Chapter Seventy-Two
SEVENTY-TWO
Caden found his Thread-family in a clearing of flowers that was much too calm after climbing through a mountain where ice had melted, and after running through a forest while a storm had faded away.
The Amonra had flooded past its banks. Now waves lapped against oak trunks and striped boulders. A heavy line in the earth showed where Lev must have dragged Zander ashore.
She was pumping at the man’s chest when Caden and Alma reached her. “Wake up, Zan. Wake up.” Lev was crying, even as her movements stayed curt and trained. “Zan, buddy, come on.” She stopped her pumping to press her mouth to his. Hard puffs of air that sent his chest rising.
Caden knelt on Zander’s other side. As soon as Lev finished her breaths, he replaced her. The giant of a man wasn’t dead—he could see that in the Threadstone Alma still clutched. In the way she stood there, grave and focused on the air around Zander instead of on the man himself.
But Zander was in danger, and death hovered near.
“I can’t heal him,” Lev said as Caden pumped.
She didn’t seem surprised by his arrival.
She was too focused on Zander for anything else.
Muddy tears streaked her face. “Commander, I can’t heal him.
I keep trying, but I can’t get the water out of him.
I’m not strong with this magic yet—I don’t remember how to use it—”
“It’s all right,” Caden said.
“It’s not, though. I’m in command. This is my mission. I did this—I did this.”
Caden couldn’t answer. There was no time as he tipped back Zander’s nose and pressed his lips against the man’s. Two hard exhales before Lev was once more pumping at his chest.
Part of Caden couldn’t believe what was happening right now.
He and Alma had just been in the collapsing Ohrins searching for these two people right here, and now they had found them in the thrice-damned Contested Lands, where Lev was talking about a mission and being in command. She was soaked but unharmed …
While Zander was dying.
Had Caden and Alma come all this way for nothing?
Caden pumped. Lev pumped. Caden shared his breaths, Lev shared hers.
Over and over. Toward death with wide eyes.
All clear, all clear. Toward death with wide eyes.
All clear, all clear. Caden wasn’t sure when they both started saying it, but it gave them a rhythm to work by.
It kept them locked into the moment, into Zan, even as the river lapped through trees.
Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear. Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear.
“He’s gone,” Alma said. One hand came to Caden’s shoulder; her other offered him the emerald that stood for Zander’s soul.
It no longer glowed.
“He’s gone,” she repeated, but Caden couldn’t stop. He kept pushing. He kept breathing. He kept murmuring the vow he’d lived by for so many years. This wasn’t supposed to be the end. This wasn’t supposed to be what he found here.
Eventually, Lev stopped pumping at Zander’s chest. She turned away, her shoulders shaking. Caden couldn’t stop, though. Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear. It wasn’t supposed to be toward Zander’s death he went with wide eyes. It wasn’t supposed to be here that it was all clear.
It was only when a fourth person joined them in the clearing that Caden finally stopped.
He was crying, although he didn’t know when that had begun.
He gawped at the girl before him, so small and unexpected with her big eyes and dark hair with silvery streaks.
He knew she wasn’t really just a child, but right now, she looked it. She felt it.
Owl crouched on Zander’s other side. No glance for Caden or Alma or Lev as she curled down and rested her head on the big man’s unmoving chest.
She and Zander had grown close during their time together in Cartorra, and Iseult had described the Threads winding between them as one of Thread-family.
A bond that had been as unbreakable as Caden’s and Lev’s were to Zander.
Caden had known it was true then—he’d seen how Zander had cried after Iseult and Owl had disappeared from Praga …
Now, Caden knew it was true all over again. How else could Owl be here? How else could she possibly know she needed to say good-bye?
As Caden watched, his tears fell faster, hotter down his face. The earth around him began to change. The plants first, roots and vines climbing closer so they could lattice across the man they’d briefly answered to.
Then came soil, although it didn’t clamber upward so much as crumble down, sucking both Zander and Owl into it.
