Chapter 49
FORTY-NINE
Safi sprinted as if she was not in Poznin. She sprinted as if she and Iseult were on the streets of Venaza City, racing to be the first back to Mathew’s. As if the day were hot and the sun high. She was the light-bringer, the world-starter.
The Witch.
The Empress.
The Sun.
And Birth, she thought as her arms swung higher, her knees pumping almost to her chest. She ran with the speed of a hundred Cahr Awen. She fought with the power of a Weaverwitch and a Truthwitch combined. She saw the weave of the world, and felt its truth. Nothing could stop her.
They tried. Raider after raider, but she was always one beat ahead. A shift of Threads, a warning of what was to come.
A raider came at her from the left. A Red Sail, and with the now-familiar lines of the slow-Cleaved across his face.
He had two cutlasses, his movements were graceful.
At another time, Safi would worry that she’d met her match.
But what good was steel against her Truth-blade?
What did his grace matter when she was as fast as a hundred souls bound in Aether?
He swung his blades, two arcs aimed inward for her neck.
All she had to do was swipe, duck, and there went his cutlasses, cleft in two. He was startled, as every other fighter had been before him, and in that moment, she swung across his abdomen.
Blood sprayed hot against her. It landed on ice …
Ice, she realized, that was moving. Retreating uphill, as if summoned. She had no time to study it before light erupted and sizzling heat smashed a wall behind her. Then Safi sensed a Stormwitch’s Threads, yellow, sharp, focused, and coming this way.
Safi dove sideways, barely escaping three more lances of lightning. One sliced against the back of her head. She felt the heat of her own blood rise. A smell like metal burning overwhelmed her—as did the scent of her hair on fire.
She’d never faced a Stormwitch before—never even seen one except from a distance at the Weatherwitch Guild in Venaza City. Steel, she thought, is not going to help me here. No matter how sharp her blade, it would only be a liability now.
Safi leaped for a narrow side street. Here the ground was so dry, it was almost desert. No frost to slip on, no soggy moss like Merik’s forest. Just dry, dead earth … Which was wrong. She thought back to the ice moving on the avenue. Could that be where all the moisture was going?
The Stormwitch stalked into the alley behind her, wearing a uniform Safi didn’t know—black with a red moon. It was terrifying, as was the woman now lifting her hands. Safi barely careened out of the alley before two more bolts cracked out.
A new cacophony met her on the street beyond. So many people on the move. Threads spun and slashed, disorienting her until she had no idea where she was in the city.
Then came more lightning. Safi barely dropped before it sliced across her head.
She smelled metal again and more burning hair.
The lightning hit a Baedyed man. He screamed as his whole body shivered and burned.
Safi scrabbled sideways before the next attack came—and ran right into a familiar square of troops wearing familiar uniforms.
How they were here, she didn’t know—but she would use them.
“HELL-BARDS!” Safi shot up as tall as she could, thrusting her blade toward the sky. “TO ME!”
The Threads around her shifted with surprise, awareness, purpose, as the Hell-Bards who spotted Safi realized who she was—and realized what they must do: protect the Empress.
There were other soldiers with them. Cartorrans from the army, the navy, personal guards.
They too heard her cry and swarmed. So now, as lightning smoked and sizzled through the dawn, it did not reach Safi.
The lightning found other targets to incinerate from the inside out.
The stench of burning hair, cooking flesh—none of it was her own.
Safi ran on. She had to. She had to finish this journey. She had to reach Iseult before it was too late. Her heart could break for Cartorran lives lost later. For now, there was only chasing in the same direction as the ice that snaked across the cobblestones.
Four Hell-Bards sank into position around her, moving instinctively into a square. She didn’t know these guardians, but her mind turned them into familiar faces. Caden, Zander, Lev. She wished it was them; she knew it was not.
She and her Hell-Bards reached a new avenue.
Trees stretched wide, branches dipping down to the cobbles, and all around them, wooden spikes had been stabbed into the ground.
There would be no getting across this intersection.
No aiming directly for the Well from here.
“That way.” Safi skewed right, and her Hell-Bards skewed with her.
In the distance, she heard pistols fire.
She heard flames roar. And lightning—still there was that pop and crack of a Stormwitch hunting.
Do not stop, the Cahr Awen screamed inside of her. Do not slow.
New sounds erupted. Firepots, she thought, exploding nearby. She felt the heat of them, but they were not so close as to slow her or the Hell-Bards.
Until one of them did get hit. A flash of light, a cry of pain, then the Hell-Bard on Safi’s right fell. Smoke plumed.
Still, Safi didn’t slow; nor did the other Hell-Bards. They were on a road cleared of stakes. The ice, though—it was here and retreating, as if the earth itself were being sapped dry.
Safi couldn’t guess why, but it felt important. It felt like she needed to keep following it.
She pointed, and her three-sided Hell-Bard shield launched up a hill. They crested it in moments. Threads gathered behind. Many, many Threads all chasing this way. Please, she prayed, don’t lead me wrong, ice.
She sprinted onto a crumbling road, but rather than find the Well, she found only an empty pond bed filled with bodies and surrounded by the remains of a house. Only three walls, she thought, gaping at it. Just as I have only three.
Safi searched for a new road, a new escape, but there was nothing. Only people, Threads, raiders with weapons and witches with magic. She saw fire, rock, ice, and wave.
This was a dead end.
She and her Hell-Bards tried to double back, but were met with more of the same. The ice had tricked Safi. The Cahr Awen souls inside her had been wrong. Now these three Hell-Bards, whose faces she’d never seen and never would see behind their helms, would die. As would Safi.
