Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
They all felt it when Iseult died.
Alma and Gretchya, too far away to help.
Evrane on a shoreline, not far at all. Owl inside the forest where seafire burned, where ice and rock collapsed around her.
Habim and Mathew hundreds of leagues away.
Aeduan, so high in the Sirmayans and struggling to breathe. All of her Thread-family felt it.
And above all, Safi, running on the frozen river mere miles away.
She felt the Threads that bind tear asunder. She felt her heart cleave in two. And she felt the broken blade enter her as if she were the one being killed. As if it were her blood coming out so fast that her organs were shutting down and her mind was detaching from its body.
A hundred Cahr Awen souls screamed inside Safi. A mourning, inconsolable sound because the dark-giver was being ripped away. Safi screamed too, with all their voices and her own. Her body fell to the ice. Backward, exactly as Iseult had fallen.
When Iseult died, Safi died too. In fact, if not for the Cahr Awen souls inside her, she would never have moved again—and everyone who’d ever been bound to her would have also felt her death as it severed her Threads from the world.
Instead, a Marstoki Herdwitch who had no reason to care if Safi survived this moment, who had no loyalty whatsoever to her or her cause, dropped to her side while his eyes glowed green.
His arms dug beneath her and he lifted Safi, inch by inch.
The sword at her hip dragged on snow and ice, an anchor trying to pin her down.
It seemed to take all of the man’s strength to fight the ice, to control his magic, and to manage the weight of Safi’s near-dead body. Once she was on her knees, though, the Cahr Awen souls stopped their screaming.
One minute, they were as loud as the horns in the city; the next, they were completely silent as they raced like worker bees down to save their queen.
The souls reached Safi’s muscles. Initiate, they commanded.
And Safi stood. They surged up to her brain: You are not actually dead, and the dark-giver’s soul is not lost. Initiate and save her. Initiate and move.
Safi’s magic whimpered at that truth. And from her distant, out-of-body vantage, she couldn’t decide if she simply wanted her Threadsister’s soul to still be out there—and so her belief, her hunger, her need made her magic thrum.
Or was it really true? Did the core of her power recognize a fact she herself could not yet see?
Does it matter? the Cahr Awen souls demanded. Will it change what you are about to do?
No, she acknowledged. It won’t. Safi’s neck muscles shifted. Her jaw too, and suddenly she was moving again. Cracking her head side to side. Faster, faster, like a dog shaking off a bath.
Safi lifted her head and peered at the seafire-streaked sky. Snow fell thicker. The forest around Last Holdout was aflame. The horns blasted an endless refrain from the city.
But there was more happening than just the enemy’s triumph—there were people Safi had connected to during Iseult’s death.
As if the act of ripping apart Iseult’s Threads had woven together all the Thread-family she’d left behind.
Safi sensed Alma and Gretchya, their grief nearly as expansive as hers.
She sensed Evrane, illogically close and shouting a war cry for the Cahr Awen.
She sensed Aeduan, sprinting and focused in a way that Safi also needed to be.
And she sensed Leopold, furious. Violent. Grappling for his Aetherwitchery so he could make the world right again.
For a vivid half moment upon the ice, Safi saw the weave of Iseult’s Thread-family as if it were a taro game. As if she herself were one of several cards in an expert player’s hand—and each card was about to be laid down to win.
The Nameless Monk to double a hand’s strength.
The Fool to be played wherever needed.
And the Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth—a winning combination no other hand could beat. No other cards, no other assemblage could ever dominate.
And they are all me, while I am all of them.
Safi stepped away from the man who’d helped her. “Thank you,” she told Loued, although he couldn’t hear her. The horns and the seafire were too loud—and armies that appeared from seemingly nowhere now clashed upon the ice.
Ice that Safi was going to have to cross somehow, if she wanted to reach Iseult in time.
Iseult’s soul was not yet gone.
Safi’s quest was not yet over.
Her pace picked up. The dark slash where the river still flowed looked immense and uncrossable.
Too vast for only her two legs. But Safi knew—she knew because she had the winning hand in her grasp—that she could leap across it.
Lady Fate would find a way. The hundred souls pulsing inside her would find a way.
Arrows whizzed by, silent and crunching into ice around her. Seafire hissed across the sky. Twenty paces to reach the river’s flow. Ten paces. Safi would make it. The gap was not so big. She reached it. She jumped; her muscles sang with truth and certainty and all the belief she had inside her.
She flew across the river’s black waters, wind lashing around her. She still wore only her loose sleeping gown. She imagined she looked like a ghost to the people on the shore.
A righteous, vengeful ghost for the Cahr Awen, and with a sword that sang of truth.
The Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth.
Arrows sliced into the water around her, harmless. Lost. Then Safi reached the other side of the ice. She didn’t land easily, and the muscles around her knees felt torn asunder as they tried to stabilize her. But she didn’t fall, and the arrows now aimed in great droves could not seem to hit her.
She thrust back into her sprint, the ice hardening with each leaping step she took. More arrows, their fletchings an array of colors. Red, green, black, brown. Like Threads weaving around Safi, connecting her directly to the world.
She darted, she curved, she spun and lurched until she was no longer on snow-laden ice, but on a snow-laden shore.
