“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.