“I don’t know how she did it.” The words come out slower now. Once I kept failing an experiment, not realizing the one ingredient was expired. I feel like that again, I’m missing something just beneath my nose. “I know it happened. I cannot deny the claim of the sword. But the mechanism—” I stop. Start again.
I reach for Kestra’s arm. Because though I know, maybe hearing a definition in another’s perspective will trigger something. “Can you tell me about glamour? True glamour. Not the surface kind.”
A beat.
“It changes what you want,” Kestra says. “Not just what you see. It reaches into your head and rearranges things.”
She’s not looking at me. She’s watching the tree line, the sharp angle of her jaw tilting as she reads the forest.
“Makes compliance feel like choice,” she continues, quieter. “Makes surrender feel like something you decided.”
There is a hidden truth in her voice where it speaks of a familiarness.
“The most dangerous glamour is that which goes unnoticed,” I say. “You cannot feel the magic. You cannot feel that truth beneath the mirage.”
My feet find the next step. My hands are steady. I have no idea how my hands are steady right now as I attempt to work through Amarantha’s claim.
“Most don’t realize glamour isn’t just about changing your appearance.” Kestra’s voice is soft and understanding as we walk over large roots. “It is in altering the state of those who perceive you. And that is a dangerous kind of magic because it fucks with your mind.”
The ground vanishes under Tiana’s foot.
Not a hole. A puddle that wasn’t there a second ago, black water, still as glass, and she goes in to the knee before Kestra hauls her back by the collar, both of them stumbling hard into a root system.
We all stop.
The puddle is gone. Solid ground where it was, like it was never there.
“It tests,” Kestra says, breathing hard. “It finds the distracted one.”
I look at Tiana. At Ash. At myself.
We’re all distracted. We’re walking through a death forest having the most honest conversation of my three-century life and none of us are watching the ground.
“Eyes down as well,” Ash says. Flat and monotone. The soldier clicking back into place over everything else; I miss the woman beneath. “We watch the ground and the canopy and the path. And we keep talking.”
“That’s three things,” Tiana says.
“Yes,” Ash agrees. “It is.”
We keep moving.
“So.” I pick up the thread because if I stop now I won’t start again. “Did I choose? If my yes was written for me before I opened my mouth, if the wanting was manufactured, was it ever mine?”
Did I in fact say yes to Amarantha, glamoured in a way that distorted my own thoughts? I don’t know.
The forest is loud now. Not creatures. Just sound. The creak of trees that aren’t moving in wind. Something dripping that isn’t rain. The distant scream that sounds like a child in pain.
It isn’t a child.
Ash looks at me for a long moment over her shoulder. Reading me the way she reads everything. Rapidly. Completely. Looking for the lie, the angle, the thing underneath the thing.
She doesn’t find a lie.
“You didn’t know,” she says.
Not you were her victim.
Not absolution wrapped in silk.
