Chapter 63
SIXTY-THREE
Sky wasn’t much of a soldier. She wasn’t much of a spy. And she definitely wasn’t much of a diplomat. But there was one thing she was good at—other than her magic, of course: staying alive. And when she saw that empress lady run into the seafire with the Cleaved …
Well, Sky had decided that was not going to be her escape route. Especially since she still had the book with the map. The one the other woman, Iseult, had given her.
Problem was, there weren’t any routes from that map that she could reach.
Seafire burned down so many streets. And even after a great rattle had shaken the city in a way that Sky figured must have meant something good had happened at the Well, nothing about her own circumstances had changed.
If anything, the quake had made it all worse.
Three buildings toppled over right before her, kicking up more seafire and smoke.
And Sky abruptly found she couldn’t breathe. It happened like a thunderclap: one moment, she was upright and scouring for a way out of this wretched place …
And the next, buildings were falling and she was doubling over. This belongs to me, she heard, even though there was nobody there. I do not want to, but I fear I must take it back now.
The suffocation ratcheted higher. A fist to close over her throat. Then her mind. She felt like she was being drained of some fundamental part of herself, and she grasped clumsily at the ground. At the air. At her own head as if maybe whatever was leaving her could be kept inside.
It was an animal that finally roused her. A blur of white at the corner of her weeping eyes. Furtive movements that meant something else lived—and something else wanted to stay that way.
Sky wrested her head high enough to see what was passing. It was white, it was wriggling, and oh yes, it was very much alive. Because animals—like Sky—were awfully good at surviving. So get up, Skyvenjetsa Drakora, she thought. Get up right now and move.
Sky got up. Her muscles rebelled and screamed. Her lungs too, and for several heartbeats, she could do nothing but cough and hack and try not to fall again. But then the intensity of the unexpected pain finally cleared.
And so Sky finally moved. A stumbling run. Then stronger, faster, after that slip of white squirming beyond.
Within two blocks, she was close enough to recognize the animal as a weasel. It wore its winter fur, which was a real blessing. Had it been dressed in black, Sky would never have seen it in all this soot and ash.
Twice, the weasel looked back at Sky. Twice, its nose twitched before it kept running.
Which meant Sky kept running too. For now, it was leading Sky away from the Well, and that seemed like a good thing.
Because now that the quake had stopped its aftershocks, a new chaos was setting in: winds.
Bad ones that kicked up seafire and sent it flying onto new roads and houses and humans.
A lot of humans. Most of them already dead, but quite a few who simply stood there, as lost as Sky had been.
Or trying, like her, to stumble out of here.
Sky ignored them all; she still had her Baedyed gear, and she didn’t know who might see her and think enemy or think friend.
Too many Cartorran soldiers here, and Red Sails and all those monks in white too.
Sky pounded onward, leaping and gasping through her scarf as she tried to never lose sight of that weasel. But then the weasel finally hit an avenue filled with smoke so thick, she couldn’t see anything but blackened shadows that sang with seafire.
Sky wiped ashen tears from her eyes. The winds were kicking harder, and now thunder rumbled. She had never hated this city more, and now she hated that weasel too.
Except, no. Something was changing. The shadows were shrinking, and a flicker of white could just be seen darting and swerving through. The weasel was close to the ground, and she’d found a way through the seafire.
Sky was about to chase forward after it, when something fell before her. It came so hard, so fast, she leaped backward, yelping. Her arms flung over her head. She dropped to a protective crouch. Several smoky seconds boomed by.
But nothing else crashed down, so Sky unfurled. She needed to move. She needed to not lose that cursed weasel before it escaped through all this black smoke. That was when she saw it, though—what had landed before her.
A sword. It was still sheathed, and she recognized it immediately.
The woman Safi had been wearing it at her hip when Sky had tried to help her.
Now here it was. Just stabbed right into the charred cobblestones with the bottom half of its sheath split apart.
“Well, shit,” Sky said to no one as she snatched up the blade.
