Metis goes on a long trip, and apprenticey tasks are no longer called for. Isabella blesses a cranberry bog in exchange for a large stack of cheap notebooks, and she writes trees of questions in them - if this is true, she needs to know that, in which case this could also be relevant. She passes them to Kas as fast as he'll take them; Path supervises and clarifies what Isabella meant where needed.
The alethiometer can make suggestions about spells. It doesn't communicate in words, and Kas doesn't know enough about ritual magic to interpret it very specifically, but it can point Isabella in the right direction. When she fails six times in a row to figure out what it means about a certain powerful defensive blessing that it thinks she'll want soon, though, she needs something that was better optimized for her use. The alethiometer describes the location of a witch from a non-Olympic but friendly clan based in Texas, an expert in such defenses. Isabella is busy: she sends Path to go talk to her about the spell, and stays in Metis's house herself, catching up on sleep now that Path is too far away to be stubbornly shaken awake, contemplating the unification of the clans as a preceding step to the attempt on human society, and eating mostly what the cornucopia can make for her.
After Path has been gone for just shy of a day, Isabella, collapsed sleeping on top of Kas, jolts awake with a strangled scream.
"Fuck," he says, and hugs her again. Petaal shifts golden retriever and darts across the room to fetch him the alethiometer. If someone is touching Path and hasn't stopped, Isabella is going to be in no condition to answer questions about how and where and who even if she has any idea.
Then he needs both hands to work the alethiometer.
What happened to Path?
Captured—killer—danger—torture.
Can I fix it? How?
Daemon—lonely/alone—send—find—change(
Kas bites his lip. Petaal turns linsang and flows up to sit on his shoulder and read the next answer along with him.
Where is he, exactly?
A forest in Pennsylvania, apparently. There's more detail, enough that Petaal nods along: she can find this place.
Okay. Last question. (He doesn't ask it if it was sure about daemon—lonely/alone. He knows exactly how sure it was.)
How do we separate?
Send—journey—pain—stay.
Simple enough. And with Isabella right there continuing to hurt, they're not inclined to argue about it. Petaal shifts cheetah and bolts for her cloud-pine, and Kas wraps his arms around Isabella and cries.
Isabella's shivering; if she notices Kas's embrace she doesn't react to it. He's certainly noticed by now that she talks in her sleep, and while her eyes are open and her words are more focused, this is closer to that than anything else. "Path - Path - hurts - I'm scared -"
It does not feel okay. It feels like his heart is being ripped out of his chest, continually, tearing and pulling but never breaking free. But since he knows from experience that what Isabella's feeling is even worse, he stays right where he is. Going along would fuck the whole thing up, that much was clear. He does not want to fuck this up.
Her unconsciousness is not peaceful, and it's not sleep, either: she stops talking, but she twitches.
Kas isn't even sure when the heart-ripping feeling stops. You'd think it would be the kind of thing you'd notice, but there are plenty of other things to be miserable about, and it's not like he suddenly stops missing her. He desperately wants her to be soft and fluffy and in his lap where he can hug her for approximately the rest of ever. But he wants Path to be safe even more than that.
Whoever's got Path is obviously not going for the quick kill. Or the direct one. Or the one that doesn't last hours-at-least. Unfortunate. In one respect.
Fortunate in another.
(It'll take Petaal nearly half a day to get there at top cloud-pine speed assuming no crashes and no interruptions.)
(Whether Path is currently in contact with a human or not, she's obviously not in good enough shape to get out the snow-circle, let alone something as complicated as the spell that brought her the alethiometer or the death curse.)
She seizes up, full of tension, again. "Path, Path," she moans.
The respite is apparently over for the time being.
It's a little under an hour before she can talk again. "How - fucking - much - can - fuck - one - tiny - owl - take - before-we-just-fucking-die-already," she shrieks.
Petaal, meanwhile, has been going maximum speed on her cloud-pine for hours. But she knows all the landmarks; when she gets close, she drops until she's skimming just above the trees, and when she spots the log cabin with the crooked roof like a broken tooth, she dives to get out of sight and shifts squirrel to bolt across the remaining distance. Then cockroach, to wriggle her way in through the walls.
And a deeper voice snarling mocking versions of the same words, with additions. "Oh don't hurt meeee, I'm only a poor wittle witch-owl, I'm too aloof and powerful to be hurt like anybody else - not so much now, little fucker, huh? Shut up!"
There's a squeak and then more screams.
The man and the scorpion daemon accompanying him have Path rigged up in something that is obviously specially designed for holding birds. With less than zero regard for the comfort of those birds. Path is pierced in a few places through both wings, held spread open. Many of his feathers are no longer attached to him and the ones that are have been crushed by miscellaneous abuse. There are spots of blood dotting the table beneath him; his beak has been cut clear through like a battery cage chicken's and his talons are all severed at the quick. Assorted ominous implements stand in neat rows nearby. In the torturer's hand is, currently, a small serrated knife. It looks like he's going for an eye, but he's taking his time about it, feinting and laughing and never taking his other hand off Path's weakly struggling foot.
What's the fastest kill from here?
Jaguar.
She shifts and launches herself into the man from the side, tackling him away from Path; on the way down, she gets her jaws around the back of his neck and crushes his spine in one bite. She knows she's done it when touching him stops feeling like some integral part of her is being shredded.
"Where's my cornucopia?" she asks, not taking her eyes away from her daemon. "I need to - he's so - I have to fix him."
And then throwing himself into Petaal's arms.
"Sweetie, my sweetie, I love you, I love you I love you love you love you love love love..."
Petaal says similar things back to him, and they both pretty quickly dissolve into incoherent sobbing.
Isabella glances at them quickly, but she has other priorities at the moment. "Dill - cilantro - mint - shredded ginger - parsley," she tells it, pausing between each one with distraction or to pant with lingering pain. "Bottle of pine sap?" she tries. It won't give her that; she eyes the door and the twenty feet to Metis's stock of such things dubiously, and says "Bottle of maple syrup" instead. That she can get. She drizzles it one-handed into shaky runes in a square on the floor, her other hand clutching Path gently to her chest.
Isabella finishes her diagram and gently, gently puts Path in its center. She never takes her hand away from him, though, fingers buried in the feathers he has left. She sprinkles him with herbs and sprinkles the syrup with other herbs and murmurs verses. She's too wrung out to compose; these are simple, almost nursery rhymes, that she's known for first aid forever. When she can think straight, when she hurts less, she'll come up with something to fix the rest of the damage. Right now she needs to apply painkilling poetry, close wounds with disappearing syrup and herbs. She can't do anything about his feathers but those will grow back.
"We'll be sore for - a while," says Isabella. "And I don't think he'll be able to fly until his feathers grow in again and that could easily take weeks even if I pour coconut milk and lavender over him every morning. But better."
"Are you okay? I don't even know how - how you did that. Witches have to go to a wasteland that daemons can't go into and drag ourselves across a mile of it and it usually takes hours and some people have to try four or five times - I don't understand how Petaal just flew away like that."
Path can't fly. But he can walk. He edges his way to the end of Isabella's arm. He presses his face - with his healed beak - into Petaal's side.
And then, timidly, into Kas's.
Isabella closes her eyes and gasps but she doesn't pull away.