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Idonea stepped into the clearing. Her dagger was already in her hand; she didn't remember drawing it. The snow soaked cold through her boots.

"You should've killed me."

"I thought I had." Elzhbeta tilted her head.

The knife came from her sleeve so fast Idonea only saw it after it had thudded into the trunk beside her head. She hadn't seen Elzhbeta's hand move at all. Her ribs flared where they had been stabbed in the cottage, a memory of pain her body had decided to revisit.

She opened her palm against the dagger's edge. The pain sharpened her and the blood went into the Current like ink into water, and a lash rose from her palm, slick and red and alive.

It struck the ground at Elzhbeta's feet. Snow fountained. Elzhbeta didn't move.

"Sloppy."

It was sloppy. The lash trembled violently in Idonea’s grip, refusing to hold shape. Untethered.

Her body knew before her mind did what she needed. She dragged the dagger across her palm again, in the same place, in the same line, mirroring the cut she'd left on Elzhbeta's forearm in the cottage. The pain went up her arm and out through her teeth as a sound she didn't recognise.

The wound found its twin across the clearing.

Elzhbeta's head jerked. She looked down at her own arm as the blood there rose to answer, and for the first time something passed over her face that wasn't composure. Not fear. Recognition. The look of a woman who'd just understood what she was fighting.

She sees it. She sees what I am. What my mother made me.

The lash steadied in her grip. She snapped it forward.

The first cut opened across Elzhbeta's shoulder. The second across her thigh.

Idonea's own shoulder and thigh opened with them.

She'd not expected that. Cold spread through her stomach. The mirror went both ways. The working wasn't using her blood. It was using her.

She was on one knee in the snow before she'd registered falling, her vision tilting, her glasses askew. The headache that had been waiting behind her eyes for hours arrived in full.

Elzhbeta steadied herself against a tree. Blood ran down her arm and dripped from her elbow. She was, Idonea saw, still smiling.

"You have no idea what a daemon-blessed witch can do."

"You are no witch." The words came out thicker than Idonea meant. "You are what they made you. You let him in because the Order took your hands and you couldn't think of anywhere else to put what was left of you."

Elzhbeta's smile didn't move, but something behind her eyes did.

The second knife came from somewhere under her cloak. Idonea got her lash up. The blade snapped sideways into the snow, but the impact ran back along the Current and slammed into her ribs where Elzhbeta had stabbed her in the cottage. The old wound and the new working agreed with each other that she should be on the ground, and she was.

Snow in her mouth. Iron taste. The lash gone.

Elzhbeta closed the distance the way a person walks towards a fire that's nearly out.

"You're working with him." Idonea got herself up on her hands. "Vinea. The relic. You—"

"I am working for a future." Elzhbeta crouched in front of her. Up close, the smile had something tired in it. "You wouldn't understand."

The knife was close enough now that Idonea could feel the cold of the blade against her cheek before it touched.

She had nothing left to throw. Her lash had failed. Her mirror had cut her as deeply as it had cut Elzhbeta. Her skull was a single white note.

She pressed her bloodied palm flat against the snow.

"Return," she whispered.