A single punch, and the ice cracked. Then Iseult swept it away, savoring the cold and the black waters now peering up at her. They did not burn her skin, nor stink of sulfur. Snow fell, vanishing on the water’s gentle roll. Iseult’s reflection was twisted, a shivering shadow that carved the world in two. She looked as she had two weeks ago in Praga … yet somehow completely different.

I look like Esme. Not in features—Esme had been one of the most beautiful young women Iseult had ever seen—but in energy. The softness of Esme’s face and body had been hardened by a frantic edge.

Iseult had that edge. Maybe because, like Esme, she had been run out of her tribe. Or maybe because, like Esme, her magic was an abomination of gray, gray, gray.

We are just alike, she used to tell Iseult. We must weave Threads when we can—and break them when we have to. Iseult had always shied away from those words. She had denied them and fought them and pretended they were not true. She was not like Esme; she was not a Puppeteer.

Until the day when there had been no more running. Esme had been right all along: Iseult did have the need to change things, and she did have the hate to do it.

She also had the tools.

She pulled away from her reflection and eased Eridysi’s diary into the afternoon’s light. The entire tome, hers for the reading. Hers for the learning. After a glance in Owl’s direction and finding the child safe and calm, she peeled back the diary’s cover. New leather creaked. Snow landed on the first page.

And Iseult began to read. It was like being handed a key to the universe—except better. This was a key to her own magic. A key to what she could become.

She began where the ripped-out pages ended: raising the dead. It was not true life such magic could create. Void magic had its limits; Portia had only created a semblance of returned life. A reanimation with Threads that could not last.

But Eridysi had scribbled notes about what might be done if an Aetherwitch attempted the same spell. Her theories and speculations, her diagrams and details filled page after page. Not just on reanimation either, but on cleaving and death. On ghosts and the afterlife, and even on a young shadow wyrm Portia had found a way to kill.

She also had an entire eight pages dedicated to Threadstones. She had apparently worked directly with one of the most famous Threadwitches who’d ever lived, named Vergedi. And where Vergedi had made stones, Portia had cleaved them for power.

Iseult hadn’t known you could sever a stone’s Threads.