Raiders aimed for her, and Safi realized with remote awe that it wasn’t merely arrows giving her the illusion of Threads.
She could see Threads, just as Iseult did.
She had, for reasons she could not fathom, bits of Iseult’s magic rousing inside her.
Safi withdrew her sword. It flashed with the reflected light of dawn and seafire.
It hummed with the power of a Truthwitch.
Then Safi reached the first raider, and she cut.
Not their Threads—she didn’t have all of Iseult’s magic—but their limbs.
Their bellies. Their necks and their armor.
Anything her sword touched, it carved effortlessly through.
I am coming, Iseult, she thought with each swipe, each duck, each shove. Do not leave me until I reach you. Do not complete until I am there.
Merik was dead. This was nothing new because he had been dead for several months now. The only things tethering him to a semblance of life were the Threads that bound him to Kullen, sleeping in the ice.
Yet although he was dead, his body kept sputtering along. Death would shatter it, then Kullen’s bound soul would restore it. Right now, it had restored Merik to his false life directly inside Noden’s watery Hell.
It was too dark to see anything, and the cold was so complete, Merik could not have moved his limbs if he’d wanted to. The current was so powerful that he could do nothing except be dragged along by it, ever deeper into Hell.
Water had entered his lungs. He’d been dead when that had happened; now that he was slowly returning to life, he could feel the water inside him.
Merik’s body died again. From cold, from drowning, from a broken neck. And still Noden’s currents carried him toward the final shelf.
Why do you hold a razor in one hand?
So men remember that I am sharp as any edge.
And why do you hold broken glass in the other?
So men remember that I am always watching.
When Merik came into consciousness a second time, his body once more stitching itself back together, his eyes had become ghost eyes.
Or maybe that was the light of Noden’s Court.
Either way, he could see now. Not well, but his dead, dead brain connected to his dead, dead eyes, and his dead, dead awareness sensed streaks tendriling through the water column.
Merik was still too broken to fight the current—and really, what chance did he have against Noden?
Plus, his lungs were too filled with water to live for long. He would die again at any moment.
But at least in all this cold, there was no pain. No frustration either. His time had finally come, and not even Kullen’s Paladin Threads could keep him bound to life. Noden wanted Merik, so now Merik would go.
He drifted. Onward, onward while the shadows coiled closer.
Then he realized what he saw, and he let his dead eyes close in supplication.
These were Noden’s Hagfishes. They were going to escort him past the final shelf.
He felt their slippery skin against him.
He felt their muscles twist and tighten around his arms, his legs, his neck.
They were somehow even colder than he was, and were he still a living man, revulsion would have kicked in.
But he wasn’t alive, and his belly was filled with water. So he felt nothing but gratitude because this, surely, would speed up the process. This, surely, would mean it would all be over soon.
He was not afraid of death—he’d been trapped on the final shelf for so long now, he knew the abyss was waiting for him.
He was sad, though. He didn’t want all those souls in Last Holdout to suffer at the hands of the Raider King.
He didn’t want all those Cleaved in the city to stand forever, trapped like Merik had been in a life that wasn’t life at all.
He hoped that Loulou might take over. With Sky and Revan beside him, he would lead well—
One of the Hagfishes that had slid around Merik’s neck now snaked into his mouth. Its small head pushed through his teeth. Then it pushed and pushed to reach his throat.
Now the revulsion switched on. Now, bones that had been shattered were repaired enough for his muscles to engage. For instinct to unreel and Merik’s fingers to claw at the creature trying to swim into him.
He gripped it. He pulled. The other Hagfishes embraced him, like shackles. Like Threads that bind and will never let go. And the Hagfish at his mouth forced its way all the way down Merik’s esophagus.
Merik died a third time.
But not before he felt the strangest thing happen inside his chest: water pumped out of his lungs.
Then came a voice he knew almost as well as his own: You don’t get to die before I do, Threadbrother. We’re still needed in this fight.
A light brightened before Merik. Ice, he realized, and it occurred to him—in a cloudy, unformed part of his dead brain—that perhaps he wasn’t in Noden’s abyss at all and perhaps these weren’t Hagfishes.
Maybe he was still in the river, and that pallid blue coming closer was nothing more than the surface and a dawn sky.
His feet caught on something that latched into him with such gritty severity the current was forced to release him. The Hagfishes were able to relax their control and, one by one, release Merik until there was nothing between him and the cold.
The last to leave was the one in Merik’s throat. It withdrew, wriggling and graceful.
Merik’s feet dragged over silt. Vegetation scraped against his legs. Then his head bumped against ice that slushed apart at his touch. Light pierced his dead eyes. Sounds pierced his dead ears. And a touch, gentle and warm, reached his shoulders.
Warmth coursed through him as a head leaned over his body. She was upside down at this angle, but there was no mistaking her face.
Sun-browned and silver-haired. Haunting, wise, and painful in a way Merik had not known his chest could still feel.
“I cannot believe it,” Evrane told him, her hands clutching his face.
“I cannot believe it, yet here you are, Merik. Delivered to me by Noden Himself—and oh my nephew, it is so good to see you.”