Chapter 51
FIFTY-ONE
The Truthwitch wasn’t dead when Aeduan reached her. She should have been, but she was not. Perhaps the Cahr Awen souls protected her, perhaps there was some other magic at work. But the light-bringer was not dead when Aeduan fell to her side.
Carawen monks flowed around Aeduan, charging from a magicked doorway Owl had led them to.
While Aeduan and Lizl had sprinted across a bridge of ice and stone—ice that had not retreated from Aeduan’s path—he’d seen the other ice throttled at the edges of his vision.
Panting and shimmering. No, he’d thought at it. No, don’t move. Please, leave me be.
And it had. Somehow, that awful sentient ice left him alone, so the journey progressed steadily. True.
At least until Aeduan felt Iseult die.
It was like a hundred arrows cutting him all at once. Like the flames of his childhood burning anew. Her Threads snipped, and the sudden absence of her—the abrupt severing of their connection—carved out all of Aeduan’s insides. It squeezed, it wrung, it ripped while the six old wounds …
They punched outward with fire. Literal flames that he would have sworn he could see smoking, just like the arrows that had once razed through his mother into him.
“What is it?” Lizl asked, seizing Aeduan before he could topple off their paper-thin bridge into star-swept nothing. “What’s happening?”
Aeduan couldn’t answer. He had no voice, he had no words; he had only smoke inside his lungs.
And for a brief flicker of a breath, he had power too, gathering inside him like a starving storm.
As if the six wounds had decided not to kill him, but to reinforce him. Forge his muscles and bones in flame.
“The Cahr Awen,” he rasped, locking eyes with Lizl. Her blood had always smelled of speed and daisy chains, of a mother’s kisses and sharpened steel. Right now, Aeduan could sense none of it. “They need us now. We have to move.”
“Yes,” she said. And when Aeduan resumed his run, Lizl followed. He was the first monk to enter Poznin; she came mere paces behind.
The air reeked of rot and smoke, and a dry pond bed slanted upward. Long-dead bodies littered the ground, bone-dry, while cattails, pond scum, and snail shells rattled in the wind.
Blood scents crashed over Aeduan, witches and raiders and soldiers. Then he smelled the Truthwitch, right there—right there at the top of the hill where a body lay smoking into the awful dawn.
Aeduan ran to her, while behind him Lizl burst from the mountain. “FOR THE CAHR AWEN!” she screamed, and at those words, the opal in Aeduan’s earlobe pulsed. Just as it had when Leopold had used it to summon the monks beside the Aether Well.
More monks toppled from the mountain. More monks shouted for the Cahr Awen and charged into battle.
And Aeduan’s heart surged. Illogically, a buoyancy coursed through him. A vibrating certainty that, even if he danced to Leopold’s command, this was the right course. The Cahr Awen needed him. Iseult needed him.
Without knowing he did it, Aeduan joined his fellow monks in a roaring cry:
I guard the light-bringer and protect the dark-giver.
I live for the world-starter and die for the shadow-ender.
Steel flashed around Aeduan. White cloaks flipped and streaked as hundreds of Carawen monks, trained for this moment, fought in a battle they’d thought was months away.
Many, like Aeduan, had never been true believers; they’d simply followed where the money went.
But now—now they could not deny. They would not deny, and their certainty lent Aeduan even more strength.
He reached Safi. She had been hit by something all-consuming that had scorched parts of her hair and her skin.
Her eyes were closed, but she still breathed—and the meadows filled with dandelions still beat inside her.
At her side was a sword, sharp and silvery.
Untouched, somehow, by the ash and blood that filled every other inch of this city.
It pointed at Safi like an arrow. Like the Sleeping Giant aiming north.
Aeduan sank to the ruined earth beside Safi. Her blood still pumped, still flowed—even if her heart was badly weakened—so Aeduan could command her. If you have to take control of me and walk me like a puppet to that Well, then I expect you to do so.
Aeduan didn’t want to, but he would. He would claim her Aether. He would guide her blade.
Iseult had once described to him how it felt when she controlled Threads.
It had been a confession, and he’d seen in her a need for absolution.
You have controlled people against their will.
Please tell me it is all right. But it was not all right; it had never been all right.
Aeduan had told himself he needed to control others because he placed the cause—his father’s cause—above all else.
