Chapter 65
SIXTY-FIVE
Iseult saw Poznin from above, brutalized.
She saw forests burned to ash.
She saw more mountains and hot white shorelines baking under a morning sun. She saw waters—and briefly, she was even dunked within them, as if Leopold hoped he might drown her into submission.
Still, Iseult held on. And with each leap into the Dreaming, each leap into a new dying corner of the Witchlands, the heat of Leopold’s Threads faded into something almost bearable.
Or maybe Iseult’s body simply lost the ability to feel pain.
After all, stare too long at the sun, and eventually you’ll go blind.
But let her go blind. Let her hands and body lose all feeling. She would not allow Leopold to escape, and she would not let him walk free and undamaged. He was not worthy of a god; it was past time that his mischief had consequences.
Green forests. Limestone and lakes. Leopold’s Threads shifted from panic and fear to fury and hate. In the Dreaming. Outside of it. No matter how he pivoted or pulled, attacked or assaulted, he could not get Iseult to release him.
“Let a man have his secrets?” Iseult asked as they once more glided through the Dreaming, so thrice-damned calm with its snow and its gray and its nothingness. “How many t-times did you say that to deflect me from finding the truth?”
“I have never hurt you—”
“You have ruined the Witchlands. You have killed Aeduan.”
“Then fix it, Iseult.” Now Leopold’s Threads blazed into something new—a shade of such godlike power, Iseult’s eyes screwed shut against her will. Her grip didn’t weaken, though, even when he sank low again and tried to snap her loose.
They tore out of the Dreaming. Humidity clawed in. And green and sunlight and warmth.
And Threads. So many Threads, burning and untamed, racing toward a master—or maybe several—west of here. A storm rallied there, accumulating thunderclouds like the hurricanes that sometimes struck the Dalmotti coast.
“That storm,” Leopold said with wide, glimmering eyes, “is only the beginning of what awaits if you do not take the next step. The seas and rivers of the Witchlands will boil. Mountains will collapse, and all the people will burn. Unless you find Sirmaya and build us anew. I told you I had a plan, Iseult, and this is it.” He opened his arms to the hot, sticky lands around them still thrumming and singing with life.
“In light,” he recited, “twelve will meet on lands long contested, while in darkness, the shadow-ender will topple nightmares and the world-starter will build us anew.”
“That means n-nothing to me.”
“It is the Lament, Iseult, and it cannot be ignored.”
“It can be. I told you already, I’m done with that goat shit.” Winds brushed against Iseult now. Charged and smelling of rain, but not a storm yet. Not deadly. Just hot and burgeoning.
Leopold’s Threads were hot too. They rolled against Iseult, through her, gradually claiming mastery over her primary senses. As if by stopping, her body now had no choice but to focus on the pain scorching into her through this god right here.
Her hands were ruined. She couldn’t see them through the Threads, but she didn’t need to. If Corlant’s Threads had left scars …
I don’t care.
“Three of the Twelve are here,” Leopold continued. “I lured them here, by bringing the rulers they are bound to. That is what all those Threads in the distance mean. Rakel and Itosha have followed the king and queen they were created to protect. Ferisien will follow soon, and Lovats too.
“The final battle will begin, but only you can finish what Lisbet saw a thousand years ago. It is what your Moon Mother wants you to do. The sleeper falls into the sky, awakening, so spring can finally weave. It’s all written, Iseult.”
“Listen to yourself.” Iseult could do nothing but laugh, a barbed, high-pitched sound. The pain was thickening within her body. “You lured the Exalted Ones here, using people as bait. All because you were too cowardly to ask directly.”
“I am asking directly now.” His cheeks twitched. “I am asking you to finish what must be finished.”
“And I am responding,” Iseult said, “with the answer no. Because that is my right, just as it’s the right of everyone you lured into this disaster.
” Her lungs were struggling to cooperate.
There was so much green here, thick and humid.
And so much sunlight too. A vibrancy of life that didn’t belong in a place where the world would soon be ending.
And the Threads, of course. Always the Threads. Except, as Iseult watched them, they changed. No longer squirming with the same intensity. No longer racing with the same speed—because they didn’t need to. Their new homes were here; they’d reached their new masters.
In light, twelve will meet on lands long contested.
Iseult had been here before, in the Contested Lands.
With Aeduan. She’d saved him by cleaving a Firewitch, repaying one life-debt of many—and forging the first strand of Heart-Threads that she would wear for the rest of her life.
A short life, perhaps, but a life she wouldn’t let end without some meaning behind it.
After all, she might not be chosen, but that didn’t make her powerless.
Mhe varujta, she thought, and she finally let go of the Rook King.
Leopold’s Threads reeled away from her. Vibrant blue relief erupted across them …
before turquoise alarm took hold. Iseult glanced down.
Her hands were, indeed, smoking and raw.
But good. Perhaps it would make what she was planning to do hurt less.
She turned away from Leopold fon Cartorra. “No,” he called at her back. “No, Iseult, you are no match for those Exalted Ones, nor for the ones who still have not arrived. You cannot stop them.”
She ignored him, and Iseult det Midenzi—who was nobody special at all—walked into the light of the Contested Lands.
For days, Caden and Alma had traveled alone on a road ever westward, and an hour ago, before this quaking and collapse had begun, Caden would have said he felt no closer to the Threadwitch than he had when they’d first met in the Nomatsi tribe.
She was inscrutable, and conversation had always been perfunctory.
