Cold water filled Anna's mouth.

Her nostrils. Her lungs. She was vaguely aware of her knees on the slippery bank, of the feel of grass sliding under her skin. Her assailant shoved her head further into the freezing stream. She thrashed, but their grip was like iron.

Calm, Anna told herself. Stay calm.

Panicking lead to sloppy mistakes. And mistakes led to death.

Anna forced herself to go still. The hand hesitated, and Anna exploded backwards, knocking her assailant over.

The blonde woman lunged for Anna's ankles. Anna gasped, ignoring the icy burn of her lungs as she kicked the woman's hand aside. Her attacker dodged, then sprung to her feet, slipping under Anna's arm to deliver a well-placed blow to her back.

Pain exploded down her spine.

Calm.

They danced around each other, going fist-to-fist, leg-to-leg. Anna settled into the rhythm of it, letting her body anticipate each move. It could have been minutes. Hours. Her body was shivering from the shock of the water, but Anna forced herself to use it, to let the icy sting of it propel her.

Until it didn't.

The woman feinted left, and Anna dodged right, only to realize her mistake: her foot caught on a tree root. Heat flared in her ankle. Anna bit back a cry as she went down, and the woman jumped on her, her thin hands wrapped around Anna's neck.

Like hell.

Anna gritted her teeth. Then she reached. Silvery threads cocooned their bodies. She knew what they must look like — two fish trapped in a net — but that was only an illusion. One of them was the fish; the other was the fisherman.

Her attacker flailed. Anna yanked the threads tighter.

Even now, the force of the nightmares caught Anna by surprise. Images wriggled through her brain like worms: a bloodied wound; a person screaming; a dark-haired woman, her face gashed and frantic, holding a squirming bundle of cloth. Take my baby, Sophie, please take my baby...

Anna's stomach twisted.

She yanked her mind back. The silvery threads disappeared. Her attacker was breathing hard, her pale skin slick with sweat. To her credit, the woman didn't scream, although Anna hadn't expected her to.

Sophie never did.

Anna pinned a silver blade to her throat. "Do you yield?"

Sophie Holloway choked.

"Do you yield?"

"Yes." The word was a gasp. "Yes, I yield."

Anna let go of her. Sophie slumped back on to the grass, her chest pumping up and down. She smelled of sweat and flowers, and her white tunic was stained green. Anna suspected she didn't look much better.

"You were sloppy," Sophie managed. "Your hook—Needs work."

"Don't be a sore loser."

Sophie frowned. Anna offered her guardian a hand up, but Sophie knew better than to accept it. "Your control is getting better. With the nightmares, I mean." She rose. "You were able to pull back them back this time."

Anna grinned. "Remember when I paralyzed you for six hours?"

"I try not to."

"You drooled."

"Well," Sophie said, "there's no need to sound so gleeful about it."

Anna sheathed her silver knife: a gift from Sophie, five years ago. Well, gift was a generous term; Sophie had dumped a pitcher of water over Anna's head and then made her run up a mountain in the freezing darkness to earn it.

Anna frowned. That run had been a bitch, actually; Sophie had jogged beside her the entire way, drilling her about the history of weavers. Anna could still remember the burn of the night air in her lungs, the ache of her legs.

"How do you produce silk?" Sophie had demanded.

"Silk glands." Anna had stumbled over a branch. "Like spiders. We have organs that produce a venomous silk. Somnium, it's called. We spin it into webs."

Sophie had upped their grueling pace. "How far can you throw your web?"

"A few feet, at the most. The farther away the target, the harder it is to catch them in the web." Anna could throw her web about two feet on a good day. Sophie could do about three, through years of practice.

"What if you can't reach your target?"

"Poison them. You can use a spinning wheel to make the somnium ahead of time and then bottle it, but it isn't as effective." It would be like a spider spitting venom into jars and then trying to convince a fly to drink it.

"How long does it last?"

"Until you sever the connection," Anna had said. "But using a web drains the weaver."

"How many people can you catch in a web?"

"One at a time."

These days, at least. Sophie had said that weavers were once children of the gods, powerful enough to spin webs that entangled hundreds of people. But Sophie also claimed that the moon was made of breadcrumbs, so it was a good idea to treat most of Sophie's tales with a healthy dose of skepticism.

"How many types of weavers are there?" Sophie had asked.

