Chapter 56
FIFTY-SIX
When Iseult broke from the surface of the Air Well, it was to find almost nothing had changed. Seafire still burned, snow still plodded down, and sounds like a distant battle still echoed over the dawn.
Nonetheless, everything was different. For the world now had Threads.
There was no other way to describe what Iseult saw: Threads, everywhere. In the ground, over people, melting across the rapidly warming waters of the Well, and brightest of all, searing in vivid streaks across the sky.
It was blinding. Overwhelming. Especially after everything that had just happened to Iseult—after death and the Dreaming and the nothingness that had almost followed her forever.
As she paddled in the Well and gulped in dawn air, her attention gravitated to one spot beyond the Well’s shore. Strangely, these new Threads of the world did not reach there. Instead, the blazing colors scuttled around like rats avoiding poison.
That was when Iseult realized what she was looking at. That the smoldering corpse in the distance was Aeduan. Her Bloodwitch.
Iseult swam then. Fast and with such panic rising through that her she didn’t notice Safi shouting and chasing after. She didn’t notice Admiral Kahina, striding around the Well like an animal awaiting a meal. Nor Leopold fon Cartorra, slipping out of the Well’s waters and limping slyly away.
All Iseult had the capacity for was Aeduan.
She reached the edge of the Well before Safi. Winter air blasted over her, and the Well’s embrace fell away. Cold, wet, Iseult staggered over snow, blackened and cruel. Faster, faster, until she was sprinting toward her Bloodwitch.
She had seen dead bodies before—there was a stillness to them that life could never mimic. It was unsettling on a stranger. It was incomprehensible on someone she loved.
And it was made all the more damning by how these new Threads avoided him. As if their colorful magic was repelled by his death; as if he frightened them with his emptiness.
Iseult reached Aeduan’s side, but rather than scrape off snowfall, or check for any pulse, she simply grabbed hold of his arms. He was frozen to the touch. Ice crunched off him. “Help!” she screamed at Safi. “Help me!”
Safi did not help. Instead she ground to a halt at Aeduan’s side and gawped at him. “Where’s the blood?”
Iseult ignored the question; it was a pointless, illogical thing to say because what did blood matter now?
Blood. Witch. Blood. Witch. All that mattered was getting him to the Well, and if Safi wouldn’t help, then Iseult would simply do it alone.
As she had done before, after all, beside the Aether Well.
“Blood,” Safi repeated stupidly. “Where’s all the blood? And the arrows?”
With one hand still on Aeduan, Iseult reached for the tapestry of Threads skating past. Fire had fed her at the Aether Well—had given her the necessary strength to carry Aeduan. So all these Threads ripping and reeling past could feed her now.
But it was as if Aeduan’s toxicity had crawled into Iseult too. The Threads reared away from her fingers. Back, back, sideways, around. No matter how Iseult swiped or pawed, the Threads would not let her touch them.
“Go!” Safi shouted now, and Iseult saw her Threadsister had finally moved.
Was finally helping her. Together, they hefted Aeduan’s stiff body upward.
Snow kept falling. Ash fell too. Swords clanged and pistols sounded.
It took all of Iseult’s strength to walk.
To breathe. She was not restored by the Well, but instead weakened by it.
Or weakened by something else. She had almost died, after all. And now her Bloodwitch was dead—again.
Except there was more missing from Iseult than that.
Like a vital organ had been carved from her abdomen.
And worse—although Iseult didn’t know yet that it was worse—a wind was assembling.
It billowed against Iseult and Safi, flapping and flipping with Threads.
Reminding Iseult in a vague, dreamlike way of the wind-flags that hung throughout Tirla.
It took a hundred lifetimes for Iseult and Safi to reach the Well. Aeduan’s boots tore as they towed him over rock and ice and flagstone. His clothes too, sloughing away across his chest, ripping from the six holes already there.
With each new rip, more skin was revealed to the Thread-filled dawn—and it was not the skin Iseult had seen, had touched, had kissed. This was pale and shimmering, as if he were a rock with veins of ore weaving through him. And where his old scars had been, there were now dark, awful scabs.
