Either she was too Nomatsi, or she was not Nomatsi enough. Either she showed too few emotions, or she showed too many. And now Owl was facing that same truth, the same knife she could never escape. You are unwanted.

Owl must have seen something on Alma’s face—something that even Iseult missed—for her Threads abruptly stopped reaching. Abruptly reversed course, shriveling in while grief-stricken blue laid claim.

Her lip wobbled, but she did not cry, and heartbeat by heartbeat, more of that green determination that made Owl who she was assembled around her Threads. Until at last, she took Iseult’s hand, a weak grip but an accepting one all the same.

And something warm and new unwound in Iseult’s lungs. Something she’d never felt before but had craved every time another person had sent her away. Such a different heat from the Puppeteer rage, such a different heat from the tongue-thickening shame.

Maybe she and Owl were not enemies after all.

“Thank you,” Iseult told the healer as she hefted Owl off the table, the child’s eyes holding hers. “We are grateful for your help.” She didn’t wait for a reply before guiding Owl toward the tent’s flap.

Neither she nor Owl looked at Alma as they passed.

There was a way out of this prison tent. That much Aeduan knew—that much had ebbed to the surface, knowledge gleaned from the first Aeduan. Knowledge the new Aeduan should have tamped down …

But that he also was desperate to use.

The young woman named Iseult had unsettled him. Weakened him for just long enough that the other soul had clawed upward and seen this world, seen this tent … Then he’d overwhelmed Aeduan with a certainty that there was an escape here. It had something to do with his magic, something that Iseult should have seen but failed to protect against.

So now the new Aeduan was puzzling his way through what exactly his escape might be.

He was a Bloodwitch, that much he knew. And he had power over blood so vast that people feared him. Called him demon when they thought he could not hear. Even the Raider King had looked at him with mild fear during their journey. But Aeduan still had not tapped into all the nuances and corners of this magic. He still, despite relying on it more and more each day, had no fathoming of just how much he might do.

He could move his muscles faster. He could track people by scent. And what else? What more?

Control. The word curled up from the deepest recesses of Aeduan’s body, of Aeduan’s brain. It was the first soul again, and Aeduan’s initial instinct was to punch it back down. Stopper it behind the walls he’d buried it in.