“Where’s the rest?” Iseult asks when she gets to the final damaged paper. Her nose is going numb; her fingers already are.

A vision of Poznin appears in Iseult’s mind, of Esme’s tower, and the meaning is clear. If Iseult wants to learn more, she must go to Poznin. There, she can learn exactly as Esme did. She can lay claim to what the girl-turned-weasel left behind.

“I … can’t.” It is surprisingly hard for Iseult to say this aloud. Never has she been so close to understanding her own power. Never has she been with someone else who has a magic like hers.

Had a magic like hers.

“I have to stay with Safi. But what happened to you, Esme?” Iseult extends a tentative hand, and the weasel nuzzles against it. For a moment, she feels far more feral than human.

Then the images begin anew.

A man shrouded in darkness, tall and lithe with no face and only limbs made of shadow. “It will all be over quickly,” he tells Esme in Nomatsi before his shapeless hands close around her. Heat spears through her body. Cold too. She stretches and shrinks, painless yet more pain than she has ever known. But as he’d said, it is all over quickly. Her vision changes; the old world vanishes and a new one begins.

“Find her,” he commands. “Find the dark-giver and keep her safe.”

Iseult sucks in sharply as the memory fades. “Who…” Another gulp of air. She felt that pain as if it had been her own skin rearranged. “Who was that?”

Esme seems to shrug. She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t care. For all that she was once a young woman—once the Puppeteer—she is now an animal with a tiny brain. Some of her humanity remains, but not everything.

She leans into Iseult’s hand, almost feline in her desire for a good back scratch. Study the pages, she seems to say. Then we will go to Poznin.

Iseult sighs, steam puffing from her lips, and though she knows she shouldn’t, she finds herself grasping the torn pages once more and holding them high for a reread. She does not want to learn. She does not want to sever, sever, twist and sever …

But she has to. It is the magic she was given by Moon Mother. The only way she can protect herself, protect Safi. She spent all her life trying to be a Threadwitch, powerless and cast aside. Stumbling every step she took and weighing Safi down. Now Iseult has a magic like Esme’s and the descriptions from this diary. She has saved lives with it before; perhaps she can learn how to do so again.

With a second sigh, Iseult settles into a cross-legged seat beside the oak. Esme coils across her lap, and with shadows to cloak them completely, Iseult studies what a Voidwitch did a thousand years ago.