“No. Non-magical people aren’t as connected to their willstones as we are. They just feel a presence in their minds when they touch each other’s stones. Sometimes they can share thoughts and memories if they are emotionally close, and physical sensation if they are attracted to each other,” he said quietly. “But they don’t feel anywhere near what we do. They aren’t as vulnerable as we are.”
“And what about between magical people? Is it always that intense?”
Rowan smiled and shook his head. “Mechanics can bond with each other, but that’s different from being claimed by a witch. We call it stone kin—like Tristan, Caleb, and I. The bond is for life, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as a claiming with a witch. The rule of thumb is the stronger the witch and mechanic are magically, the stronger the shared experience.” Rowan broke off suddenly, carefully considering his wording. “You and I are uncommon, Lily. The next time you claim someone, even if it is another mechanic, it won’t feel like that. I don’t want you to be afraid of it, okay?”
Lily nodded, frowning, and looked away. Her emotions had inexplicably flipped again, and she didn’t want to talk anymore. She wanted to be alone. Rowan sensed that Lily had mentally checked out of the conversation and secured his mask over his nose. “I’ll be right outside,” he said reassuringly, and left.
She stripped down and stood in the bucket of icy water. It chilled her to the bone, but she didn’t care. She washed herself from head to toe, marveling at how tender she was. How soft and small her body felt in comparison to Rowan’s. She splashed water on her face repeatedly, trying to rinse away the memory of sharing his skin. She shouldn’t want to wear Rowan like a pair of pants, or swallow him like a mouthful of chocolate. It just wasn’t right.
She brushed off her wearhyde clothes and boots as best she could, giving them a good shake. Luckily, wearhyde seemed to be not only durable but also capable of staying fresh even after several days of hard use. Her linen shirt was limp and stained, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She finished dressing and tidied up the cabin while she let her hair dry. It still seemed strange to feel the ends of her hair touching the top of her neck and brushing against her jawbone, but she tried not to think too much about how it looked or lament its loss. Instead, she concentrated on folding and putting things away.
“Lily? Are you okay?” Rowan called from outside.
“Yeah,” she replied. “You can come in.”
He ducked under the flap and pulled his mask down, looking around. Lily had pretty much everything packed up and ready for them to go.
“Oh. You cleaned up,” he said, surprised. Lily smiled at him, and looked away quickly. Everything he did seemed to make her blush. She felt ridiculous.
“I didn’t know what to do with the empty jars of preserves and pickles so I washed them and left them to soak in the bucket of water you brought me.”
Rowan pulled the jars out and left them on a windowsill to dry, then went to the chest, closed it, and sealed it with a shimmer from his willstone.
“I’ll empty this and we can go.” He picked up the bucket and gave Lily a puzzled look. “Thank you.”
She nodded and shifted on her feet. “Well, I can’t let you do everything for me. Even though it is tempting.” He stared at her for a moment longer than usual. “What?” she asked when the moment dragged past the comfort point.
“Most witches expect their mechanics to do everything for them. They don’t even think twice about it.”
“I guess I’m not like most witches, then.”
They stared at each other again with nothing to say. Lily edged past him and went outside.
The fire had burned itself out, but the mound of blackened bodies still smoked in the center of the clearing. Lily noticed that Rowan had dug a shallow ditch around it to contain any stray embers. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at the jumble of mismatched body parts in the pile. She still had no idea how to classify the Woven in her head. Not one was exactly like another. Some were the size of a small dog, and others were twice the size of a man. Some stood upright, while others had no legs and had to slither. The majority of them resembled giant insects with claws and teeth, but there were some that seemed more mammalian or serpentine. It was the sheer wrongness of them that disturbed her the most.
“How many did we kill?’
“I don’t know. Thirty or forty.” Rowan threw the used water onto the smoldering remains, making them hiss. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t want to remain there a second longer than he had to. Lily didn’t blame him. She followed him to a water pump. He hung the bucket on the spout, adjusted his pack, and started into the woods without a backward glance.
They didn’t speak for a while, but Lily could feel Rowan stealing glances at her whenever she wasn’t doing the same to him. She kept imagining that there was a string connecting them—as if they’d been tethered together like two paper cups and something in each of them whispered to the other in the dark. The connection wasn’t clear, but she could still feel something inside Rowan speaking to something inside of her. She didn’t know how to initiate mindspeak yet, but she could tell there was something he needed to say.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“What happened between you and Tristan?” His voice was tight and his hands wrung the strap of his pack.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, I know him really well. Tristan and I have been stone kin since we were kids.” Rowan watched Lily carefully, but she didn’t look up at him. “We share mindspeak. So I know a lot of girls have forgiven him when he’s—”
“Cheated,” Lily finished for him. “Which means he isn’t faithful in this universe either,” she said, more to herself than him.
She expected to be disappointed about that, but she wasn’t. Fair or not, she didn’t feel the same way about Tristan. Things he did that used to seem unbearably charming to her now seemed staged—phony even. Lily knew she shouldn’t judge the Tristan in this world by what her Tristan had done to her, but she couldn’t help it.