Blood, Iseult thought. This must be what Safi had meant, although it didn’t matter. Not now, not here. Once Aeduan was in the Well, the holes would heal. He would heal.
Iseult’s muscles shook, her lungs quaked.
For some reason, the Well kept moving farther away.
No matter how fast she or Safi moved, its waters kept drawing away.
And Iseult didn’t want to, didn’t mean to, but her pace stopped.
Her grip on Aeduan’s frozen arms released.
He fell like a block of stone at her feet.
Blood. Witch. Blood. Witch. The words screeched through her, booming in time to her heart.
In time to her blood. In time to the organs that felt as if they’d been removed.
Mhe varujta. Te varuje. He was dead and frozen and she could do nothing but stand here and watch as the Well drained—literally drained before her eyes.
All while the weave of the world broke around her.
“What do we do?” Safi shouted. “Where do we go?”
Iseult shrugged stupidly. The wind beat her hair against her face, fanged and growing hotter by the second. Her eyes burned. Her lungs could not get enough air.
Then came a smell like petrichor and lightning. The heated winds turned to razors and slammed into Iseult like a hundred swords. So sharp, she could do nothing but scream. So all-consuming, she lost any sense of Safi, of Aeduan, of herself.
And it was, as Iseult felt herself lift and detach from the world, that she heard a voice rippling out from the crushing winds and the fraying Threads. It spoke in a language that was almost familiar, almost Arithuanian, almost tangible and real.
At long last, it seemed to say. At long last, we are awake and can reclaim what belongs to us.
The battle is supposed to be over, Safi thought, gaping at a sky turned to black with storm.
The battle is supposed to be over. The Cahr Awen had finished their mission.
There was nothing left for her and Iseult to complete.
This was meant to be, if not a happy, exuberant moment, then at least a moment of triumph.
Because finally, finally Safi and Iseult could rest.
When Safi had surfaced from the Well, she’d seen the Sleeper’s Threads searing across the sky, great bands of color that wavered and danced—just like the old Nomatsi tale that Iseult had told her when they were children.
But then the Well had begun boiling and shrinking.
And then a storm had spun into life. A shroud of cold and heat to snap Safi into its maw like a crocodile.
Winds cycloned around her. Feral, furious, with lightning to clap and snarl.
It lifted Safi, so high, so fast, she could do nothing but watch as ground vanished and violence punched in.
“Iseult,” she screamed, but her Threadsister was being carried a different way. And no matter how hard Safi reached for her, no matter how wildly she twisted or spun, she could do nothing against the winds that claimed her.
Safi still wore her nightgown, burned and sodden and frozen. Her sword was still belted at her hips, and it hit her with bruising force over and over again. Her hair turned to ice against her skull. Her ears popped like gunshots. She thought she heard Iseult screaming.
Only when she was thirty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet above the earth did she finally see what had become of the Well.
No more water, no more bubbling heat. Now, it had all been made flesh: a person with pallid, grotesquely long limbs and strings of white hair.
With laughter that rolled out like thunderclaps and winds that shredded off her, thick with rain.
Exalted One, Safi thought, remembering what Iseult had taught her about the origin of the Wells. Paladins so wicked, they had to be slain a thousand years ago.
But they hadn’t been slain. They couldn’t have been because there was one right here, dragging herself into life below.
The creature swiveled her gaze upward, and when her glowing eyes found Safi’s, she grinned with too many teeth, shaped all wrong for a human. Then the storm snapped Safi sideways. She lost sight of anything—of Iseult or the earth or Poznin, burned and ruined.
The battle was supposed to be over, but there was no denying it had only just started.
Safi was so cold. She was so hot. The laughter pummeled and thrashed around her. Until suddenly, when Safi thought it could get no worse—that surely this was what waited at the bottom of the hell-gates—a new sensation exploded into her.
Emptiness. Complete and total emptiness.
This must be death, she decided, because she knew only absence. It devoured her, encased her, infused her until she could do nothing but crumple inward. Her mind, her muscles, her senses.
She forgot all about the storm that had claimed her. There was only a hole widening inside her and the storm carrying her ever higher into oblivion.