Chapter 66
SIXTY-SIX
Well, the weasel had turned out to be useless, and Sky kept thinking of something her mam used to say: Over the falls and into the rapids.
Sky might have gotten out of the seafire, sure.
But now she was in the middle of the rutting city where, instead of flames, there was a giant hole filled with ice.
And not normal ice either, like she was used to finding all over this city and Last Holdout. This was weird, veinous ice that carved across the ground in evenly spaced lines like the spokes of a wheel. And all those spokes moved toward a single mound where wet snow gathered.
The mound looked an awful lot like a corpse, and sorry, but Sky had had enough of those to last a lifetime.
She shivered. She was literally the only thing alive here other than the weasel.
Nothing moved except the snow, slopping down.
There wasn’t even a wind, which was about as unnatural as things could get here on the Windswept Plains.
Also, hadn’t this whole area been the Well?
That’s definitely what the map in the book was saying, but if a whole Origin Well could just disappear …
Blessed are the pure, Sky thought—and this time, the voice in her head sounded like Priest Corlant’s.
She pulled out the book, fingers numb. Teeth chattering. If this was where the Well had been, then there was supposed to be a tunnel on the other side. An old hypocaust that had heated baths centuries ago …
Yep, Sky found it. Straight ahead. She just had to circle left around the gaping hole she didn’t want to study too closely. She returned the book to her pocket and shifted, ready to leave.
But the weasel had other plans—and now it wasn’t even pretending to be a normal animal doing normal animal things. It raced right for Sky, white as the snow, and it chittered and purred, curling its tiny form around Sky’s boots.
Then an image formed in Sky’s brain. Although image was overstating the clarity of what appeared there. It was more like a feeling laced by vague shapes, and that feeling indicated the snowy mound ahead.
“You … want me to walk over to that mound? Where all the ice lines are going? No way.” Sky snorted. “I ain’t doing that. I’m going over to that old hypocaust, and I’m getting the hell-pits out of here.”
The weasel didn’t like this answer, and after zipping up Sky’s body, it bit her on the face. Just bit her, right on the nose with wicked fangs and claws to stab into Sky’s neck.
Sky punted the weasel off her, squawking with surprise and pain. The weasel hit the snow ten paces away, but she was down no more than a heartbeat before she got to her little feet and hurled forward again.
Sky ran; part of her was ashamed to be fleeing a rodent, but most of her was wondering what this cursed creature was and why she, Sky, had gotten trapped in this completely unhinged reality of ice craters and weasels.
Her feet pounded into ice veins on the ruined earth, and each time they hit, a ringing walloped through her.
It didn’t hurt so much as stagger Sky with the intensity of its response—and it reminded Sky of this one spot on her elbow that always knocked her silly whenever she bonked it.
This ice wasn’t just weird, it was alive. It was part of some greater being.
Nope, Sky didn’t like this and she didn’t like that weasel and she didn’t like that she was close enough now to the mound beneath the snow that she could see blood trailing outward from it. Six trails moving on the wheel spokes … until they froze, forming the very veins Sky couldn’t seem to avoid.
The weasel chittered anew, and fresh feelings and images filled Sky. The sword, it seemed to say. Drop the sword.
Sky obeyed. She flung the sword at the mound.
To her horror, though, the sword didn’t just rotate a few times through the air, then land on its side like it should have done.
Instead, it found a path all its own and stabbed right into the mound.
Fully vertical, exactly as it had when it had landed on the cobblestones before.
The ice veins all rang at once. The mound groaned.
And Sky gave one more Nope before running with all her heart away from that mound, that ice, that sword, and that weasel.
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks. It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
But he does not move, just as he did not move when the raiders first ambushed the tribe.
Just as he did not move when his father drew his sword and ran from their tent.
Or when the raiders reached their doorway, loosed their arrows, and then his mother fell atop him.
She had hidden him with her body until the raiders had moved on.
“Run,” she whispers one last time, pleading desperation in her silver eyes. Then the last of her strength flees. She collapses onto him.
The six arrows that pierced her body slam into Aeduan. Pain and punctured breath and blood, blood, blood. Always the blood.
He is pinned by cedar and corpse. His mother is dead.
And now there will be no running. Now there is only flame.
He begins to cry.
Aeduan watched himself. He stood where the raider had stood when he’d loosed the six bolts into Dysi’s back. He stood at the mouth of their tent—except there was no tent now. No walls or battle raging in the tribe. All that surrounded Aeduan was fire and shadow.
Death follows wherever you go, yet by the grace of the Wells, you always outrun your own.
