No, she almost pressed her lips to his jaw. Instead, she paused just below the ear, where her breath could whisper against his skin. Where he could pull back in case he did not want her there. But he didn’t pull back, and so her lips grazed over his skin. So lightly, he feared he might be imagining it.

Too much! his instincts screamed at him. Too much! Retreat! But Aeduan didn’t retreat because inexplicably, the too much was also not enough.

She kissed him a second time, her lips more firm, more sure, and he definitely was not imagining it. His body told him that—the way his lungs constricted and his stomach dropped low. The way his magic charged to life and his fingers, still clasped around her wrist, tightened until he could feel her pulse thrumming against them.

He wanted to turn into it. He wanted to find the same spot on her jaw and try to kiss her too, but he found he could not move.

It was too much, too much. The feel of her lips, both hesitant and sure. The feel of her breath, warm in this wintry world of stone and forgotten time. He had faced armies and monsters. He had died and been brought back to life. Yet somehow, Iseult was more daunting than all of them.

Eventually, she pulled away and she smiled at him—a sly, subtle movement only visible if you knew what you were looking for.

He always knew what he was looking for.

“I am glad you’re back,” she said, and he nodded faintly, letting his fingers release so she could withdraw her pattering pulse.

He had no words to offer as she turned away, nor even breath to sustain them. Not that he needed to speak. The words that mattered most had already raveled between them on a Thread he could not see.

Mhe varujta. Te varuje.

Iseult didn’t know if her plan would work. After all, it was just a story. But all stories had roots in truth, and the specifics had been so similar to what Eridysi had written that she had to at least try.

The moon gleamed down, no longer full but bright enough to see by. A perfect hour for Threadwitching. A perfect hour for a Voidwitch with sparkles of Aether in her blood.

Alma’s body lay shrouded beneath a pale sheet upon the ground. Iseult had brushed away the previous night’s snow. Nearby, the spring Iseult had once gazed into burbled into the quiet winter night.

On a bare stone, Eridysi’s diary lay open to the page about reanimation. Owl had left the diary for her beneath their spruce tree, along with a single mountain-bat claw. The length of her old moon-scythe blade and just as sharp, it now rested atop the weathered page. Iseult had already imagined ways to fasten it to a handle. Crude but deadly, just like Owl.