Chapter Twenty-Three Simran #2
The tale of The Knight and the Witch was clawing painfully at her skull, her heart, urging her back to the mountains. But she wouldn’t go yet. She had to believe—had to hope—this was the lifetime when she could win.
She swayed on her feet, tears in her eyes. She couldn’t go on.
She heard a meow. It shocked her right out of her self-pity.
What the hell was a cat doing here? She turned her head, and there was Maleficium, abysmally wet and forlorn, sitting on the wet sand. The cat mewed again, and Simran leaned down, picking her up.
“Oh hell,” Simran said. “You are a familiar spirit, aren’t you? Vina was right.”
Maleficium, a ball of fluff in her arms, and also a demon, began to purr.
“Why do I have to feed you, then? Shouldn’t you be able to live off the ether?” Simran asked. She began walking again. It was easier, oddly, with Mal’s company. At least she wasn’t doing this alone.
She made it to the islet. The abbey was ahead of her, jagged and black-toothed against the endless horizon. The apple trees were twisted, their fruit glossy and waxen. There was no birdsong here; nothing but the howling wind.
She walked through the ruin, its black and broken walls, studded with flowering apple trees, to the grave that lay at its center.
On a raised plinth, on gray stone, lay a man.
Barely a man—a boy, seeming healthy and tanned, his brown hair loose and long around his face.
He was veiled by a gossamer of ink, as if under a shroud.
On his wrists, his throat, his ankles, sat chains of ink.
Many were broken. The work of lifetimes.
One still stood strong. The greatest chain of all—a great, long knot of smoke, of ink, that looked stronger than iron.
Simran took a deep breath.
“It’s time for me to begin,” she said. Maleficium, loafing on the floor at her side, responded to the nudge of her foot by padding to the entrance of the ruin. She settled back down, watching Simran with wide, reflective eyes.
Hundreds of witches, over hundreds of lifetimes, had torn at these chains with their desperate, determined hands, pouring all their magic into the task.
And still they remained unbroken. But Simran had to be the best of them.
She had to break these chains, so the tale of the Eternal Prince could rise again.
He would awaken, and take up his crown, and do whatever bloody, ugly work came naturally to an incarnate whose presence thudded with the drumbeat of war.
But his awakening would let her tale grow and change—let all tales grow and change.
When her knight came, blindfolded with sword in hand, they would be able to forge themselves a different ending.
Simran drew on all her courage. Without pausing to think, she grabbed the first chain link.
The agony flung her back.
Godsblood, how had all the witches before her done this? Grasped the ink, and torn at it, forcing it to slowly yield out of shape? She was near immune to the pain limni ink could inflict. But this—this was worse than she had ever imagined.
How had she held, controlled, the ink in the past? What had happened with the archivist, and that whip of ink, had been all impulse. This had to be controlled. Purposeful.
She clenched her still-burning hand. She lowered her satchel to the floor and pulled her scribing needles free.
She wasn’t the witches who’d come before her. She was everything they’d worked for, each one returning here and building their magic in the hope that the next would survive. And she was also herself.
She pressed a needle to the ink.
It followed her needle, compelled. But it wasn’t like drawing ink—it was like pulling a wave with nothing but her fingers, a single needle, the strength in her body and her bones. She gritted her teeth as her tendons screamed, her fingers trembled—and kept on moving.
Scribing required intent. If this was anything like it, then she had intent in spades. She poured it into the frayed link. Break, break, I demand you break. Break for me.
The chain snapped.
There was a frozen moment of silence, utter silence. Then she heard the sound of breaking glass as, one by one, the chains broke from his body. Scattered around him. They shattered with a howl—all that ink, all that pure potential of tales converging into a mass of darkness.
She collapsed, breathing raggedly, her magic spent. Lying on her side, as the ink snarled and shimmered in the air, near alive.
The Eternal Prince remained still.
She sucked a deep breath. She had no strength to move.
“Won’t you wake now and end this?” Simran called weakly.
Still, he slept, unmoving.
Her heart plummeted.
She lay, face pressed to the cold ground, for a long time. Maleficium came to curl up by her face, grooming her hair.
“Horrible creature,” Simran rasped. She touched Mal’s little nose, and got a lick in return.
She could still feel the pulsing, inexorable call of The Knight and the Witch. Her tale was summoning her back to the mountains.
