Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
The moon was fully risen by the time Iseult navigated the Nomatsi trail again. She did not return to the hunting lodge, but instead made her way to the ancient tower with its altar inside. The pack weighed heavy on her back, but it was steady. Comfortable, even.
She scanned the tower, full of shadows. A world of black and white. Snow still skated languidly down, and a barely perceptible wind whispered every few seconds. But something was wrong. Something had changed since Iseult had come here with Safi that morning.
There were the supplies, tucked into the darkest corner with the blanket above. Snow had once more banked around the crates.
There was the altar, only ten feet away. Still, silent, timeless.
There were the crumbling walls and broken staircase and winter trees beyond.
Iseult shifted her weight, splaying her toes in her boots, trying to find warmth. The pack shifted with her. She should add its supplies to the organized crates in the corner. Open up the leather and catalog exactly what Alma had given her.
But Iseult didn’t move. Instead, she eased the pack off her back, letting it land directly behind her. A bulwark against cold—and against the strangeness still huddling around her.
There were no Threads here, so she did not fear humans. And she didn’t fear animals, since they, like men, avoided this place. Of course, there were ways to hide Threads. Ways to travel that even a Threadwitch could not see …
Wind pulled at her hair as she withdrew Eridysi’s diary from a leather pouch at her belt. She always kept it with her, for its words were too precious, too dangerous to ever leave untended.
Iseult lowered to the snow-covered earth, folding her legs beneath her before laying the diary on her lap. She closed her eyes. She slipped into the Dreaming.
It was so easy here, in this old tower where the walls between this world and the Old Ones’ were thinner. She only had to imagine the Dreaming, and suddenly she was there. The night hazed around her. The edges of her vision blurred into gray nothing.
“Leopold,” she called. “I know you’re here. Show yourself.”
She sensed his emergence before she saw him. A heaviness where her periphery smeared—a slowing of time that made the snow drift differently, as if gravity no longer operated by the same rules.
She turned toward him and found he was not Leopold at all, but the purest distillation of his Paladin form.
He stood at the tower’s entrance, a ghostly figure.
Almost insubstantial, yet also many people at once, many genders and many races before all the incarnations of his Paladin soul finally settled into the version Iseult knew best: Leopold fon Cartorra.
Except now he wore the Rook King’s silver crown, and his cloak was black and bulky, adding breadth to what she knew were lean shoulders.
“This is a welcome surprise.” His voice and Threads indicated it wasn’t welcome at all. “I did not think I would see you again, Dark-Giver.”
“Don’t c-call me that.” It was Iseult’s title as the Cahr Awen, but Leopold always made it sound insulting.
She rose to her dream feet while her physical body remained behind.
“Where are you? I know you must be near.” The last time she had seen Leopold in person had been here, after he’d stabbed Corlant in the back.
Leopold paused at that altar now, inspecting the precise spot where his blade had cut through Corlant’s spine, as if he were an artist looking upon his work. “Is it so strange to want to see how the Cahr Awen fares?”
“Yes.”
“I have spent a thousand years trying to heal the Wells. Give an old soul this … pleasure.”
“Except you were the one who betrayed the Six. Oh yes, I’ve read the diary in full now, Leopold. Eridysi writes that you betrayed the Six so that the Exalted Ones knew of your plans. The Six were going to kill the Exalted Ones, but you warned them. And so the Six failed.”
“And Eridysi was wrong. I was not the betrayer, Iseult.” A pause. A contemplative twirl of Leopold’s Threads as he motioned toward the altar. “I was, in fact, the one who ensured the Exalted Ones were slain.”
“Portia was not slain.”
“Was not, but now is.” He smiled, and although he didn’t add it, Iseult could practically hear him saying: Because I slayed her. She was in Corlant’s body, and I killed Corlant so you would not have to.
“Why are you here, Leopold?” Iseult spoke more forcefully now. “Why are you in this tower, lurking so I’ll find you? I w-want an honest answer. None of your charm or lies.”
“Ah, but charm is a prince’s only weapon, remember?”
“And you are not a prince anymore.”
He laughed. A twinkling sound that clashed with the brutal frustration in his Threads. “I am here because it would seem that you and Safiya are leaving. Abandoning all the forces Dom fon Hasstrel and Monk Evrane have assembled for you.”
Iseult wanted to recoil. Wanted to gasp. How does he know? Who has he told? But she clung to her Threadwitch training. She was stasis through and through.
“It will be a march to your death,” Leopold continued.
“If you travel east, just the two of you, you will not survive long enough to heal the Well. You will not even reach Poznin, for that matter. The Raider King is not a man to be trifled with. He is the greatest strategic mind of the last millennia.”
Iseult presented a thoughtful silence. One breath. Two. Then she said coolly: “I’m surprised you would say that about someone who isn’t you.”
A snort and a flash of Threads that, for once, actually matched the amusement on his face. “Why do you think I made him my general? I know what my strengths are, and they are not battlefield tactics. Meanwhile, Ragnor has both knowledge and experience that span generations.”
“So why not kill him?” Iseult flipped a dismissive hand. “Why not use a-all your sneaking and shadowy tricks to eliminate him, Leopold?”
Another snorting laugh, this time with Threads of violet disappointment. As if Iseult was a particularly slow pupil. Against her will, heat burned in her chest.
“Trust me, Dark-Giver: I have tried to kill him, but he has accounted for every strategic possibility—including assassination. So only brute force will get you through his armies.”
