Isabella's grandmother sends her the clan library's Book of Tattoo Spells. A witch from Brazil sends her a curse that matches the parameters she wrote asking about.
"Hey, Kas," says Isabella, climbing up to the attic after fetching the mail and brandishing the latter. "Guess what Niada Ivakesi sent me."
"Then this is tons of fun, I suppose," says Isabella. "The curse is designed to just give you cluster headaches as, you know, a stable feature of your life that will strike randomly as though you naturally had them, but I think I can get it under finer control if I edit the verse a little, and of course I can lift the curse any time."
"She included a printout of the Wikipedia page," says Isabella, "about cluster headaches. Apparently they are widely considered the worst pain that humans experience. If you ask someone who's given birth unanaesthetized and who also gets these, they will prefer the former."
"Oookay," laughs Isabella. "And the nickname 'suicide headaches' is apparently not a joke, so, you know, remember that I can take the curse off in under sixty seconds if you want me to, don't go stabbing yourself through the eye or anything because that's harder to fix. ...And if you're going to operate a motor vehicle or anything, let me countercurse you first. I think the bayleaf tattoo will probably keep you from dying on impact if you crash on cloud-pine because you get a headache, but it's witchcraft and it's not as good at cars. And one of the tattoo spells in my book is one that will inform me if something dreadful happens to you so I'd be able to patch you up. But if you're that enthusiastic about it I can do this right now."
Rune rune rune rune rune, and all but the middle one are the same one. Lines of herbs spraying out from the line of symbols in all directions and another line trickled across them. This spell doesn't call for a sacrifice, so Isabella doesn't bother to summon an animal; she just clasps her hands, takes a moment to note the cardinal directions to help her get into the habit, and says a poem that is not in English, except for the second-to last line, which she has changed from its original to "Respite given at my whim" - that's the edit she made for finer control, although she's not terribly confident about mixing languages and the spell might go off as originally designed, thus her caution about motor vehicles.
Isabella has plenty to work on. She doesn't make much headway addressing the alethiometer herself, although she does carry on studying her dictionary to see how far she can get. But she's got an entire new branch of magic to figure out, and if Kas isn't back again by the time she's run out of avenues of research on that she can always find him. She's probably getting more done, actually, since he and Petaal don't keep distracting her by being so ludicrously attractive.
"Hallo," she says, greeting him with a kiss. "No headaches while you're gone or otherwise possibly flying, I don't want you to crash. You can have them back now, although mind I don't schedule them and they can easily go away for weeks on their own." Whimsy, change of mind, done. "Did you mean pretending to be knifey and so on right then, or with the whole part including the staking of claim at daggerpoint?"
When she's caught up on questions she had in mind to ask the alethiometer - but only just barely, before he'd wonder when to expect the next page of them - she catches him wandering around outside the house, and with an elbow to the chest and a quick, practiced draw of her dagger, she's got him pinned to the wall with a blade against his throat.
She makes eye contact, and grins the predatory feral grin she sees occasionally on her great-grandmother or some of the other clan sisters.
"Mine," she purrs.
(This script is taken almost verbatim from great-grandmother's inappropriately graphic description of her acquisition of her third husband. Not Isabella's great-grandfather, the one after him.)
"Good," she whispers. "Let's go inside, and have - some - fun." And she seizes the front of his shirt and pulls him after her without looking to see if he's pressed his feet into service yet or not.
Isabella acts quite normally after enough fun is had to be tiring. Crazy witches do, after all, tend to settle into fairly ordinary relationships with their captured sweethearts. At some point he'll slip off and then she'll be acting again, hunting him down, making threats, etcetera. For the time being she can get some work done.
(She turns his headaches off. It's supposed to be a game, not a potentially deadly obstacle course.)
For this purpose, the alethiometer would be less helpful than one of her own divinations. She sugars her room in runes, sits in the middle of the triangle she's marked, and murmurs repetitive verses until visions pour down on her.
(She picked a spell that doesn't need his name. She's not sure "Kas" would work for one of those.)
He's in a boat on the ocean, not flying, that's interesting. She can control the visions just well enough to tell them how close in she wants to see; when she's zoomed out enough to recognize coastline she zooms in again. She brings her cornucopia so she can stop on the way and make another check, if he changes direction.
When she picks up her cloud-pine to go, she hesitates.
Full realism would call for leaving Path home.
She wouldn't kill someone she loved in front of Path, and in a realistic scenario, this might come to that.
But she thinks Kas will forgive this lapse of verisimilitude.
Off she flies, Path clinging to the silks on her shoulder and her bow clenched in her hand parallel and unstrung beside the branch of cloud-pine.
She lands and stalks forward. "Where's Petaal?" she asks, for all the world like they're having a friendly conversation and not pretending that she might kill him. Casually, she plucks her bow away from her branch and unwinds the string from around her wrist. There's a quiver of arrows on her back. But maybe she's just hunting rabbits. In the middle of the sea.
String goes on this end of the bow. Pull tight, string goes on that end of the bow.
Bow is strung. She lets it dangle from her left hand loosely. She reaches up as though to scratch her shoulder - near her arrows.
"Aren't we, dear?"
(Even for crazy witches, killing an occasionally wayward lover is not the first resort. She's got a cousin whose first husband ran away six times before she killed him in a fit of miserable fury. A bad time for all involved.)
"I thought we were having fun," she murmurs. (Because crazy witches are sad, too, not only furious, because he hasn't been so openly defiant as for shouting to become appropriate.) "Why would you leave? Why would you do that to me when I love you so much?"
(Everything about this feels unnatural now. The alethiometer was right, she can't imagine ever actually doing this. Pleading with him, maybe, plotting to shoot him if he won't come back with her emphatically not.)
"Oh, you'll be nobody's," she snarls, whipping the bow around to nock and aim an arrow. She only half-draws; if she slips and the arrow looses accidentally it might hit him, but not hard enough to kill through the bayleaf protection if she's quick with the healing. "Last chance."
They are clearly out of character. Isabella abandons musing on the dagger and focuses wholly, utterly on the kisses and on Kas and on how glad she is that her brain works in this way and not in that other awful way that would have him dead now instead of loving her.