Chapter 53
FIFTY-THREE
“Hold on,” Leopold said, his arms wrapped around Iseult’s bloodied thorax. “Please, hold on.”
I hope he means figuratively, Iseult thought, because literally is impossible.
But of course he meant figuratively, for although Iseult had managed to crawl her spirit back into its body, she hadn’t moved far since.
The heat of the seafire bore down. She felt it through the trees around the Well, and she felt it over her bond with Safi.
How had everything changed so quickly? Iseult had been quietly planning inside the Raider King’s tent, savoring her pause and logic, and now the whole of the Witchlands was aflame.
How very Safi, she thought, for a plan to go horribly wrong.
She wanted to laugh at that. She wanted to share it with Leopold and watch him chuckle too—then have Safi show up and crow, Goat tits, Iz, you’re supposed to be the clever one.
Instead, Iseult would be lucky if she did not die and float once more into the Dreaming.
Leopold lifted her. It should hurt, but Iseult was too detached to feel anything. His words, Hold on, please, hold on, echoed as if they were in a cavern. She sensed as the heretic’s collar fell from her neck—a weight releasing. A gust of hot, hot air.
Goat tits, Iz, when you told Sky you found a route to reach the Well, I assumed you meant a tunnel or something. Not a city consumed by seafire.
I know, Safi, but it’s not really my fault the city ignited. Plus, I doubt you actually talked to Sky, and this conversation we’re having isn’t real.
Oh, but I did meet Sky. And who needs Threadstones with our magics connected?
Iseult’s bones rattled. Blood spurted, although there wasn’t much left to keep spurting. Leopold was walking her toward the ice-crusted shore of the Well. “It’s dead,” Iseult wanted to inform him. But of course the words wouldn’t come.
And of course, he knew it, anyway. After all, he’d been trying to get Safi and Iseult to travel here all along. His schemes, his armies, his maps and drawings and insistence that Iseult and Safi listen to him … Well, he’d been right, hadn’t he? They’d done it their way and they’d failed.
“Drop her.” A voice cut across the Well, command honing it razor-sharp.
Threads of pure, pure flame. Admiral Kahina.
Of course she would come here. Of course she would be able to cross through the seafire advancing on all sides.
“I don’t want to kill that girl, Rook King.
She and the other one have done nothing wrong.
So if you drop her, I won’t hurt her. Otherwise …
well, she is a weak shield against my Paladin flames. ”
“I was wondering when you would arrive.” A falseness scuttled over Leopold’s voice. But he did as Kahina ordered and gingerly lowered Iseult to the earth. She was at the Well’s edge, and cold, cold snow soaked against her.
She could see across the Well from here—and see Kahina as the woman wrapped her body in flames. The fire flickered and licked, transforming from a desaturated gray to vivid orange. Because this was real fire. This was the fire of the Moon Mother, not an alchemical cruelty built by humans.
Kahina attacked. Leopold vaulted, and a new fight began.
One that Iseult could not follow, even if she’d wanted to.
Her eyes drifted shut. She let her magic observe instead.
The Fire Threads burning like a flame hawk; the Aether Threads sparkling like spirit swifts.
Two Paladin souls who, despite their stark differences, were evenly matched.
Almost evenly matched. Kahina had one edge that Leopold did not: a thousand years of simmering rage. Where Leopold’s Threads were defined by a lost, lonely core, Kahina’s were defined by vengeance and a certainty that the entire Witchlands had been wronged by this Paladin right here.
In the end, Ragnor had only been a man when he’d faced the Rook King. A brilliant, perhaps once-kind man, but still only skin, muscle, blood, and bone. Kahina, however, was raw power, and Iseult didn’t think Leopold would survive this fight.
But she could do nothing to help him. She could not cleave, she could not move. She was an amalgamation of her Threads and Safi’s Threads and whatever had been held inside those broken tools gathered by Ragnor.
Sever, sever, twist and sever.
At those words, Iseult thought of Esme. She thought of the white weasel who’d died here and all the Cleaved now caught in the seafire to burn. Innocents who’d never deserved what came for them. Hundreds of bodies with Severed Threads and no Puppeteer to free them. Unless …
Unless.
The Well was right there. Dead, yes, but perhaps Iseult was looking at it wrong. Perhaps she was asking its dead waters for the wrong thing. After all, it had been a Loom once; all those warping, wefting Threads might still be in there, waiting to be used again.
