Cold and light burrowed past her eyeballs and into her brain. Past her lungs, all the way to her heart. She was pure winter. She froze from the inside out; her muscles and bones became fuel for a Cursewitch.

Distantly, Iseult felt her knees give out beneath her. Distantly, she heard screams she knew must be her own. But she was powerless to stop them. She could not even release Corlant’s Threads. The dark current at the heart of them would not let her go. It swelled inside her, glaciating every cell it touched and every drop of her Aether too.

I thought you would be stronger, a voice whispered atop the ice. But there is still time for you to become the dark-giver you were meant to be. The shadow-ender the Witchlands needs. The daughter I thought had been taken from me.

“No,” Iseult tried to say. Or maybe she did say it, though no sound reached her ears. No voice shook in her chest. The crackling core of Corlant’s power still consumed, still froze.

Until at last he released her. Laughter briefly filled her skull, pink Threads briefly claimed her vision. Then darkness—blessed and pure—shoved in to drag her down.

Iseult collapsed.

Fourteen Days After the Earth Well Healed

Later, Iseult will wonder how no one saw her and Leopold. Later, she will have strange memories of gray and snow and walls that open wide. But it will all be so dreamlike that she will not be able to fathom what it means.

And she certainly cannot fathom what it means while it is happening. She loses track of the turns and passages, of the countless people they pass who never seem to see. Every time she says, “Safi,” Leopold ignores her. Or quiets her, a bloodied hand to cover her mouth, as if people might be near to overhear.

She sees no one, though, and Threads are hazy.

Worse, a voice is beginning to speak to her again. Just a tickle at the base of her brain, but Iseult recognizes it. She has been here before. You did this to me. You killed me. I will never let you go. It is the Hell-Bard’s voice. The Stonewitch’s ghost.

But then the voice pulls back. The gray seems to clear, and suddenly Iseult finds herself in a part of the palace she has never seen before, in a round room of dark, ancient stone and blazing hearth.

Owl is here, dressed in a plain traveling cloak and clasped in Zander’s patient arms. She gives a soft cry at the sight of Iseult, and relief swells across her Threads. A cleansing wave against the fear that paled them before. “Bad things are happening,” she says as Zander eases her to the carpet, red as blood and so much thicker. “We were worried.”