Lightning arrived. A giant explosion that hit the Hell-Bard on Safi’s left. Their armor and helm roasted them in seconds. The remaining two, their weapons drawn, sank low and prepared for the same. They would fight until they couldn’t, to protect the Empress who had once been noosed like them.
“No,” Safi tried to say. “We’ll surrender. We’ll surrender.” She lifted her arms to show her guards how.
But it was too late. A spear made of stone shot through the Hell-Bard at her front. A blade of ice sliced into the one behind. Then there was no one standing, except for Safi.
She had only moments. These people were here to kill her. They would never let her reach Iseult. Their Threads throbbed with shared bloodlust.
The lightning soared out. It hit Safi. First, she locked up as tall and as strong as her body could ever be. A magnified, all-powerful version of the Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth.
Then she burned and burned and burned.
Merik wished he could say this was his first chaotic reunion with someone important.
He wished he could meet the people he loved in easy conditions that afforded time for conversation.
Instead, here he was, one of tens of people being tended by healer witches inside a sagging tent.
Painstones pulsed, filling the space with pink light as Merik was literally dragged on a litter toward a mat at the back.
He heard the sounds of war outside, but he couldn’t see any of it.
The person dragging his litter dropped it. “Noden save me.” Evrane half leaped, half fell to his side. “You were dead, Merik. You had no pulse. Your bones were shattered, there was water in your lungs. Yet here you are, waking up.”
“Well,” he ground out from a throat that didn’t work, “you must have been expecting I’d wake up, if you brought me here.”
She didn’t respond. Her dark, dark Nihar eyes were wide with horror, forcing Merik to look away.
Every shame he’d ever carried from childhood was suddenly churning to the surface, as if the Hagfish in his mouth had sucked it up for examination in the light.
And this was the greatest shame he could imagine: being a mostly Cleaved man who clung to life through a Threadbrother trapped in the ice.
There was no dignity in that. No Nubrevnan strength.
He tried to push upright. His muscles resisted. Or maybe that was his spinal column, finally giving way after too many deaths.
“Not so fast.” Evrane gripped Merik with strong, ungloved hands. They were winter-reddened and flaking from cold. And ah, there it was: the familiar chant of her magic to weft through Merik’s body.
The sensation of being a boy again ballooned hotter. “You can’t help me,” he told her, as he tried to push her away.
She gripped him harder.
“You were dead,” Evrane repeated, and this time, she closed her eyes.
Her grip was strong as the Hagfishes had been: “You had no pulse. Your bones were shattered, there was water in your lungs. But…” Again, her magic chanted through him.
“My witchery reaches you, and that means—no matter what strangeness I feel on your blood—there is still life left inside you.”
Hye, Merik wanted to say, although suddenly he couldn’t speak.
Evrane’s magic coursed through him, sparkling and real.
He was still a boy, but not a cowering one any longer.
Not a shamed one. This was the crash of the Jadansi on the Nihar shore.
This was the river beside the Origin Well, still clean when all the rest of the land was dead.
This was all the between moments when he hadn’t been looking and his aunt had quietly loved him simply by being there when no one else in his family had been.
Merik wanted to say something. He wanted to do something. But this was the problem with rushed reunions in the middle of a collapsing world. Cannons blasted outside. Horns bayed in the distance like wolves on the hunt. Soldiers—many limp and losing blood—were being rushed into the tent.
Merik couldn’t stay here; whatever he might want to say or share with Evrane, now could not be the time.
“Who fights outside?” He drew in his legs to stand, and Evrane finally released his arms. “When I fell into the river, there was no battle.”
“And the battle was only just beginning when I retrieved you. I am here with Cartorran soldiers and Hell-Bards—although the Raider King had anticipated us.”
“How many of you?”
“Not enough. Only twelve thousand.”
And Ragnor has at least double that, Merik thought. But there was no need to say it aloud. Evrane must know, just as she must know that Ragnor had the better position defending behind his walls.
“The Cahr Awen forced your hand, didn’t they.” It was an observation, not a question. “They left too soon, so you had to leave too.”
Evrane’s dark brows jumped. “How did you know that? Have you seen them?”
Merik nodded, and in quick, crude strokes he explained how he’d found Safi—but not Iseult.
How he had a small encampment in the woods called Last Holdout.
And as he spoke, he saw Evrane’s face lose color.
She spoke, rasping and almost inaudible in the rising tumult of the tent.
“Your people, your Last Holdout—it is gone. The entire forest is consumed by seafire. No one could have survived that attack. Merik, wait!”
Merik didn’t wait. At the word seafire, he’d shot to his feet.
And although Evrane shouted after him, he had no capacity to hear her.
She had her battle, and he had his. She had her cause, and he had his.
All his life, she’d put the Cahr Awen and her vows above all else.
Merik had resented it as a boy; he understood it now.
But he couldn’t do the same.
He reached the world beyond and found a battle raging. With flames, with ice, with arrows to batter into shields. Siege engines mired in earth too soft for them, loosing iron shot after iron shot at a city that had been quiet for decades.
And to the east, Merik found the forest exactly as Evrane had described it: the same thick, clotting seafire that had been his first death months ago now devoured the haven he’d built for lost souls.
Did I do this? he wondered, as the magnitude of what happened bowled over him. Did I do this by entering Poznin and catching the Raider King’s eye?
The answer didn’t matter. Not right now, for Merik’s course of action wouldn’t change. He had people who needed him, and if any might still live inside those flames, then he would be the one to find them.
After all, he could not die like normal men.
Merik heard Evrane shrieking, begging for him to wait as he kicked into a run. As his winds slung closer, taking strength from the healing magic that still glittered in his veins.
Once his fight was over, he would rejoin Evrane. Then, he too would fight for the Cahr Awen against the Raider King. But not before Merik saved his own people. Not before he was the king they needed him to be.