of summer lap over them. Their white gowns ripple over willowy limbs and small breasts. They speak in Withil, practicing the cant so that if they are caught they can say they have been studying.
Miriam does not bother them. She stands in the shadows and listens to the mythopoeic fertility of fourteen-year-old mouths.
“She used to be one of us.”
“Really? Stupid.”
“I wonder if she’s stronger than the Eighth House.”
“No one’s stronger than the Eighth House.”
“She was stronger than Megan.”
“Shh. What if someone hears?”
“Without the book, she’s nothing. That’s what Haidee says.”
“I hate Haidee.”
“Haidee’s going to be Coven Mother, idiot.”
“I still hate her.”
“Why haven’t they already picked someone? To replace Megan?”
“They should pick me!”
Mocking laughter from all of them.
“No. Me!”
“Shut up. It’s not funny anymore.”
“Maybe Giganalee’s lost her mind … she’s soooo old.”
“I’m telling.”
“You do and I’ll kill you.”
“Bitch!”
“Eat me.”
“Maybe I will.”
More laughter.
“I bet they haven’t picked someone because they’re scared. What if Sena just kills whoever they pick? Just like Megan?”
“They should pick you, then.”
“Shut up!”
“Maybe they’re waiting to get her book.”
“They’re all afraid of her. I bet she’s stronger than Giganalee.”
“No one’s stronger than Giganalee.”
“I bet she is.”
Miriam retreats from the childish, circular talk. Over the course of several weeks she answers the Eighth House’s pointless questions and fills the old woman’s hookah for her with herbal fruits. Maybe the ancient woman really is losing her mind. Maybe she’s just high. To Miriam, the Sisterhood feels different. She senses a change in the organization, a lack of businesslike ambition that it used to have when Megan was still alive. Instead of feeling awed and inspired, she feels ambivalent, despondent and unsure. Since Megan’s funeral, the Sisterhood has felt headless.
Unofficial “representatives” from Pandragor claim the transumption hex was a failure. They say it did not dislodge Caliph Howl from the throne as promised and that they are not obligated to adhere to the bargain. They will not attempt to get the Sisterhood’s book.
In retaliation, the Sixth House in particular has tried to send a message, but the Pandragonians are not afraid. They say that if any more of their bureaucrats turn up missing, Skellum (and Parliament) will be razed.
Not that Pandragor, as a government, would ever admit to dealing with witches or that those dealings had gone sideways, but Miriam knows Emperor Junnu is quite capable of concocting other reasons for war.
There are rumors that Pandragor has taken an interest in the Cisrym Ta. The emperor may be trying to secure it for himself.
She wonders again what has happened to the Sisterhood. Bullied by governments, murdered by the Willin Droul, terrified of a girl with a legendary book.
Perhaps all of it really is linked to the Cisrym Ta.
The Eighth House babbles incessantly about it. Every day, Giganalee mutters paranoid expletives. She is convinced that Sena Iilool has opened the book.
Miriam recalls the Sisterhood’s last encounter with Sena, on a weedy road in Stonehold, surrounded by singing insects and fabricated shadows. It is a chilling encounter that Miriam remembers clearly. She alone had been privy to it.
But there have been no Shradnae operatives in Stonehold since then. Over a year now. Not even half-sisters. And even if there were, Sena has cut her eyes. She would recognize a Shradnae spy.
The coven needs a window into Stonehold.
Miriam spends her time thinking and waiting for opportunities.
And then it happens. Late in the year, disillusioned with her family’s faith, the daughter of Avidan Mwyr comes sailing out of the south: heading for Stonehold. Her pedigree dictates that she will have access to Isca Castle.
Taelin Rae is worth using a puslet.
On the tenth of Oak, the clergywoman arrives in Newlym and disembarks for a bit of shopping at the town’s rustic stores. Miriam is there with a qloin10 and an iatromathematique to perform the procedure.
That night, while Taelin sleeps, Shradnae witches descend on her stateroom. A thick silence settles over the deck, the halls and mooring lines.
The window to Taelin’s chamber dehisces without sound. Miriam is one of the black figures that billow in. They encircle Taelin’s bed and drape her in inky cloth. The witches slit their palms and whisper in the Unknown Tongue. Taelin does not wake.
In the south, machines are made of flesh. The Sisterhood has collected specimens and recipes. Their iatromathematique is capable of this.
Miriam opens up the jar.
The smell of apples pervades the room.
From the nutrient-rich solution the iatromathematique draws out a slick fat blob. It is ugly and nuanced as a rotting wall and does not struggle in the forceps. Rugose folds of gelatin ripple through the puslet’s slippery white-blue mass. But there are other colors: obscure and myriad. Sometimes burgundy, sometimes gray and dun.
It fits in the iatromathematique’s palm, a tablespoon of horrible pudding. She lets it slip from her fingertips to pool over Taelin’s sleeping eye.
Taelin convulses. Her eyes open wide. But the witch is already inside it, moving its soulless flesh.
She lurches the blob without bone or muscle, a pure rearrangement of fluid and cells; then forces it to burrow gob-like into Taelin’s face.
The iatromathematique is from the Fifth House. And this is not a true qloin. But Miriam knows she is skilled. She helps support the woman’s weight while she is gone, guiding her new body over slippery conchae, up into the sinus, toward the ethmoid. From there, the puslet travels deep, insinuating itself through the sphenoid, up beneath Taelin’s brain.
The witch positions herself carefully. The puslet’s lab-grown neurons vulture up against Taelin’s meninges but her memories will not be stolen. They will be duplicated. The puslet is a useful tumor and its connections begin instantly to siphon off copies of Taelin’s dreams.
The iatromathematique withdraws, coming back to herself. The senseless yet ever-sensing puslet stays behind, less reactive than plant-life, gathering memory, doing only what its cells have been designed to do.