She remembered Rowan’s distrust of her when he first met her, and she wondered if he would always see Lillian when he looked at her. Something clenched inside of her at the thought. She wanted him to see her. She wanted—well, she didn’t know what she wanted, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the time when he hated her. They’d shared too much.
“It’s not that,” Rowan said vehemently, bringing Lily out of herself and back to the conversation. “Tristan is the most faithful friend you could ever ask for.”
“He was a faithful friend to me for years,” Lily said, agreeing with Rowan.
Rowan was silent for a while. She could tell something was eating at him.
“What is it?” Lily asked.
“I was wondering if you’d forgiven your Tristan. That’s all.”
“No,” she admitted. “The next morning we had a terrible fight, and then I let Lillian take me.”
“Because of him?”
“Because of a lot of things.” She glanced over and saw a muscle jump in Rowan’s jaw. She was torn between being ashamed about what had happened to her and grateful that someone knew exactly how she’d felt. Rowan hadn’t been just a spectator to Tristan’s infidelity, and his anger wasn’t just for Lily’s sake. They’d shared more than memories the night before. What they’d experienced was a communion. For a few brief moments they’d literally become one. He’d felt just as hurt as she had in that moment.
But communion worked both ways. Lily had felt skin under her hand when they’d touched Lillian. And she’d felt their shared body swell when they’d climbed on top of her. Lily didn’t know how to deal with that just yet.
“You showed me a gallows,” she said quietly. “What happened?”
Rowan’s face turned slightly away from hers. She hated not being able to see his expression, but she didn’t push. Eventually, he changed the subject. “When you enter a mechanic, yo
u don’t have to give back, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t have to delve so deeply into him, or share anything of yourself if you don’t want to. You’re the witch. You’re in charge. It doesn’t have to be that intimate. You can keep your experiences to yourself.”
“And what about the mechanic?”
“It depends on how strong he is and how strong the witch is. Sometimes, he can fight her off if she tries to view things he’d rather keep to himself.”
Lily stopped walking and stared at Rowan. “Fight her off? That’s awful, Rowan.”
“None of this happens without the mechanic’s consent. He has to let her in first.” Rowan’s lips twitched with the hint of a smile. “And a kind witch controls herself when she’s in there.”
“Like I didn’t?” Her voice grated with guilt.
Rowan put his hand on her elbow, tilting his head down closer to hers. “You had no warning about how it would make you feel. It was your first time.” He dropped his hand a little too quickly, and eased away from her. “I’m lucky you didn’t eat me alive,” he joked.
Lily’s smile was forced. Did he know that she’d wanted to eat him alive? That she still wanted to? She cast around for something other than eating Rowan to talk about, and a thought occurred to her. “Wait. You’ve been calling me witch all morning.”
“After what you did last night, you’ve definitely earned the title. Healing your ankle was medicinal magic. That’s easy stuff—any crucible, even mechanics, can do it. But what we did last night was warrior magic. The highest level there is, save one. A simple crucible can’t possess a body like that and fill it with the Gift.” Rowan started walking again. “You’re a witch. And you did it with no training and no willstone of your own.”
Lily thought she heard him whisper the word “scary” to himself, and rushed to catch up with him.
* * *
“That’s utterly ridiculous,” sputtered Councilman Roberts.
Gideon shifted in his seat and swallowed the retort that caught in his throat. Councilman Roberts was a dried-out old fool as far as Gideon was concerned, but he had been serving on the Council for more years than anyone—even more than Gideon’s father, Thomas Danforth. If Gideon and his father were going to get the rest of the Council to hear them, they’d need his support.
“I’m not quite sure we understand what you’re saying,” interjected Councilman Wake. He leaned into the round table and crossed his hands neatly in front of him. Wake was a younger man, barely thirty, but he had a reputation for being a shrewd tactician, which was why Gideon and his father had included Wake in this small and secret gathering. “Are you trying to say that the Salem Witch has created a copy of herself out of thin air?” Wake asked.
“Not created,” Gideon interrupted, shaking his head. “We think she found another version of herself in another universe and brought that other self here.”
A stupefied silence followed.
“What my son means is that there is the possibility that something impossible happened,” Thomas Danforth said. He laughed nervously. “After all, you can’t account for Lillian being in two places at once in any other way besides the impossible.”
“Rumors,” Roberts spat. “A bunch of drubs in the dungeons claimed they saw another Lillian gadding about the woods with Rowan Fall, when we could all attest that the Witch was in the Citadel. That doesn’t make it true.”
Thomas Danforth sat back in his chair, deflated. Gideon had always known that his father was not a strong man and that he often caved to the wishes of the other men on the Council. Danforth was well liked among them for exactly that reason. Knowing his father wasn’t going to find the strength to convince the Councilmen, Gideon glanced up and looked into the corner of the room. Carrick stood with his back to the wall, huddled under a dark cloak, so that he nearly disappeared inside his own glowering shadow.
“Tell them what you told me about the shamans of your people,” Gideon ordered.
“Now he’s talking about shamans—the craziest of all the drubs,” Roberts muttered incredulously to Wake, throwing up his hands. Roberts leaned imploringly across the table toward the final member of that evening’s covert cabal, Councilman Bainbridge, who had until this point remained silent. “Don’t tell me you believe any of this nonsense, Bainbridge?”