Anna had shot her a look that said, really? Sophie had given her a little shove, sending her careening towards a cliff.

"Answer the question."

"Two." Anna had rubbed her shoulder indignantly. "Dayweavers and Nightweavers. Weavers that can create dreams, and weavers that can create nightmares." A slice of chocolate cake, or a pit of snakes. Your greatest fantasy, or your worst nightmare. As a Nightweaver, Anna could produce the latter.

"Can you be affected by your own venom?" Sophie had asked.

"No."

"Another weaver's venom?"

"Yes. Not—" Anna had gasped for air. "Not as bad as mortals are, though."

On and on it went, only stopping when they reached the top. When Anna had collapsed onto her back, sucking in air, Sophie had passed her the silver blade. "Here," she'd said. "It belonged to your father."

Then Sophie had started down the mountain again.

Just like that.

Now, Anna ran a hand over the intricate designs cut into the glass. Curling vines and feathers, sharp-eyed ravens and thorns. And above it all: Only in Night Can We See the Stars. The Cidarius family motto.

Anna shoved the blade back into her pocket. They fell into step, moving towards the cottage. Sophie was still pale, and Anna thought back to her nightmare, to the bleeding woman. Take my baby, Sophie, please take my baby...

"Was that me?" Anna asked. "The baby?"

Sophie nodded. "During the attack on the castle."

Anna frowned. She hadn't seen that memory before; normally, Sophie pictured the castle burning, or her fiancé, Sendry, being killed. Sophie hadn't watched as Anna' parents burned at the stake that night — that happened after they fled — but Sophie imagined it anyway, sometimes.

As a child, Anna had vomited after those lessons.

"I didn't expect her to be so scared," Anna said. "At the end."

Sophie's mouth tightened. "Your mother had never seen death before. None of us had. We were young ladies in a castle; we didn't have to..." Her eyes darted to the white scar on Anna's arm. "Lotta wasn't brought up like you."

Sword-fighting. Torturing mice for practice. Poisoning herself repeatedly, until Anna was sick in a bucket. Sophie had made her do it all over the years. Turned her into a weapon, so that when the time came, she would be ready to strike.

Just as Sophie had been.

Sophie's father had been Commander of the Guard, Anna knew, once upon a time; Sophie had grown up learning the difference between a parry and a pivot, a deflect and a diagonal. It was why Sophie had survived the attack on the castle. Why she had saved Anna and a handful of others that night.

"What was she like, then?" Anna asked. "My mother?"

"Kind. Charming." Sophie's lips twitched. "She used to insist on baking Celeste's birthday cake herself every year because Cook always made it too small."

Anna tried to picture it. Princess Lotta and her two handmaidens, Sophie and Celeste. She'd heard stories of them rolling sugared plums in salt, hiding under the table and splitting their sides with laughter as the greedy courtiers choked on them.

They might as well have been fairytales.

They arrived at the cottage. Anna could smell something sweet and doughy drifting through the window, mixing with the lavender in the garden. Scones. Henry Holloway was whistling in the kitchen as he baked them, a little local jig.

"Did you get it?" Sophie asked. "The powder?"

Anna nodded. "And the poison."

"You remember what to do?"

"Drink it?"

Sophie didn't smile. "Just make sure that you fail the test today. And get that map. That's the most important thing."

The map. The map of Nyxos. The reason that Anna had endured all those days torturing mice, had trained until her hands calloused and her skin bruised. Anna had heard so much about that infernal map that it was imprinted on the back of her eyelids.

"And don't get caught," Sophie added.

That was a given. The royal family thought Nightweavers were a scourge on the earth. If Anna showed even a hint of magic, she'd be executed.

No pressure.

Henry popped his head out. "Have you had breakfast, Annie?"

Flour coated his red hair. Henry's voice was casual, but Anna didn't miss the way that his eyes flicked over Sophie, checking for injuries. It was a marriage of convenience — Henry was mortal, and he married Sophie to shield her from discovery — but some days, Anna wondered if he remembered that.

"Henry," Sophie sighed. "You must stop calling her that."

"Why?"

"Because she's a princess. Our princess."

"Well," Henry said, "she'll always be Annie to me." He winked. "For the record, pumpkin, I think you look smashing covered in grass stains. But is that the look you're going for?"

Anna looked down at her blue dress — torn, caked in mud — and swore colourfully.

"Language," Henry said half-heartedly.