Within seconds, both figures were gone. Buried and claimed by the earth with only a fresh burst of asphodels to punch upward and mark where they had ever been.
Caden reached for Lev across the expanse of fresh flowers, and together, they wept.
It had not been called the Contested Lands when Nadje had last come here a thousand years ago. It had simply been one more stretch of earth controlled by Lovats in his granite city to the west.
Nadje wondered where Lovats was now.
He was ashamed to admit he still feared that Paladin of Fire—as much as he’d feared Portia. Perhaps even more so, for where Portia had always kept her cruelty close, Lovats had spread it like the wildfires he controlled.
There were no fires here when Nadje had left the Dreaming with the Rook King. There had been nothing at all beyond a sunrise that held no promises of the battle yet to come.
But the battle had come eventually. Nadje had watched it from the edges, too weak to help but growing stronger by the second as the magic of the Witchlands had fed into him.
Had bolstered him. He didn’t have the rage of Itosha or Rakel; he’d never had it.
All he had was patience, and so he’d used that patience until the right moment came.
And that moment was now, as he watched Rakel flee from an onslaught of witches as powerful as Paladins. Three people whose very beings radiated in a way that told Nadje they were special. That they were the sorts of souls who could lead, who could lift up.
He’d forgotten how it felt to be near them—not a real sound, but a sense of ringing from the purest of bells or a feeling like the sun when she rises after a cloudless night. A sun much like what had been rising before Itosha and her storms had arrived.
Nadje found Rakel; she was wounded. A hundred blades from an Ironwitch pocked her heaving form like fishhooks caught on a whale.
She would die like this, bleeding slowly on the riverbank, and Nadje could be the one to ensure it.
Certainly, that was why he was here, wasn’t it?
That was what he’d told the Rook King when he’d awoken at the Well.
This was the final battle; he was meant to fight in it.
And yet, finding Rakel so broken, rusted blades lying around her …
All Nadje could do was stride to her and kneel at her wretched side.
Unlike he, who had awoken with—as far as he could tell—his original body, this was not the shape Rakel had once worn.
There were remnants here, in the strength of her brow and the underbite on her jaw.
But otherwise, she was a creature transformed by too many years drowning.
Nadje had drowned too. He didn’t know why it hadn’t changed him, but he did at least understand why Rakel had been so focused on possessing Monk Evrane’s body—and why, in turn, she’d been so angry when the Rook King had snatched it away.
“You,” she said in a voice defined by agony. It burbled with the watery depths of her soul. Blood spilled out.
“Me,” Nadje replied, and he took her wet, slimy hand in his. The sun was high enough now and the storm long enough gone that beams cut down, warm and welcoming.
They made Nadje think of when he’d been inside the Bloodwitch’s body. Of that smell he’d sensed like sun and sand and auburn leaves falling. That had been Sirmaya’s scent; and here it was again—not a smell, but a feeling. A heat. An embrace.
Again, it did not feel like a battle to end times. It felt, instead, like a battle to begin them.
“You chose the Rook King.” Rakel fixed her bulbous eyes on Nadje. Only one still appeared to be working. “Instead of us.”
“I chose Sirmaya.”
“And why do you assume I have not chosen Her too?”
Nadje’s brow furrowed. Something about that question prodded his ancient brain and ancient soul.
“Sirmaya gave us all this power,” Rakel went on. “It was only natural we would wish to use it.”
“But that was not why She gave us this power.”
“You used it greedily enough a thousand years ago.” Rakel tried to smile. It revealed torn gums and shrunken teeth. Her breaths heaved.
A hot wind crossed Nadje, rustling at the oaks. Playing with the asphodels. “Yes,” he agreed. “I used it greedily, and now I do not wish to.”
“So what will you do, then?” Rasp. Cough. “I will die and be reborn. But you? What will you do now?”
Nadje’s frown cut deeper across his face.
