The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (different e readers txt) 📕

take hold, cursing in Vraszenian. She came back to awareness to find him hesitating a short distance away; then Tess was there, with a blanket and soothing words, holding her steady against the uncontrollable shaking.

Soothing words for Ren, at least. Serrado was lucky he didn’t get his ears blistered. “If you’ve nothing useful to share, you can leave,” Tess spat when she’d run out of colorful invective.

He knelt so he wasn’t looming over them and spoke urgently. “Whatever happened to these kids, it isn’t caused by taking ash, and it isn’t a physical ailment. That’s important to know for helping you. And maybe now that an alta’s affected, I’ll be able to get more support in hunting down the person responsible. The children say an old woman is kidnapping them—they call her Gammer Lindworm. Have you seen anyone like that?”

It jolted her, like falling once more into the empty wellspring. An old woman. She didn’t realize until Serrado replied that she must have echoed him out loud. “You know about her?” he asked.

Since the Night of Hells, the world had been on the other side of a pane of glass. That glass was Renata, and it cracked more with every incautious move she made. “There was an old woman—” she stammered. “I-in my nightmares. She said she had done this, poisoned us all, but…”

“She said she poisoned you? What else?” he asked, softer but no less insistent. “Did you tell Meda Fienola?”

What had she written in her report? She couldn’t remember. “She… There were these… creatures.” No effort could suppress her shudder. “Skeletal, but not bones. Blackened, like burned wood. But she didn’t call herself Gammer Lindworm. She said her name was Ondrakja.”

“Zlyzen,” he whispered, his accent flavored with Vraszenian smoke. “They are called zlyzen.”

The word made her shudder again, but it saved her from showing that she knew it already. “What are they?”

“Monsters. From the old stories. They feed on…” Serrado faltered. When he continued, his voice was pure Nadežran. “Dreams. So they say, at least. And there was a child gang in Lacewater run by a woman named Ondrakja. But she wasn’t old, and she’s been dead five years.”

He stood, filled with sudden energy. “It’s still more than I had before. I’ll tell Meda Fienola. For now, do what you can to rest.”

In the silence following his departure, a single question echoed through Ren’s bones, until Tess finally gave it voice. “Could she have… survived?”

Recent events might be evaporating from Ren’s mind like mist, but not old ones. “The apothecary warned me not to give more than three drops. I gave her nine. She must have died.” But even to her own ears, it sounded more like a prayer than certainty.

A prayer that seemed even more flimsy when Tess repeated it. “She must have. And didn’t the captain just say it? Ondrakja wasn’t old. She might have been a horrid old hag on the inside, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at her.”

Two years on the streets had aged Ivrina visibly, and Ren had seen what happened to people who survived serious illness. The poison alone couldn’t account for the way Ondrakja had appeared in the nightmare—but that was in Ažerais’s Dream, where outward appearance might reflect inner reality. “It could be her,” she whispered. “And if it is…”

“Then there’s nothing to do about it until you’re well,” Tess said, as though that was an end to it. Wrapping an arm around Ren’s waist, she helped her to her feet. “Downstairs with you, and let’s pray Meda Fienola has a good head for more than astrology.”

Isla Prišta, Westbridge: Cyprilun 21–24

Over the next few days, Tess’s world shrank until she measured it one bell at a time.

That evening a courier showed up with medicine from Tanaquis and instructions on how to apply a numinat to it. I fear this won’t be pleasant, her message said, but I hope that purging the remaining ash from your body will resolve the problem.

The possibility of cocking up the activation of a numinat terrified Tess. She reviewed the instructions several times, knowing that she’d only have a short while before the amplifying power of the numinat burned out the efficacy of the imbued purgative. Then she had to chase Ren across the kitchen to make her take it, because for a while Ren saw her as Ondrakja, come to poison her in revenge. In a twisted way, it was good that Ren was weaker than a sick kitten. Tess wound up pinning her and pouring the tonic down her throat by force, before its power could fade.

Any doubt as to whether it was still effective vanished not long after, as Ren was mercilessly sick. Thank the Mother and Crone—and Giuna’s good sense—that the basket Tess had brought home from Traementis Manor contained several jars of salty bone broth. Getting that and water into Ren proved even more difficult than getting her to drink the purgative, though. Tess resorted to waiting until her sister was lost in delirium, then singing a Vraszenian lullaby, one of the ones Ren had learned from her mother. After that, she coaxed her “little Renyi” to drink as much of the broth as she could manage.

“It’s for your own good,” Tess whispered past the tightness in her throat. Ren curled on her side, limp as river weed, and gazed glass-eyed into the fire. Sometimes she closed her eyes, but never for long. The darkness behind her lids only served to make her more restless.

The purgative didn’t work, and Tess duly reported this fact via messenger; she didn’t dare leave Ren’s side. The next day a second batch arrived. Tess wrote a reply telling Meda Fienola exactly where she could shove her remedies—then promptly burned the paper. Instead, she sent the medicines back with a terse note: She won’t be here to cure if you kill her first.

Tess was quite proud of her restraint.

After that things only got harder. Giuna showed up, wanting