“Brute force,” Iseult repeated. “Meaning people will die. Countless people—on his side and ours. Don’t you care about that at all?”
“Not particularly.” Leopold opened his arms. The black of his clothes smeared like wings. “Either we lose thousands of lives now or we lose the entirety of the Witchlands when Sirmaya dies. Tell me which sounds preferable to you.”
“Funny how you never put your life at risk, though.”
A sneer carved down Leopold’s handsome face.
His Threads, however, remained placid and unperturbed.
“You have no idea what risks I’ve taken.
I have done nothing but help you and Safiya.
Please recall who found you in Tirla, all alone.
Who reunited you with your Threadsister in Cartorra.
Who gave you an army, that you foolishly set free—”
“Because Hell-Bards are people, not tools.”
“—and who killed your father so that you would not have to.” Leopold strode toward Iseult, closing the distance between them until all she could see was his face.
All she could feel was the icy core of his Threads, crackling with static and cold.
He had a Paladin’s Threads. Overwhelming in power and violent in their intensity.
“Everything that has gotten you and Safiya this far—it has been my doing.”
“No.” Iseult cocked up her chin. “It has been your manipulation. Because you work forever behind the scenes, never willing to take direct action. Why is that, I wonder?” She canted toward him.
Closer, closer, until only inches separated them in this cold, hazy place of nothing.
“I think you avoid direct action, Leopold, b-because then, if you fail, you can absolve yourself of any blame.”
The silvery core of his Threads dilated. The sneer carved deeper. But Iseult wasn’t finished yet.
“Tell me, Leopold, how many Cahr Awens have you nudged along and given armies to over the last thousand years? How many of them failed and died because you refused to ever work with them directly?”
“I will not let you and Safiya go alone to Poznin. I will not let you leave this lodge without an army.”
“And what will you do to stop us?” Iseult motioned to her body, still seated in the real world with the diary upon her lap. “Stopping us would require you to act, and I don’t think you’re capable of it.”
“Do not underestimate me, Dark-Giver.”
“Do not underestimate me, Trickster.”
The sneer fell away. In its place, a smile spread over Leopold’s lips, like an asp coiling to strike.
His Threads folded outward in a meteor shower.
“Trickster,” he purred. “Yes, that is what you so love to call me.
But what is it the Nomatsis say? May the Moon Mother light your path, and may Trickster never find you.
“Well, I have found you. And I have acted in a manner that is quite direct and not at all conducted behind the scenes.” Now Leopold was the one to motion, although not toward Iseult but rather to the dark corner where her supplies awaited.
They were not so dark now.
“Enjoy the flames, Iseult. They burn so brightly in this ancient place of memories.” Leopold backed away. The charge of him receded, his body fading like smoke into the sky.
Iseult lurched out of the Dreaming, her body crudely trying to remember how muscles connected to ligaments connected to bones. Heat billowed, orange and blue, fed by the fuel of Iseult’s and Safi’s supplies.
They were all on fire.
Somehow, while Iseult was distracted in the Dreaming, Leopold had ignited the crates, and now they all burned.
Iseult half crawled toward those flames, toward the smoke and heat billowing above it all. She didn’t think to cover her mouth or face, nor did she think to protect herself in any way. Not until she made it five steps over and suddenly remembered what was inside the crates.
Firepots.
Iseult flung herself around. She crossed five steps in only two bounding leaps. Then she jumped, headfirst behind the altar.
The first firepot exploded. A mere stutter, a mere crack! before the rest of the cataclysm joined in.
Fire, heat, noise, and stone. It convulsed over Iseult, rippling with power and rage.
She was midair, reaching for the snowy banks behind the altar—when the force of the explosion slammed her down.
Right into snow and stone. She lost all hearing; she lost all sight; she lost all sensation in her limbs, her lips, her skin.
She could do nothing but lie there, facedown and limp, while heat and shockwaves boiled across her.
She thought of how Safi had described being trapped beneath a flame hawk. She thought of earthquakes and Sirmaya and all the power of a Firewitch contained inside a single clay pot. Inside fifty clay pots.
The tower burned.
Iseult burned with it.
Until suddenly she was being moved. Someone was rolling her over. Then tugging her to him. There was so much smoke, her eyes streamed. She coughed and gasped. She couldn’t see her savior, but she knew who he was anyway.
He had no Threads.
“I’m here,” he told her—or at least, she thought he told her that. Everything was echoey and vague. Fire and smoke swirled like Threads. Her body hurt where Aeduan held her. As he carried her step by steady step out of the tower.
Then it was not fire, but snow.
It was not smoke, but starlight.
Cold air beat across her. Aeduan solidified into sharp specificity: fire-flap across his face, eyes glittering like bloodied ice.
He walked and walked until the tower became nothing more than a distant torchlight.
Until they were beside a stream, frozen save for one patch where ice had not laid claim.
There was no light to create reflections upon the black, burbling surface.
Here, Aeduan eased Iseult down. She had, by now, reclaimed her senses. Reclaimed her mind too, and a thousand questions crowded in: Why is Aeduan here? He should not be home yet. What will this do to our plans? What can we do if we have no supplies?
But there was only one question that really mattered in this immediate moment. She coughed and scrubbed ash from her eyes. “Where is he? Where is Leopold? F-find him, Aeduan, before he can get away.”