Iseult opened her eyes and dug deep inside herself.
First she found a drop of strength in her muscles.
Then she found a trickle. Then she had enough current—from Safi’s Threads, from the Threads of a broken blade and glass—to finally lift a single arm.
It was so, so slow mountains could have grown before she moved an inch.
But she did move. And she did dig her fingers into the earth. And she did pull her body forward.
Iseult’s soul was not yet gone.
Her quest was not yet over.
It was without a doubt the stupidest thing Aeduan had ever done. It was the sort of decision one made when the choices were between certain death and almost-certain death. That almost made all the difference. He needed that almost, and he had no choice but to rely on it.
If you have to, then you will take control of my blood.
Whatever consequences might come from that, we’ll reckon with them once the Well is healed.
The consequences, Aeduan feared, would be dire, but they were all he had left now.
Any burst of power he’d found inside the mountain was gone.
His wounds were not simply weeping, but gushing.
So heavily they soaked his clothes through.
He was losing a lot of blood. It was weakening him far faster than his magic could keep up with.
But there was still that almost, and he had to cling to it.
As Aeduan walked Safi toward the seafire, he removed his salamander cloak. Every nerve inside him fought against that. All he wanted was to run, my child, run and never look back. Yet Iseult had walked through fire to save him, so he would walk through fire to save her.
He and Safi were close to the flames now.
Aeduan saw nothing else. Felt nothing else.
His eyes wanted to pop from the heat—and that was only the beginning.
“This will hurt,” he warned again, although he knew Safi couldn’t hear him.
He draped his salamander cloak over her.
He towed up the hood, and he fastened the fire-flap as if she were a child who needed dressing.
A final time, he said it: “This will hurt,” but this time, it was not for Safi. It was for himself.
“You’re not protected—” Safi tried to shout at him, but Aeduan had already reined her blood to his. He was already sending her muscles onward. She would go first; he would walk behind.
The fire devoured them. Aeduan had felt flames; he’d survived burns that no one else could; and he’d died by seafire too, beside the Aether Well. But he did not stop. And he did not let Safi stop either.
Run, my child, run. Straight ahead. Straight through. There was no sight, no sound, no touch inside the flames. All senses ceased to be, and there was only pain. Smoke to clog lungs, fire to peel off skin. While inside Aeduan’s chest, the six wounds would not stop bleeding.
They made it twenty-seven paces this way, before Aeduan realized his plan wasn’t working. That because he burned, his body was trying to heal—and because of the six old wounds, he was running out of blood to heal with.
His control over Safi was failing too, and she in turn was burning.
Through the salamander fibers, flames kissed her.
Aeduan tried to run faster, to push his magic to fresh heights.
Somehow, he kept going. Somehow, there were still pieces of him that did not burn.
Pinpricks of light from the Truthwitch herself, he realized, that he could latch on to.
Physically, he grabbed hold of her, his fingers spasming and cruel.
Magically, he latched on to her too, injecting the hot viscosity of his blood into her veins. And mentally, Aeduan screamed: Run, my child, run. Then he ran. With the Truthwitch leashed tight, he ran through the seafire and chased after an almost that might only be ghosts in the trees.
Straight ahead. The light-bringer was almost there. Aeduan had almost finished what he needed to do. He had almost survived with the Truthwitch beside him, and that almost was all that mattered.
The heat morphed against Aeduan as he finally reached the end of his magic. As the last of his blood boiled. His steps flagged. His lungs, choked with flame, gave out. He thought he must be near the Well, but he couldn’t see to confirm.
Run, my child, run.
He kept running. He kept pulling Safi in the salamander cloak that could not protect her forever.
No, he realized as he tripped over an unseen rip in the road.
She is pulling me. They had traded places.
Her muscles still worked, her mind was still free.
And although she could have left him behind—could have sprinted ahead to the Well and to Iseult—she hadn’t.
Part of Aeduan hated her for that. He was not what mattered here.
Leave him to the seafire and the pain. He was done.
A husk. A Bloodwitch with no blood, only heat solidifying in his veins.
But another part of him—a part that sounded so much like his mother—whispered: You are not done yet.
There are still debts owed and a knife that must go claim them.
Then they were through. The flames melted off Aeduan and the temperature against Aeduan’s skin cooled. Smoke billowed, and his body was lost. But he was out of the seafire, and the Truthwitch was too.
He collapsed.