Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Vivia awoke to screaming. An entire chorus of voices in a clamor of languages she couldn’t split apart, much less comprehend. She couldn’t see, and she was cold—so blighted cold.
“Move. Please, move.” One voice severed through all the others, in words Vivia could understand. “You’ve got to get out of this ice—Zan, help.”
Vivia felt her arms rip upward. Her muscles resisted. Her mind too, although it was starting to reclaim awareness in spurts. You are in the mountain. That awful ice consumed you.
She opened her eyes. It hurt—not merely from all the light, radiating off of ice and foxfire—but from frost crystallized across her eyelids.
It had glued her lashes shut. Her vision was blurred and bulbous.
As if the shadowy ice had pushed so hard against her eyeballs, it had changed their shape.
How long was I frozen? Why are we waking up now?
“Zan,” the woman named Lev cried again. “Help!”
The giant smeared into focus before Vivia. He dug his hands into her armpits, and he tugged, tugged, wrenched at her. Because ice had glued more than just her lashes in place.
Vivia kicked, she pulled, she fought against any ice pinning her down. Voices still screamed. She couldn’t see where they came from; she couldn’t get her mind to understand them. And the light—why was the ice so bright, even with filaments of darkness to slide through?
The last shards cracked away. Vivia fell into Zander’s arms. “Cam?” she shouted. “Vaness?”
“We have the Empress. But not the boy.”
Vivia spun. The door out of the workshop was still split apart, but now ice filled every space between the wooden panels. She found the Empress, limp on the ground with blood across her face—and with Lev stamping and tromping at ice trying to crack in and claim her.
But no Cam. No Cam.
And the ice wouldn’t sit still. It wouldn’t stop groping for new bodies. It had lost its quarry once; it wouldn’t lose them a second time.
“Grab the Empress!” Vivia barked at Zander. The Hell-Bard obeyed, hopping over ice claws and swooping up Vaness. The movement looked harder than it should have been. The giant was tired and weak. They all were.
Nonetheless, Vivia and the Hell-Bards ran. Vivia hit the workshop first, Lev only steps behind. There was no ice here, thank the Hagfishes. But the ice would be here soon. It was following.
Vivia sprinted through the timeless space built for a Sightwitch she’d never believed was real. Whatever spell had kept it safe for so many centuries, it was failing now. The room shook. Dust fell from the ceiling. Entire fans of foxfire broke loose and toppled down.
And the Waterwitched pumps groaned.
Which gave Vivia an idea.
YES, her magic squealed. Use us and attack. Join us and attack.
I will, Vivia agreed, and the dam broke inside her.
It was like an addict seeing Painstones after too long without.
Vivia dove right in and lost herself to the power.
No control, only channeling. Water exploded from the pumps in the wall.
It slashed outward, forming sharp lines to snake and fly through the workshop.
Waters couldn’t stop the ice. After all, water had no shape.
It only engulfed, eroded, flooded, or drowned.
But there were shelves here. There were ladders and tables and stone, and they could not resist so much power, so much strength.
The tides—tens of tentacles, each as strong as a bull shark—slammed into any surface they could find. Two tables flung up and launched at the archway through which ice clambered. A shelf fell. Hundreds of books and beakers toppled down. And wherever there was nothing solid, the tides settled in.
It was enough. The ice, for now, could not get through.
But Vivia found she couldn’t stop the waters.
She was so deeply bound to the magic spewing out of the wall, her mind was dissolving into it.
After all, the waters never asked her to simply use them; they also asked her to join them.
And like a sandcastle collapsing beneath a wave, Vivia lost control of everything.
“Take her,” the woman Lev shouted from a hundred miles away. “I can manage the Empress. You take the queen.”
Once more, Zander’s arms came around Vivia. He was solid, he was safe.
No! the waters shouted. He is confining. He is controlling. Do not let him stop us. Against Vivia’s will, the tides took aim. Whips and waves that flung full power at a Hell-Bard whose only crime was trying to carry Vivia to safety.
Before the tentacles could slice him, drown him, slay him, all the foxfire in the workshop moved. Fans that flew off the walls, off the shelves, up from the waves. They launched upward in an onslaught of glowing green that encased both Zander and Vivia together.
The tides smashed against the fungus. It shredded, it collapsed. Zander, however, did not, and in that moment while green smeared through her, Vivia was finally able to reclaim control.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped out, clinging tightly to his neck. He was wet, bleeding. “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t answer. He simply chased after Lev. Two Hell-Bards Vivia hadn’t trusted who now were the only things keeping her and Empress Vaness alive.
They left the workshop. The waters, the foxfire. The sleeping ice too, and the screaming voices. Lev and Zander retraced their steps, through the winding tunnel where new foxfire flared at their approach, then faded at their departure.
Vivia wanted to carry herself. She wanted to help carry Vaness or do anything that wasn’t simply clutching at Zander like a child. But the little fox couldn’t find the mask labeled bear. The tides still cried out for her.