Leather scraped off it to reveal pure silver to a dawn made of storm. “Well, shit,” she said again.
Then Sky ducked low and dove into the gaps of seafire where the weasel had just sped away.
Where the hell-waters am I? Merik thought as he blasted into the mountain. He’d made it through a magicked doorway and was almost certain Itosha would follow him, but it was proving to be a minuscule blessing in the loss.
For this was not the vast hall crawling with ice he’d expected, but a snaking tunnel filled with water and half-thawed bodies who screamed at Merik as he passed. A cacophony of sound that overwhelmed almost as much as Itosha’s attacks had. Follow the grain! Forced to change!
I am! he wanted to scream back. I have no other choice! And he didn’t, for the tunnel was too narrow, too unpredictably curving for him to tap into Kullen’s magic. All he could do was sprint and occasionally launch himself faster on winds fed by his Threadbrother.
Then all blessings vanished when, after a steep rise in the tunnel, the voices snapped off. Merik knew right away it meant Itosha was with him inside the mountain. And she was able to fly.
Move, Kullen roared into Merik’s mind. Go, my king. Go!
“What do you think I’m doing?” Merik snapped—a waste of breath as his vision blurred with panic.
That way goes to Paladins’ Hall, Merik. Keep going, and then take the brightest door when you get there.
“Why? What’s through it?” Merik veered past hanging limbs encased in wet ice. Past faces with silvery eyes. “Are you there? Are you in that hall?”
No. This was all Kullen said, but Merik could feel—across their Thread bond, across their many years as Threadbrothers—that there was more to that word than what Kullen was letting on.
He didn’t like it, but he also had no chance to press for more answers because Itosha was right there. She carved through this tunnel with far more speed than Merik had, since unlike Merik, she wasn’t trying to avoid the bodies in the ice. She just crushed them as she flew.
Merik saw the tunnel’s end ahead. He saw the melting ice release its claim in a crooked, raw hole. Merik had been in this mountain twice before; there’d never been a passageway like this one before.
Move, Kullen commanded, and power burst again inside Merik. He shot as if from a pistol into the vast cavern called Paladins’ Hall.
There was no ice now. No summoning song for sleeping. No whispers of Come, come, the ice will hold you. It was just a vast abyss inside the mountain, where several doorways glowed.
The ice is gone, Merik thought at Kullen. Does that mean you’re awake? Does that mean you’ve been set free?
Kullen gave no reply beyond a fresh surge of power. It hurled Merik toward a new door glowing brighter than any other in the cavern. It stood upon an island of rock in the center of Paladins’ Hall—a central platform that Merik was certain hadn’t been there before.
Warmth sparked against Merik. Inside him too, and he remembered that feeling. It was a sense of star-spun power, and it had fed him faster, higher the first time he’d come here, with the Northman.
Now, since it fed to him through his Threadbrother, there was a new dimension. One of strength, of love, but also one of crushing sorrow—
No, Kullen barked, and cold slapped through Merik’s lungs. Focus on flying, my king. Get out of this mountain. Get Itosha away from here.
Merik obeyed, rocketing across the dark abyss that filled the cavern. There was the galaxy he remembered, forever swirling in the mountain’s heart. And there was the door he needed to use.
The magic pulsed against him. Then it grabbed hold and sucked him through. Seconds later—after his whole being had been pulped and then reconstructed—Merik erupted into a new place. A hot, baking place where no storms darkened the sky and where green dominated red soil.
Don’t slow, Kullen commanded. She is right behind.
How do you know? Are you awake? Where are you, Kullen?
I am where you left me, Kullen replied, and again, Merik could feel there was more to this answer. Something his Threadbrother was intentionally holding back. But—again, again—Merik could do nothing except resume flight with a fresh torrent of power.
Not a star-spun power, but a Paladin-shaped one, tender and old.
Merik flew into a new day.
