“She survived,” the woman said to someone I could not see. I tried to turn my head, but could not. “Dim the lanterns.”
My consciousness flickered as the lights dimmed and the woman disappeared. I blinked, and she was back again, and my threads were twining in an artificial twilight. I felt them rise across my throat, my jaw, down my temples.
But the sensation did not stop there. It prickled across my collarbones, my shoulders, and down across my chest towards my stomach. It felt like trails of water, hot and just on the edge of burning, and as it spread memories whispered to me—not from any object that I could sense, though I understood that I lay on a hard surface. They seemed to cling to the air itself.
My consciousness drifted again, and when I next came to my senses, I lay on a divan.
I squinted around myself, disoriented. I was in a large study, shelves packed with books and tables layered with instruments. There was a desk to one side, illuminated by a green glass lamp, and diagrams were pinned to the walls over bloody red, vaguely floral wallpaper.
Hand-sketched anatomical diagrams of men and women were on the table, just legible from where I lay. Diagrams of threads twining necks and shoulders, some even spreading down backs and entirely across faces. Others were charts and lists. My eyes struggled to focus on the words, but I made out the titles ‘Of the Sun’ and ‘Of the Moon.’ Entwined classifications.
I held very, very still. Had I somehow fallen into the hands of the Guild? Had Lewis and I been rescued from one den of villainy, by another?
Lewis.
I looked around sharply. I was alone—no, just then I heard movement. A woman shifted into sight, riffling through a stack of papers.
I closed my eyes again, memory churning. I knew her, but it took me a moment to remember where from.
From my delirium. For Ihadbeen delirious, I recognized that now.
She survived.
I sat up sharply. Or rather, I intended to. Instead, I managed to throw myself ungracefully onto the floor. Cheek mashed into a serviceable carpet, I wheezed.
Footsteps approached and the woman looked down at me, brows furrowed. “Your sedative has yet to wear off,” she advised. “I shall fetch you more. Do not try to move.”
With that she moved off, out of my sight but in the direction of the desk.
“Pardon—No!” I croaked. “Where is Lewis?”
I heard riffling in drawers, and the clink of bottles. “Try not to speak, either.”
“I demand to know where he is,” I persisted, regaining a little more of myself. There was little point in attempting dignity, not prone on the floor as I was, and I squirmed relentlessly, trying to sit up. “I demand to speak to Madge!”
“Who?” the woman’s voice inquired curiously. I heard several footsteps as she retraced her steps a few paces, still out of sight.
“Margaret Rushforth. Margaret Moran.”
“Oh, your Golden sister? She is still at large,” the woman replied.
The meaning of that sank in slowly. Though I had finally regained some control of my arms, I quickly stilled again, hiding my advantage.
“This is not the Guild,” I observed.
Her response was distracted. “No, no. I work for the Grand General. You are in his care.”
With dawning horror, I took in the study again. From the perspective of the floor, where I still lay prone, I noted the ceiling was of red stone. Pre-imperial. Furthermore, there were no windows. We were still in the Old Citadel dungeons. And this woman’s obviously diligent study of the Entwined, combined with my delirium and fragments of memory painted a horrible, unsettling picture.
“What have you done to me?” I asked.
She survived.
Had Lewis?
The woman approached, a cloth in one hand and a bottle in the other. “I have, in theory, nullified your Entwined characteristics,” she said as she poured something from the bottle onto the cloth, something amber and thick. She smiled. “Reducing you to a mere mortal, like myself. It was my notion, that the power that creates Entwined might also uncreate them. Securing Adepts to test my theories on has been difficult but… here you are.”
She sounded smug, as if she expected me to be impressed.
