Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
“How bad is it?” The Truthwitch’s voice rasped through the tent, and when Aeduan turned from where he checked Surefoot, he found her gazing up at him. Her face, much too pale, glistened with sweat. Her freckles stood out like constellations.
Aeduan didn’t try to help her as she sat up.
“Earlier,” Safi continued with a grunt, “you said you sensed my injury wasn’t life-threatening, and that was a lie.”
Yes, it had been a lie.
“So how bad is it?”
“Better now.”
Safi rolled her eyes, a move that was barely visible in the shadows. She finished sitting up, her hurt arm hugged tightly to her chest. “You know you can’t lie to me, Knifey. So I’ll ask again: How bad is it?”
Surefoot snuffed. Dandelion stamped. But there were no sounds to suggest Iseult was near enough outside to overhear them.
“It’s more than a surface wound,” Aeduan said honestly.
“And you should be resting.” He tried to turn away, to resume his careful checking of the horses.
But Safi leaped to her feet, surprisingly agile for someone with an injury as bad as hers—and it was bad.
She had lost enough blood that the mountain ranges and cliffsides were nearly swallowed up by the meadows filled with dandelions and the truth hidden beneath snow.
That didn’t mean her magic had suddenly become stronger, but rather that all those Cahr Awen souls inside her were crushing down on the pieces that made Safi who she was.
Her arm muscle was also ripped apart. Aeduan was no healer, but he would wager there was bone damage—and also that she had the start of a fever. It did not radiate off her yet, but there was a certain shallowness that hit blood when infection took hold.
Safi’s was beginning to throb that way.
“You can’t help me.” The way she said this was more statement than question. “You, who controls people’s bloods … you can’t do anything to help me.”
“No.”
She staggered toward him. Aeduan tried to withdraw, but there was nowhere to go. And in the shadows of the tent, her blue eyes had become storm gray.
“Because you will not or cannot?” She crooked toward him, her voice lowering until it was almost lost to the winds outside, until not even the horses could hear her.
“Make me a promise: if I cannot walk to the Well, then you will walk me there. You will take control of my blood and move me like a puppet every step of the way.”
Bloodwitches cannot do this. They cannot control people like this.
Aeduan swallowed. “We have Painstones.”
“Not many.” Safi’s right hand whipped out and yanked him close.
The feverish gleam in her veins was unmistakable.
“Not enough to last us two days and carry us through armies. Which means, Knifey, that when the time comes, you will take control of my blood. Whatever consequences might come from that magic, we’ll reckon with them after the Well is healed. ”
Aeduan did not answer. He took in the sweat on Safi’s forehead, the faint scar above her brow. He took in the intensity of her eyes and the strength of her grip upon his cloak.
He didn’t like this Truthwitch. Perhaps he never would. She was rash and loud, spoiled and obscene. But there was a steel in her he recognized, a determination to do what had to be done no matter the cost to herself.
And, at the end of the day—at the end of everything that was careening nearer and nearer—Aeduan had sworn his vow to the dark-giver and the light-bringer. “Yes,” he said at last. “I will take control if I have to.”
Demon. Monster.
Safi nodded. Her shoulders relaxed and her grip on him too. As she drew away, her muscles shook. But Aeduan didn’t let her get far before asking: “What did you mean by consequences?” It was a flat question, almost bored.
“Since we left the lodge, there is something off inside you.” She wiped sticky hair off her brow. “My magic senses it.”
“Like … cleaving?”
“No.” Her breaths sawed in. Out. “Something different. Something else … wrong.”
I can smell it on you: you’re bound to the Void, a cursed beast with ’Matsi poison running in your veins.
“Clearly you don’t want Iseult to know about it. And I don’t want her to know about me. So.” She gestured at her hurt arm. It made her whole body sway. “You will tell her I am healing quickly. Do you understand?”
It was a threat, and against his will, Aeduan found his estimation of the Truthwitch rising.
Iseult was their Sleeping Giant, forever pointing north, and if they lost her, then both Aeduan and Safi would have nothing left to follow.
No reason to keep traveling to Poznin. When Iseult had called herself a “master,” she hadn’t been far wrong.
But it wasn’t because she forced people to follow.
It was because everyone who met her felt compelled to.
So Iseult had to keep going because it was the only way Aeduan and Safi could keep going too. Yet Iseult would stop immediately if she thought either Aeduan or Safi were hurting.
Aeduan bowed his head at the Truthwitch.
It was the closest to an agreement he would offer Safi, and she seemed to realize this, since she finally released him.
But rather than hobble back to her bedroll, she reached to her neck and withdrew a length of silver chain from beneath her many layers.
Bits of quartz and brass dangled off it.
Aeduan’s fingers flexed. “The Truth-lens.”
“Yes, Knifey. Good job at stating the obvious. I … want you to take it. The person I made it for is in Nubrevna, according to Uncle’s spies, and in case I don’t survive this … Well, it’s your job to deliver it to her.”
When Aeduan didn’t claim it from her, Safi sighed. Impatience set her muscles into motion. She shoved it against the skin of his neck and wrapped it around like a scarf. Against his will, he staggered back. “That is … overwhelming.”
True, sang the crystals and glass. True, so very true. It was a heady feeling that buzzed like a hundred Painstones in Aeduan’s skull. He ripped the necklace back off again and thrust it at Safi.
But she flipped out a weak hand of refusal. “You don’t have to wear it, Knifey. You just…” Pant, pant. “Have to deliver it if I can’t. I’d give it to Iseult, but then she’d know what’s wrong with me. So just … shove it in your pocket and deliver it to Vaness if I don’t make it out of the Well.”
“You will make it out of the Well. I already said I would control your blood.”
“To get me to the Well, yes.” Her eyes scrunched. She wiped clumsily at her brow. “But neither of us knows what will come after that.”
There is something off inside you.
Demon. Monster.
The necklace glinted and swung in Aeduan’s grasp. The wounds on his chest throbbed. He didn’t nod or agree, but he did slide the lens into his pocket where it couldn’t affect him.
“Good,” Safi said, though nothing in her voice sounded triumphant.
“Now, I can sleep.” She slogged back to her bedroll—and snorted loudly when she got there.
“I agree,” she declared as she folded herself back into the covers.
“This tent is way too small for this many bodies. But I promise it’s not me that’s stinking up the place. ”
Aeduan had nightmares after speaking to Safi.
He saw the Cahr Awen ghosts inside her skull, pushing at her like too many crabs inside a basket.
He saw Iseult with her abdomen carved out and Threads crawling from it like worms. He saw the Truth-lens, but on each bit of quartz or glass was a shadowy face he couldn’t recognize.
He saw a mountain filled with stars where shadowy ice clawed for anything it could grab on to—except for him. It never dug into him.
He saw four Exalted Ones in quick succession.
Ferisien on a mountainside. Itosha on the plains.
Rakel beside the sea. And, most violent of them all, Lovats spreading flames.
That Exalted One was the one they’d all feared, even Portia with her power over Void.
And certainly Nadje, who had never quite known which side he ought to choose.
Then Aeduan smelled it, poignant and inexorable: A sky singing with snow. Meadows drenched in moonlight. Sun and sand and auburn leaves falling.
“Run, my child, run,” said the voice like his mother’s while heat roared, wood cracked, and embers flew. Blood dripped from her mouth. “Run.”
Aeduan did not run. He did not move. He waited, exactly as he had as a child, for the flames to overtake him and the world to burn alive.