“Are they all dangerous?”
“To humans. They are territorial, but they tend to leave other animals alone unless they’re hunting them.”
Lily looked up at the stars. This sky here held the same exact constellations, but they seemed closer, brighter, and more varied in color and tone than anything she was used to.
“Let me wrap this around you.” Rowan reached up and looped a rope around her legs a few times, tying her to the branch so she didn’t slip off in the middle of the night. “Try to rest,” Rowan said when he’d finished, his voice edged with concern.
She gripped the rope tightly even though she knew there was no way she would nod off that night.
“Lily?” he called up to her. She could hear him repositioning himself on the branch beneath her, trying to get a glimpse of her face.
“Go to sleep, Rowan. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re in shock. I can feel—” He broke off suddenly, and made an impatient sound. “Good night.”
CHAPTER
6
It was halfway through third watch by the time Gideon made it back to the Citadel with his prisoners. He ached from riding for so many hours on no sleep and with so little to eat, but he wasn’t about to show his discomfort and look weak. The sachem had gotten away, but apart from that, the raid had been a success. Softhearted Juliet had inadvertently led many rebels to their deaths. Gideon couldn’t wait to tell her that.
Carrick was already separating the potential talkers from the hard cases. He moved among them, planting the seeds of hope for a release in those he found pliant. The stoic ones—the ones who neither railed about their loyalty to the cause nor moaned about the injustice of the Witch State—he sent immediately to the dungeons. It was the quiet ones who always ended up as the worst kind of martyrs and needed to be kept apart.
How Carrick, who had never been a mechanic, could sense these differences in individuals and know how to deal with them so adroitly was of interest to Gideon. Carrick was far too old to be trained as a mechanic now, but the talent was certainly there. It was a pity that it had been overlooked when he was young and he hadn’t been brought to the Citadel to be trained; Gideon was almost certain that Carrick knew more craft than he let on, and he was willing to let that go as long as Carrick made himself useful. If he had been given some kind of training, it had been without the consent of the Coven and could get Carrick and his teacher hanged—that, too, could be useful to Gideon as a way to control the inscrutable Outlander.
“A word?” Carrick asked politely when Gideon finally dismounted.
“Found something already?” Gideon guessed, handing the reins to a lackey. Carrick waited until the lackey was out of earshot before answering.
“Possibly,” he said with his customary caution. “Two of the prisoners mentioned something that caught my attention.”
“Go on,” Gideon prompted. Carrick glanced around, surreptitiously checking each willstone for the telltale flare of magelight. When he was satisfied that no one was using his stone to listen in, Carrick continued.
“One was taunting me,” he started, and paused. Carrick was an Outlander by birth, but he had sided against the majority of his people in this small and useless rebellion. Gideon nodded his understanding and motioned for Carrick to continue. “She said that soon the Salem Witch would truly meet her match. Then she laughed like a crazy old woman. I would have thought nothing of it if another prisoner, far removed from the first, had not also said that every coin had two sides and that the front was about to face off with the back.”
“I don’t see the connection.” Gideon led Carrick inside the Citadel. “Explain.”
“I couldn’t help but think about the sightings in town three days ago.”
“Of the Witch running through the city and throwing herself against the window of a café?” Gideon smirked over his shoulder as he led Carrick up to his private rooms. “Lillian hasn’t gone anywhere without an entourage since she was six.”
Except once, Gideon added silently in his mind as he opened the door to his rooms. A year ago she’d disappeared for weeks and returned half dead without ever explaining where she’d gone. She refused to allow her mechanics to help heal her. In fact, she hadn’t allowed anyone but Juliet to touch her since. That was when Lillian had changed completely and began her crusade against science. But Carrick didn’t know about that—no one knew about the disappearance except Lillian’s inner circle.
“Dozens of people said they saw her running through the streets while you yourself confirmed that she was in her bed,” Carrick persisted. “So many people claimed to have seen the same thing, and there’s no reason for any of the witnesses in the city to have lied.”
Gideon sat down heavily behind his desk and began yanking off his pretty but far-too-stiff boots. “Alright,” he said with a reluctant sigh. It had bothered him as well, although he’d tried to overlook it. “So what do you think is going on?”
Carrick’s dark Outlander eyes—eyes that looked solid black from pupil to iris to city folk like Gideon—had a glassy sheen to them. Gideon assumed this was Carrick’s cold approximation of passion.
“Either the Witch has learned how to physically be in two places at once—or the prisoners are right. There are two of them.”
Gideon looked at Carrick with a raised brow. “And how would there be two?” Carrick was agitated, which was rare. Usually, the Outlander was cold. Unruffled. Gideon was almost more intrigued by that than by the mystery of the “two Lillians.”
“The shamans of my people believe that there are millions of versions of every single one of us.”
“Millions of versions of each of us,” Gideon repeated disbelievingly. He’d never heard anything so ridiculous. He stood and poured himself a glass of wine, flexing his cramped toes into the carpet. To his surprise, Carrick didn’t take Gideon’s turned back as a cue to leave, but continued to stand stubbornly in front of his desk.
“When I was a child, a shaman told me that I had the talent to spirit walk and that I should train with him. But shamans aren’t respected as they once were among my people, and my father wouldn’t hear of it.”