It was a good dream. Yes, Safi was back in the Loom, but this time she wasn’t slowly fading while Zander held her aloft. This time, she floated and flitted and followed the sound of Iseult’s voice.

Then she found her Threadsister. She was right there, flesh and blood, standing before her. “Weasels piss on you!” Safi laughed, a trilling sound that seemed to vanish as soon as it left her lips. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Safi,” Iseult said in that special way she had: inflectionless yet somehow carrying a thousand emotions. She reached for Safi, and Safi, formless though she was, tried to reach back.

But a shadow came. It spread behind Iseult, liquid and alive, before solidifying into a man. Gold winked at his throat, and he crooned something in Nomatsi—something Safi couldn’t quite hear and wasn’t sure she’d understand anyway. Iseult turned away.

“No,” Safi tried to say. “Stay.” But Iseult didn’t hear. She spoke to the shadow man, a cold, detached version of herself. The one that sometimes frightened Safi.

Whoever the shadow was, he was bad. Iseult needed her help. Yet right as Safi brushed forward to speak again, to reach again, Iseult rounded back. Arms outstretched and fingers long, she grabbed for Safi as if to embrace. So Safi swept into it. Yes, yes, I am here!

Then the pain began. Safi shattered awake.

Her whole body shook. Her teeth rattled in her ears. And someone was grabbing her, holding her, and shouting her name over and over again. Caden. She twisted her stiff neck toward him, but her muscles were not her own. Left, right, she looked where Iseult wanted her to look.

No, not Iseult. This could not be Iseult’s doing. It would never be Iseult’s doing.

“Safi.” Caden gripped her biceps tightly. “Can you hear me?”

She nodded dimly. Still, no words would form; no breath would gather. She was going to suffocate, and this was going to be the end. Let go, she tried to tell Iseult. Please, please let go.

“Shit,” Caden hissed, and suddenly Safi was being hauled into an upright position. Then dragged over wood and leaned against the railing.

He ripped open her shirt, no ceremony, no gentleness, and exposed her chest to cold and starlight. “The Hell-Bard’s doom,” he said. “You should have said something.”

Safi could only shake her head. What was there to say? It wasn’t just the doom. It was Iseult, now gone, and the shadow man with gold upon his neck.

The longer she sat there with Caden’s fingers upon her chest, the more air seeped into her lungs, blessed and true. “I feel … fine,” she rasped.

“Liar,” he replied.

She shook her head. “Truly.”