Where do the Threadstones lead? West. We must keep going west.
But now, in this moment, Caden knew all he needed to know about her—and he’d never felt more certain that she was as loyal, as brave as any Hell-Bard he’d ever served with. The steely determination that had settled into her muscles was the only thing that kept Caden going.
Good enough, he thought, and although he still could hardly breathe through the magic that wanted to leave him, he shoved whatever remained of his strength into letting Alma tow him along.
The ringing in his ears magnified with each step. The wind that beat against them both blew harder—dry and thick with dust. This way was danger—this way was where the chaos of the moment aimed.
It was where they’d aimed ever since they’d left the tribe and the Solfatarra. A doorway he’d traveled through before, and the doorway where the Bloodwitch had found Lev’s and Zander’s nooses.
Then there it was, glowing through the trees: a magic access into the cursed mountain. Blue light seared outward, and although Caden’s whole body felt aflame, he also felt the scratch of powerful, uncanny magic against him.
Alma slowed to a stop. Her panting breaths were lost to the forest still thrashing around them. “They’re through here.”
Caden heaved a nod and dragged himself around to face her. To grip her biceps and make her look at him with her silvery eyes. “You don’t need to go in with me. It will likely be worse in there than out here—”
“No.” Alma clutched Caden’s arms. “You promised to get me to Saldonica, Hell-Bard. If I leave you now you cannot do that.” Then she smiled at him, and it was like the first sunrise Caden had seen after he’d been set free from the noose.
Color, life, dimension—they all washed over him in a way he had forgotten was possible.
“I will do all I can to protect you,” he told her.
“I know,” she replied, still smiling. “And remember that Moon Mother lights our path, so Trickster cannot find us.” She tore away from him now, although her hand held fast to him, and she guided him to the doorway, pulsing and brilliant.
Magic scraped against them, and for half a moment, Caden no longer felt as if he were dying. As if the fire of his witchery were being sucked away.
He also felt an itching, inexplicable urge to look backward. Because something wrong, something hateful was back there—something he needed to witness before it was too late.
He turned.
And he saw. It was a figure, stocky and stonelike, more mountain than human with a skull that melded directly into their shoulders. And on their strange, earthen face was the grin of someone safe in the knowledge of their triumph.
The figure waved.
Then Caden and Alma were subsumed by the mountain’s magic.
Do not snag the weave.
Do not snag the weave.
How many times had Gretchya or Alma or even Esme too said that to Iseult? Well, Iseult wasn’t just going to snag the weave. She was going to completely obliterate it.
For half a mile, she ran through oaks and hot winds. Clouds gathered, but they couldn’t fully block the sun. They couldn’t shut up the birds and insects and whispering leaves that lived here.
Sometimes, she imagined she smelled coffee, fresh-brewed from Mathew’s shop. Sometimes, she imagined she heard Safi laughing like she’d just won at taro. Twice, she did sense Leopold nearby. A flicker in the shadows of dappled trees. A murmur of desperate, yet cunning Threads.
He never stepped into her path, though, and he never tried to stop her.
Iseult lost track of time. She lost track of her exhausted body or her mangled hands.
She thought of Aeduan, over and over again.
Her final image of him was so broken. She wanted to summon a different version of him.
Any version. The one who’d met her gaze across a canal in Venaza City.
The one who’d dived into a river to save her.
The one who’d held her hand and walked her through hundreds of raiders and monks locked in place by his magic.
Her feet kicked at ancient, rusted armor from battles long forgotten. Ferns and flowers brushed against her.
Why so much fighting? Iseult had asked Aeduan as they’d crossed these same forests where humans might never live, but where other life always thrived. Is the land so valuable?
At the Monastery, he’d answered, they taught us that when the Paladins betrayed each other, they fought their final battle here. Their deaths cursed the soil, so no man can ever claim the Contested Lands. I think it is all a lie, though.
Why?
Because it is always easier to blame gods or legends than it is to face our own mistakes.
Yes. Iseult could see how true that was. No one had cursed this soil; the final battle had not even come yet—it was happening here now because a Trickster god had made it so.
Eventually, a shape hefted itself up from the forest, as if the earth itself were coming alive. Then a scent like soil and time curled into Iseult’s nose, and to her shock, she felt her lips twitch with a grin.
“Hello, Blueberry. Is Owl w-with you?” She would not be able to hold back her tears if Owl were to appear, in this place where Aeduan had first found the child and saved her.
But the mountain bat only swatted his tail. It made a nearby boulder hop.
“I need to get close to that Exalted One in the distance. The thing making all the skies build with storm.”
He opened membranous wings and squatted over to offer Iseult his back. The ground rippled around him—literally rippled like waves, because while magic might drain from the Witchlands, it was not abandoning the creatures to which it had always belonged.
His fur was hot and sunbaked. Iseult couldn’t fit her legs across him like a horse, so she stretched herself flat against his back instead.
Iron and stone scuttled up, moving with Blueberry’s guidance from the forest floor.
It crawled over Iseult’s legs, her ankles, her waist and bound her to the bat like shackles.
Smart, she thought, since she couldn’t use her ruined hands to hang on to him—and she would need these useless things soon, once they were near to the Exalted One.
Blueberry hefted himself up. Dust and ferns blew wide around them. White and yellow asphodels too, so beautiful. So alive. Then Iseult held her breath, closed her eyes, and the mountain bat took flight.