“Why aren’t we free?” Simran asked. “Elayne. Why are we still trapped?”
“We can’t be free until he awakens,” said Elayne calmly. “We’ll be free when he changes the Isle in tumult and war, takes up his crown, and destroys the Queen’s archives, which imprison our tale in the cage of a book. And he will not awaken until he is ready.”
“You never told me about tumult or war or the bloody archives,” Simran said angrily, tears of fury starry in her eyes.
“You never told me I wasn’t saving myself.
” Coldness spread through Simran, icy rage.
She knew. “You expect me to die,” she said.
“You expect me to let Vina die. So someone else—some other damn witch—can be free, and change her tale, and live and do all the things I can’t. ”
“There’s nothing else for it,” said Elayne. “It’s a cruel business.”
“I want to live,” Simran said, voice ragged. “I want to live. I deserve to live.”
“There’s nothing to be done.”
As she lay on her side, the waters looked endless. The seething ink was a scar tearing the horizon.
“This ink,” she murmured, “can turn a mortal man into an immortal one.” She met Elayne’s ghostly eyes. “I can do what you could never do,” said Simran. “I can scribe. I can write my own story—or rewrite the one I’m in.”
“It can’t be done, Simran,” Elayne said pityingly.
“It can be, because you did it. We did it, lifetime over lifetime.” She dragged herself up and kneeled, looking down at her hands—burned by limni ink, but still strong, still her own.
“We made me into someone who can touch ink. We made me into an incarnate who can write tale-magic into other people. We changed me. I’ll never have so much powerful limni ink like this again. I have to try.”
She thought of Vina calling them cursed lovers, forever under a spell that condemned them. She thought of the knight and the witch, always the knight and the witch, falling into a love that couldn’t save them from destroying each other.
She stumbled onto glowing sand, toward the mass of ink. It was pure potential—the stuff tales were made of, written from, reshaped from, or so she could hope.
She pressed her needle into the ink. It hurt again. But she didn’t stop. She tried to write it. A tale of two lovers. Vina and Simran, and then we found a way to free ourselves. We were free and the sword never came, the bloody dying—
The tale sputtered out. It was too weak. There was no strength in it. She didn’t believe it. Not enough.
She collapsed to the ground.
She lay there on the mirror-sand, exhausted beyond repair, and thought of having done all she had and losing herself, and Vina losing herself; as if this life wasn’t precious.
As if this life wasn’t hers. As if what she felt for Vina—this fragile thing, somewhere between hunger and the way it felt to watch the sunrise—wasn’t hers, and worth saving. Unfit for an Isle-feeding tale.
She lay there and thought of the first time she’d seen Isadora—Elayne, truly—and how empty her head had been, Elsewhere scrubbed from it by the binding ink of the Isle.
Her father, rubbing his scar, already forgetting how a man had held a knife to his throat when they’d run from their village, one bag with all their belongings, all her mother’s dowry jewelry lost.
Her heart was suddenly in her throat.
A moment ago, she had not known why he had his scar.
Her father didn’t remember, but she did. Right now, she did. Something about this place allowed it.
The chains on the Eternal Prince were broken. She was surrounded by the ink that made the Isle, the power of tales. And now an Elsewhere tale was creeping into her skull. There was hope.
Memories and tales rushed through her, now that she was grasping for them: a rift, and war; the promise of a safe home. The angrezi may have destroyed us, but their land of tales will be a safe haven. They promised us.
And you trust them? Her mother, speaking to him. Simran, watching from their bed, pretending to sleep. A language she’d heard in the hidden library winged its way, known and comfortable, to her ear. She remembered it all.
No. But we can’t stay here.
Rushing memories. No wonder the Isle needed Elsewhere-born.
The Isle was fed by Elsewhere; by ancient invaders, by frostbitten raiders, by explorers bringing back tales, and by new arrivals carrying those tales with them, gold as coins in their hearts.
The Isle was tales that archivists thought valuable enough to tend to, preserve, protect.
And the Isle was tales of blood and slaughter, of conquest, of evil, all buried or culled.
The Queen had hidden those tales. Erased them. The library that had cradled them for lifetimes had been burned.
But the ink—and Simran—remembered.
The tide was drawing in again, blue-black, thick as ink, frothing into shining silver. This was the silver sea, the great ocean of ink that bound all the worlds of tales together.