All he had wanted that day as a child was to join his mother and escape the flames. But death had refused to claim him. His mother’s body had kept away the full brunt of the fire’s force; his magic had healed his wounds.
Demon. Monster. You’re bound to the Void, a cursed beast with ’Matsi poison running in your veins.
Eventually, Dysi’s body had burned away. Eventually the arrows in Aeduan’s chest had too, leaving only white-hot heads trapped inside his chest. And eventually, Evrane’s gentle face and gentle hands had found Aeduan among the debris.
For so many years, Aeduan had relived that nightmare. Only once before though had he hovered outside like this, watching as his mother died and his wounds oozed blood upon the floor.
Now here he was again.
Yet rather than watch as the vision ended with Evrane carrying Aeduan away, the memory continued. Rain kept falling. Smoke kept rising from flames buried deep in the wreckage. As he had done beside the Aether Well, Aeduan turned to see if he blocked someone from entering …
That was when he saw a new figure. Staggering, frantic, the man dove into what remained of the tent. He flung, he searched, he wept and shouted: “Son! Where are you, my son!”
It was Aeduan’s father, too late to save those he’d loved. Too late to do anything, for even Dysi’s corpse was gone now. There was nothing at all for Ragnor to find. Nothing at all for him to save.
He scoured and crawled anyway, and for a time he vanished from Aeduan’s view, as if he searched wider, farther than the nightmare would let Aeduan see. Then Ragnor returned and collapsed to his knees in the middle of their ruined home.
As Aeduan watched Ragnor’s heart break, he felt his own break too.
For how many nights had his own father relived this carnage?
This failure? How many times had Ragnor, like his son, died that day?
And how many times, like his son, had Ragnor been alone in this nightmare with no child, no wife, no escape?
He’d had only the darkness and himself, the nightmare and himself.
As the vision continued onward, Aeduan sensed his father’s blood transform. From frosted baby’s breath and sleeping ice, from loving hounds and nighttime songs, a new shape emerged: bone-deep loss and flame.
All these years, Ragnor had blamed himself for what had happened that day, and Aeduan knew precisely how such blame could warp you. How it gave death meaning and life a twisted light.
Aeduan had been a child trapped in the wreckage of war, and Ragnor had been a father trapped in the same. Ragnor had not done this—he had not caused this—yet he had lost his life to it all the same.
One need not be evil to become it.
Ragnor lifted his head. His hazel eyes found Aeduan’s. The tears streaking down slowed. “Ah, my son. I failed you. I failed her.”
“You didn’t, Father. You tried to protect us from the flames.”
Ragnor frowned, glancing around at the nightmare—and seeming to realize, much as Aeduan had, that none of this was real.
“Here. Yes, I did.” A slow nod. An inward puzzling that made his brow furrow.
Then again, his hazel eyes found Aeduan’s.
“But there, at the Well—I failed your mother. She warned me the Wells should not be healed. She warned me that only more death and violence would ensue. And I tried. By the Sleeping Goddess, I tried.”
“What did she tell you, Father? You’ve always said it was her cause that you aimed to finish, but what was it?”
“She said the Cahr Awen were not real. That they were a lie to make us all believe someone would save us, when the truth was that no one would. We hurt Moon Mother. We, the people of the Witchlands, hurt her. For you see, when the Six and your mother and I made the Wells, we cut six deep wounds into the goddess. But those wounds could never heal because we never understood that no one can save us but ourselves.”
Ah. Aeduan felt his breath unwind. A release of air held too long. Six Wells. Six wounds. And a desire to give death meaning by forever blaming oneself. Aeduan had learned that lesson the hard way, hadn’t he? Months ago, in this same nightmare with the same flames and the same falling rain.
No one could save him but himself.
Four long steps carried Aeduan to his father. He stared at the face so much like his own, half hidden by shadows and pain. Ragnor had been a loving father long ago. Now he was nothing more than a ghost filled with aching memories.
Just as Dysi had been.
With careful hands, Aeduan gripped Ragnor’s shoulders. “Father,” he said. “It is done. There is nothing here, and you can let go now.”
His father nodded. A tired movement as he gazed back at Aeduan. “She told me you were special, you know. Born in the Moon Mother’s own ice, she always said. And that which is closest, she cannot see. A strand fallen from the weave, cast adrift on winds of flame…”
His father did not finish. Not before he crumbled into black nothing and whispered away. But Aeduan already knew what came next, for he’d heard the lines of the Lament before. Inside the mountain, inside the Moon Mother.
A knife with two sides. Blood on the snow, he thought.
He looked down at his shredded clothes. At the six old wounds exposed into this nightmare. They’d bled away his life and strength for so long. But no one could heal them. No one but himself.