No. Leopold’s panic blazed through his Threads into Iseult. He hadn’t expected her to do something this excruciating—or this profoundly stupid.
But stupid was the one thing no one ever saw coming.
Iseult’s hands were on fire as she held on to Leopold’s Threads.
Her body was getting pounded to dust. But she couldn’t let go of him—no matter what he did, she couldn’t lose him.
He tried, his eyes huge and his body moving like a dancer’s.
Like a fighter’s. First, in the Dreaming, he dipped and spun and tried to shake Iseult free.
But he couldn’t.
So then he ran, his body streaking so fast, it snapped Iseult almost horizontal in the immaterial space between worlds. She was like a banner on a ship. The wind-flags in Tirla.
Still, Leopold could not get rid of her.
So he leaped out of the Dreaming. Gray smashed into seething Threads and hard earth. Golden grass, but without snow—as if these were the Windswept Plains to the south where winter had not yet taken hold.
Leopold tried again to wrench Iseult off him. His face was flushed, his lips too, and his Threads glowed with such intense determination, it darkened the sea green of his eyes into forest shadow.
Never trust what you see in the shadows.
Iseult should never have trusted Leopold—and she would never make that mistake again. Nor would she let go of him. He sank low in his stance and lurched sideways. The move tore Iseult forward like a dog on a lead.
The fraying weave of the plains smashed once more into gray. The intensity of the shift obliterated Iseult’s senses. Wiped them all away so that there was nothing but her and Leopold. His silver cloak. His many Paladin faces, wavering across him. Ghosts of the past he could never escape.
She might have pitied him for that curse.
She might have felt something other than rage if he’d only told her the truth.
If he’d only acted directly. And Iseult couldn’t help but wonder—in that little corner by her left lung—if this was exactly what Moon Mother had felt when Trickster had saved her from the storm in that legend of long ago.
Had she stared at the creature before her and marveled that he thought himself so clever he could marry a god?
Iseult wasn’t a god.
But she wasn’t quite human either.
Lightning flashed. Winds beat. Snow cut against her. They were out of the Dreaming once more, where peaks towered wicked and young against the sky. These were the Sirmayans—the Rook King’s old home.
Leopold reached for Iseult, his body lithe and trained. But Iseult was lithe and trained too. In fact, this was exactly what Aeduan had taught her to evade. So when Leopold lunged, she twisted. She swept. He dodged her counterattack, although only barely. His Threads erupted with white panic.
And still Iseult held on. The fire of his Threads saturated her veins, burned behind her eyeballs and up into her own Threads. Fuses she knew existed even if she couldn’t see them. They’d caught fire when she’d tried to hold on to Corlant.
But she wasn’t that Iseult anymore. She wasn’t chosen. She wasn’t special. She wasn’t a blade or a Threadstone or the dark-giver half of the Cahr Awen.
She was just herself. A Threadwitch who’d never made a Threadstone. A Nomatsi hated wherever she went. And it would be enough, not because Iseult was chosen, but because she was choosing.
For Safi. For Aeduan. For everything Iseult had ever believed about herself—and for everything Safi and Aeduan had ever believed about her in kind. Her mother too. And Alma. For Mathew and Habim and Monk Evrane.
The blizzard vanished. The Dreaming engulfed Iseult anew—and this time, Leopold spoke to her. His voice was as desperate as his Threads. No masks to hide behind, no Trickster self to mock and jeer.
“You must release me, Iseult! You must finish what we started!”
“No.” She smiled at him, her fingers squeezing tighter. He no longer ran. He simply stared at her.
“We will all die, if you do not.”
“Good.” She laughed. “Death is what we b-both deserve.”
He didn’t respond to this. Iseult didn’t know if he even heard her, since now they were snapping into a forest where the earth itself writhed. Root and rock and branch scuttled by as if answering the call of a master—and all of them moving with the Threads of the world, still sucking away.
Soon, there would be nothing left. Soon, the end would be complete. Death really was what they both deserved.
So Iseult kept hanging on.