It had been easier that way than to reckon with what he was. With the demon and the monster inside him. With the dog named Boots whom he’d killed all those years ago.
This was the first time, though, that someone had actually told Aeduan, Yes, it is all right if you control me, and there was power in that. A trust he’d never deserved.
Bloodwitches cannot do this, the fon Grieg son had said. They cannot control people like this, freezing them. Killing them.
I assure you, Aeduan had replied. I am a Bloodwitch. And he was—one with a cause that he’d chosen and that he embraced fully in this moment wrapped in death.
Aeduan latched on to each layer of Safi’s blood. On to the dandelions and the meadows and truth hidden beneath snow. “Move,” he commanded in a voice too low to cut through the battle. “Rise.”
Safi’s eyes opened. She was confused, but she obeyed.
Her muscles switched on. Her heart pumped stronger.
And with Aeduan’s hands behind her, gripping her at the armpits, she stood.
One endless second stretched past. Two more.
Then Aeduan was able to release her. To step back, snatch her clean, true blade off the ground.
“Yes,” she rasped as Aeduan offered it to her. And as more Bloodwitchery coursed into her so she could grip it. So she could sheathe it in leather blackened by heat. “Yes.”
It was all the acknowledgment Aeduan needed to continue on, toward Iseult. Toward the Air Well.
I guard the light-bringer, the monks bellowed over the hammering clash of metal and flesh, and protect the dark-giver. I live for the world-starter and die for the shadow-ender.
Lightning singed. Aeduan ignored it. He was two bodies now, his own blood so closely bound to Safi’s that he could feel all the Cahr Awen souls inside her.
They had no blood, so his magic could not control them—but they were fireflies in the forest. The ones he’d wished upon months ago, hoping that someone might one day want him to stay.
Now it wasn’t only Iseult who’d answered his wish, it was her Threadsister too. She needed Aeduan; she needed the magic that had cursed him his entire life.
My blood, I offer freely. My Threads, I offer wholly.
My eternal soul belongs to no one else.
Safi grew stronger as Aeduan’s magic wove deeper into her blood. Her heart pumped with the same rhythm as his—a rhythm to match the booming vow of the Carawens.
Claim my Aether. Guide my blade. From now until the end.
In a tucked-away corner of his mind, Aeduan knew this could not last forever. He felt his old wounds throbbing. He felt them bleeding inside his clothes. But for now, he was standing. He and the light-bringer were walking, then running, and whatever flames decided to erupt again …
They would be a problem for later.
“She … is … not dead,” Safi wheezed. Aeduan had one hand clasped tight over her right forearm, and she in turn clutched his left. Their hearts still beat as one. “Iseult … can still be saved.”
Aeduan did not respond to this. Raiders had seen they were escaping—aiming uphill toward the Well—and their blades flashed as they redirected their attacks.
Aeduan drew his own sword. Safi drew hers, and by the time the raiders reached them, it was not merely their hearts that moved as one, but their entire bodies.
They parried, they blocked, they spun. They carved and cut in unison.
Aeduan’s opal warmed in his ear, and vaguely, he realized that he and the Truthwitch were not the only ones moving in synchrony. All the monks—all of them—were swinging and dipping, kicking, pummeling, and thrusting with exactly the same rhythm as Aeduan.
Which was exactly the same rhythm as Safi.
She is controlling us all, he thought, and he recalled what Leopold had said about making these stones centuries ago. Clearly they were more than simple opals meant to summon aid; Aeduan was no longer the puppet master, but rather the puppet controlled by the Cahr Awen.
I guard the light-bringer. Safi stabbed. The Carawens stabbed.
And protect the dark-giver. Safi deflected. The Carawens deflected.
I live for the world-starter. They all slashed.
And die for the shadow-ender. They all swept.
My blood, I offer freely. My Threads, I offer wholly. They all scooped low and drove blades into abdomens and elbows.
My eternal soul belongs to no one else. They all hook-kicked jaws and knees.
Claim my Aether. Guide my blade. A final slice through the neck.
From now until the end. Heads rolled from bodies.
It was carnage, and the raiders and Purists and black-uniformed soldiers who’d sworn fealty to Aeduan’s father, the witches and Nomatsis and lost, cast-out souls—they could not stand against this onslaught.
Many fled, while those who did not tasted Carawen steel and saw flashing opals before they died.