She would indeed be reborn. That was how their Paladin souls worked.
But he had no easy answer. The Lament simply said: In light, twelve will meet on lands long contested, while in darkness, the shadow-ender will topple nightmares and the world-starter will build us anew.
The Twelve were not here yet. Or at least, he thought vaguely, not the Twelve Paladins.
The wind whispered louder. Tree limbs shook, spraying fresh shadows across Rakel. Lifting fallen leaves and dust. And, he noted, ringing like the purest of bells.
“Ah,” Nadje said on a heavy sigh. Because of course Rakel was right: they both believed that they served Sirmaya. Just as both the Rook King and Ragnor the General had believed they served her too. Two sides to one knife. Two truths that were not really true.
Nadje tightened his grip on Rakel, and something like sadness twined through him. Sorrow for all the centuries it had taken, all the lives and mistakes and effort, cycling again and again because no one ever had thought to step outside.
But here he was, outside. Feeling his goddess in the clammy, cold touch of Rakel against him. In the earth under his knees. In the breeze and the leaves and this small meadow drenched in sunlight. And with those sensations, he thought again of what a Sightwitch from long ago had seen.
In light, twelve will meet on lands long contested, while in darkness, the shadow-ender will topple nightmares and the world-starter will build us anew.
“I am not going to kill you,” Nadje said quietly. “Yes, it would give you that new body you have hungered for … but it would not bring you back to Sirmaya. It would not bring either of us back to Her. And that, I think, is what both of us really desire.
“We have earned our rest, Paladin of Water. Do you not think we should claim it?”
Rakel’s lips shook. Something almost like tears glossed her fishy eyes. “How?”
“With my help. I can take us both there.”
“And what will happen?”
“I do not know,” he said truthfully. “But I think it is and always has been a question of balance. When it was just the Twelve, we did not steward magic as we should have. When it was just humans, they did not either. The Rook King wished to give it back to the Twelve. The General wished to leave it with the people. Maybe we should simply give it to the goddess instead and let Her decide.”
The sigh that slid from Rakel’s throat was one that weighed too heavy.
That carried centuries atop it and sought only freedom, only solace.
She had let anger stew inside her because it had been the only way to exist inside that Well beside the sea, where her tides had been so close but never within reach.
And Nadje, he had drowned too—but it hadn’t stoked a rage inside him. At least not a rage so vast as Rakel’s. Not a rage he hadn’t been able to claw back from thanks to his time inside the Bloodwitch’s body, with its unique history that had given Nadje far more than he’d deserved.
“I want to see Her again,” Rakel said.
“Yes,” Nadje agreed. “I do too.” As he said this, it occurred to him that he already had—or at least that he had seen part of Her, when he’d found the dark-giver and watched her end Portia. He knew now that the dark-giver was nothing more than a tool of the Rook King.
But then, what was the Rook King other than a tool of Sirmaya?
Another sigh from Rakel. Another collapse of centuries and civilizations and pain. “Yes, Nadje. I choose Sirmaya. I choose to let Her start anew.”
Nadje nodded. He could not lift Rakel—he was too weak still, and she was too misshapen and changed. But he didn’t need to lift her to carry her into the goddess’s embrace.
The last thing he saw, before he took hold of Rakel’s other hand and winked them both into the Dreaming, was a shape in the trees. A figure in white that he knew instantly because he had worn that shape and body only a few months ago.
And on either side of him were the dark-giver and the light-bringer, the purest of bells to shimmer across the land.
The Bloodwitch nodded at Nadje, and as the walls between the realm that was theirs and the realm that was Hers fell away, Nadje saw the Cahr Awen too. No longer did they wear corporeal forms, but instead they were simply two sides of a knife. The left and right hand to a goddess.
Then ice carved across Nadje and Rakel.
Come, come, the ice will hold you. Come, come, my children, and sleep. You are forgiven here in the ice, and you will be as you once were again.
The Paladins closed their eyes. Together, they slept.