stood before Owl, and at her voice, Owl huddled deep beneath a blanket. Iseult’s own blanket had fallen off in the night. “She said for those born directly in the Sleeper’s glow, their Threads never form. Something like that.”

Portia again. The woman from the diary pages. Iseult ought to ask about her—press for how these usurpers knew such a name—but that was when the rustling resumed in the forest. A snapping branch. A pattering like a hundred feet. And Threads. Faint but unmistakably silver.

Now Iseult was the one to tense. Aeduan noticed. “What is it?”

She didn’t answer; instead she squinted into the barren hardwoods and green pines. Twice she had seen Threads of such pure silver: Once on sea foxes in the Jadansi Sea. Second on Blueberry, Owl’s mountain bat. And as much as she wished those Threads might be Blueberry, they were too quiet. Too stealthy.

“What is it?” Aeduan repeated.

“Something hunts us,” she said, glad they spoke in Arithuanian so Owl wouldn’t understand. “We should leave.”

Alarm brightened Aeduan’s Threads—and Evrane’s too. But neither monk argued. They simply unbound Iseult and Owl and hurried them onto Lady Sea Fox and Lord Storm Hound. They’d already loaded up camp, and neither Iseult nor Owl resisted as they were forced into the same pairings as yesterday.