Bainbridge’s face was stony. He wasn’t nearly as old as Roberts, but he was just as respected. He had a lot of innovative ideas, and had been elected by the citizenry in his district by a huge majority. He also had more reason than most to hate the near-totalitarian rule of the Lady of Salem’s Coven, as Lillian had squashed several of his pet projects for being “too scientific.”
“I’m not saying I believe it or don’t believe it,” Bainbridge said equitably. “But I am wondering why Lillian’s head mechanic would call this meeting to begin with.”
Gideon knew what Bainbridge’s problem was. Why would someone whose power hinged on the Witch want to meet with three men who had so long opposed the overreaching power of the Witch and her Coven? Gideon could sense Bainbridge’s caution. Gideon could be working for Lillian, trying to root out those who opposed her. But these men of the Council could never understand Gideon’s frustration. They had no magic. They had no idea what it was to be a mechanic who was claimed by a witch—no, chained to a witch—who wouldn’t use him.
“Because I’ve worked with witches long enough to understand why the Council hates them.” Gideon heard the edge of spite in his voice, and made no attempt to rein it in. “The Council is supposed to be equal in power to the Coven, and the two bodies of government are supposed to balance each other so no one group has too much power. But we know that’s rubbish. If the Coven doesn’t get what it wants all it has to do is put an embargo on electricity, medicine, meat, clean water—or any one of the dozens of things that witches supply the citizenry—until the people who elected you to stand up for them against the total control of the nonelected Coven demand that you give in to their wishes. How the hell is that democracy?”
“So all of this is for democracy’s sake?” Bainbridge asked with one raised eyebrow. Yet despite his disdain, Gideon could tell he was intrigued.
“The witch system has to go,” Gideon said finally, and watched the nervous glances dart around the table.
“Or rather, there needs to at least be an alternative to all the things the Covens supply the people, or the Council will never have any real power,” Danforth interjected quickly.
Roberts was already shaking his head. “And where are we supposed to get these things? The people need energy and food and medicine—how are we supposed to supply that for them? Not even witches can pull something out of nothing.”
“Really?” Gideon asked pleasantly. “Carrick. Would you please tell the distinguished gentleman of the Council about the shamans of your people?” he repeated pointedly.
Carrick’s deep voice rose up out of the darkness around him, like a bit of shadow had been turned into sound. “The shamans say that there are an infinite number of worlds, all of them different, and that their spirits can travel to them and come back.”
“And are these other worlds full of resources like energy and food and medicine?” Gideon asked.
“All that and more,” Carrick promised quietly. “The shamans say that everything you could possibly imagine is real in some world somewhere.”
“Nonsense,” Roberts scoffed. “That spirit-walking stuff is a tall tale used to comfort poor Outlander children when they realize their lot in life.”
“But what if it’s true?” Danforth proposed quietly. “An infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of resources…” He trailed off dramatically, and for the first time, Gideon understood why his father was head of the Council. He had a knack for using greed to get everyone in line with his agenda.
“If Lillian has found a way to bring a person from one world into another, is it so hard to imagine that other things
could be brought as well—the very things we lack, for instance?” Gideon added smoothly, after a suitable pause.
Bainbridge looked Gideon in the eye. “We’d need proof that other worlds exist before we make any move against Lillian.”
“It’s easy enough,” Carrick suggested quietly. “Find Rowan Fall, and you’ll find the other Lillian. Ask her where she came from.”
Bainbridge grew quiet, internalizing all the ramifications. He shook his head suddenly. “No. Fall still has all of the Witch’s favor and protection. She was always especially fond of him.”
“And he profited by it,” Roberts said lewdly. “I hear he owns the whole building he lives in. Great neighborhood, too. Could charge whatever he wants for rent in that area and make a fortune.”
Gideon stifled another wave of frustration. The Council always was jealous of the Coven’s wealth, and they begrudged how well the Coven paid anyone who worked for them—from the lowliest farmers who maintained the greentowers all the way up to the mechanics who were practically showered with riches.
“Does he still draw a salary from the Coven?” Wake asked, like the bean counter he was.
“No,” Gideon answered sharply, hoping to end this line of conversation. “I’m Lillian’s head mechanic now. What does it matter how well Lillian paid him?”
Roberts smirked at Gideon. “Proves how much the Witch cared for Fall, doesn’t it? Their fondness for each other is practically anecdotal. The two of them may have had a tussle over that business with his father, but magical folk are queerly tied to each other with all of the claiming nonsense. Much more than regular flesh and blood and common sense would deem suitable, in my opinion. All of this hullaballoo could be that this ‘other Lillian’ is simply the Salem Witch visiting her favorite.”
“In the Woven Woods?” Gideon interjected incredulously. “Not very likely.”
“But far more likely than what you’re suggesting,” Bainbridge countered. “No, you can’t openly challenge Rowan Fall without Lillian knowing. And even if he is no longer drawing a salary, she’s made it clear that Rowan Fall is still to be afforded all the privileges of a head mechanic. Making a move against Fall is far too risky. You need to find your proof elsewhere.”