Down, down. The Way Below was endless and unchanging.
Dust kept falling. The ground kept quaking.
Vivia didn’t notice when they passed the hole in the ceiling.
She wanted to sleep. She wanted to fall back into the tide’s embrace and never find herself again.
To be neither little fox or queenly bear, but rather water, ever changing and free.
“Look,” she heard Lev say. “The ice is gone in the tunnel. We can get through.”
“How?” Vivia tried to ask, but the word was lost to a rising cacophony. Familiar now, in all its many layers. Many languages. This time, though, Vivia could understand bits—and this time, she saw faces attached as Zander stormed by her.
“Knife with two sides!”
“No coincidences!”
“Think beyond!”
“One by one, into the ice!”
They were old faces in every shade of skin imaginable, with hair of silver or white or no hair at all.
Vivia heard languages she’d been taught growing up and others that were fully unknown.
She heard clear crystalline tones; she heard voices murky and slurred.
But the one thing every woman had as she fell or climbed or reached out of the ice was silver in their eyes.
“A door!” Lev roared. “That’s a door!”
Vivia forced her head to turn and forced her sight to lock on to a glowing, frizzing archway hammered into a patch of wall not coated in sleeping ice. She recalled the doorways from the map. She recalled what Cam had warned about them. They shouldn’t exist; they would lead her far, far from home.
“No,” she tried to tell Zander, “let’s keep going. All the way to the big cavern.” But Zander didn’t hear her. Or perhaps didn’t understand, because he nodded as if he agreed and hollered, “Go!”
Lev, with the Empress of Marstok in her hands, leaped through. She vanished in a burst of crackling energy. Three staggering heartbeats later, Zander also reached the door. He charged forward.
The magic laid claim. Quivering, ecstatic, violent as it sliced Vivia apart like a chicken on the butcher’s slab—her soul, her body, her thoughts, her Threads—and then sewed her back together again.
She landed on a red stretch of dirt, where heat sweated in and white asphodels grew.
At first, Vivia thought they were back in Nubrevna.
That she was home, maybe even at Noden’s Gift beside the Origin Well …
But then, as she coughed and gasped, the differences battered against her. Oaks instead of palms or cypress. Reddish-yellow soil instead of white. And just visible through the trees, a languid, murky river that did not move like any waters Vivia had ever met before.
Not that this stopped them from calling out to her like an old friend desperate to make contact.
They were in the Contested Lands. That name had been on the map, and this looked like every description Vivia had ever read.
She swallowed against the magic rising inside her. Zander was at her elbow; he helped her stand. Blood poured down his nose, and he was pale—too pale in this night surrounded by jungle.
“The Empress,” she choked out. “Where is she?” Vivia spun, searching until she spotted Lev through the shadows.
The Hell-Bard had carried Vaness into the trees, and Vivia instantly stamped after.
Yet before she could reach them, her foot caught on something.
She tripped. She fell. Small stones cut into her palms.
Then Zander was at her side again. He lifted what Vivia had tripped over and held it toward the Sleeping Giant sparkling across the sky: a rusted helm.
“The Contested Lands,” he murmured, voice gravelly.
He wiped his bloodied nose on his shoulder.
“I don’t know how it’s possible … but we’re in the Contested Lands. ”
“Hye,” Vivia confirmed, her voice broken and defeated. “These are the Contested Lands, and now we’re hundreds of miles from where we need to be.”
Kullen,
I have been missing something hugely important. All this time, I’ve forgotten one piece of the puzzle that is critical: Merik.
I’m ashamed to admit the idea didn’t come to me on my own. Instead, it was the cards. They say what they’ve always said: Lady Fate, the Cleaved Man, the Paladin of Hounds. But there was a new card that kept itching its way in.
I don’t know how else to describe it. It is a fourth card that’s begging to be drawn, even though I’ve only ever used three cards to guide me.
The King of Hounds. Merik.
He is bound to you, as your Threadbrother.
But also as your king. That bond matters, I think.
You’ve always known, in your Paladin heart, that Merik would one day lead—even before you knew you were a Paladin.
So what if that connection between Paladin and ruler is important here?
Merik didn’t die when he should have. His connection to you kept him alive. Why? How?
The ghosts have ideas, of course. They take me to a new corner of the Crypts, where there are Memory Records on the Hell-Bard Loom. And that makes sense to me: the Hell-Bards are people whose magic has been cleaved from them. But rather than die as unexpected cleaving causes …
They exist, trapped. Neither dead, nor alive. Neither magicked, nor magic-free.
I think that’s what has happened to you and Merik. It makes so much sense, and I can’t believe I needed the cards to help me see it.
The Hell-Bards have been freed, Kullen. That must mean I can free you too. So now my focus becomes how do I unbind you from the Puppeteer’s Loom? Is that even possible now that she is dead?
And what will it do to Merik if I succeed?
I love you.
—Ryber