The moment the door of The Cracked Chalice closed behind her, Catherine's mask cracked. The cold night air hit her like a slap, and with it, the reality of her situation.
The confidence, the calculated grace, the predatory assurance that had inhabited her for an hour evaporated, leaving her staggering and drained. A blinding migraine exploded behind her temples, the inevitable backlash of using her vision so intensely and with such focus.
The hunger, which she had held at bay by sheer force of will, returned with a new ferocity, twisting her insides.
She leaned against a wall in a nearby alley, out of the lamplight, and closed her eyes, catching her breath. She was an actress leaving the stage after a grueling performance.
The role of the mysterious woman was exhausting.
Every measured word, every controlled glance, every part of her being strained to maintain that illusion had cost her precious energy.
She had succeeded.
The silver thread of Mathieu's curiosity was so bright, so firmly hooked to her, that she could almost feel it pulling at her through the tavern walls. But success tasted like ash when you had nowhere to go.
Dressed in her stolen gown, she was a new kind of outcast.
She couldn't return to the slums where her old life awaited; her new appearance would attract the wrong kind of attention, that of thieves and brutes.
Nor could she seek respectable lodging; her purse was empty, her single silver coin having been sacrificed for a bath and the right to enter a tavern. She was a well-dressed enigma without a penny, a situation perhaps even more dangerous than being a ragged prostitute.
She needed a sanctuary.
A place where the actress could remove her makeup, where the predator could lick her wounds. A lair.
Gathering her last reserves of strength, Catherine focused again, but differently.
She wasn't looking for a person, but a place. She extended her perception through the streets, ignoring the bright threads of life, wealth, and commerce. She searched for their opposites: the gray of decay, the black of emptiness, the tangled, dusty purple of unresolved legal disputes.
Her vision guided her through a maze of increasingly quiet streets, toward a neighborhood of respectable but sleepy townhouses.
There, one building stood out, not by its appearance, but by the absence of life emanating from it.
The threads attached to it were weak and old. A complex skein of purple threads, indicating a legal dispute, connected it to the courthouse, but the threads were slack, inactive.
A thin, black thread, like a spider's silk the thread of death led from the ground floor and was lost in the temple archives. The owner was dead. The house was empty, its fate suspended in bureaucratic limbo.
It was perfect.
A skill from her old life resurfaced. The small service door on the side was secured by a simple lock. With a hairpin taken from her own head and a focus born from years of practice opening lockboxes or bedroom doors, she picked the lock. The click of the mechanism sounded like the sweetest music in the world.
She slipped inside. The air was stagnant, thick with the smell of dust and frozen time. She silently climbed the stairs, her steps muffled by thick carpets.
The top floor was a former maid's room. Small, sparsely furnished with a bed, a small table, and a chair, all covered in white sheets. Ghosts of furniture. It was dry, secure, and above all, invisible to the rest of the world. Her first true territory.
Exhausted, she sat on the bed, the mattress releasing a cloud of dust.
She had nothing to eat, but for the first time, sleep seemed more important than hunger. She had a roof over her head, a roof she owed not to any man's favor, nor to the sale of her body, but solely to her mind and this strange new power.
A wave of pure, powerful triumph washed over her fatigue. It was a victory sweeter than any meal.
Before allowing herself to rest, she did one last thing.
She went to the single window, its pane covered in a thick layer of grime, and looked out over the city's rooftops. She closed her eyes and cast her consciousness out beyond the walls, searching for Mathieu's energy signature. It was difficult, like trying to spot a candle in a fog, but she found it.
She saw the silver thread of his curiosity and the green thread of his ambition. But they were not heading toward his home in the modest district where she had seen him live. No. Both threads were burning with a new intensity, a beacon in the night, pointing directly toward the Scriptorium.
He hadn't gone home to sulk.
He hadn't gone to sleep.
He had gone back to his place of work. In the middle of the night.
A faint smile, the first that wasn't a mask, played on Catherine's lips in the darkness of her new room. The puppet was already dancing on its strings, even when the puppeteer was no longer on stage.
The seed had not only sprouted; it had taken root with a voracity that exceeded her expectations.