Chapter 22 #2
I shivered. Even if he hadn’t told me, I would have known that she was the Death Bringer. The third sister sat hunched apart from the others, not sparing a glance at her sister’s magnificent work. Her hair fell into her eyes, and she kept her hands tucked in the voluminous sleeves of her robes.
An ominous gloom hung over her like a cloud, and a glimmer of something on the ground caught my eye: a pair of shiny gold scissors, with fine runes etched into each blade.
“I don’t understand,” I said, gesturing at the sisters. “If the length of each life is determined at birth . . . How would I sever Semphrys’s ties to the souls he’s taken? Wouldn’t their threads already be cut?”
Adriel’s expression turned grim. “That is what we’re here to find out.”
Bewildered, I studied the tapestry, moving about the chamber to get a better look at the design. Staring up at the curtain of shimmering golden threads, I noticed a flaw in the fabric.
One section was a tangled knot, as if an unruly child had gotten into the sisters’ weaving. Something was wrong with the tapestry.
Glancing at Clotho, I saw that there was a slightly manic quality to the first sister’s spinning. Her foot moved on the treadle in an incessant beat, her shoulders rocking as her pale hair swayed.
It was almost as if she couldn’t stop.
Then there was the weaver, Diem. She flitted around the tapestry like an erratic butterfly, nodding and humming to herself.
At first glance, her weaving had seemed peaceful and meditative. Now I saw the truth. The tips of her fingers had been rubbed raw, and streaks of shimmering silver blood stained the thread.
Circling the tapestry, I looked to Morta, and a pit formed in my stomach.
She wasn’t keeping her hands tucked in her sleeves. She didn’t have hands.
Instead, two horrific stumps protruded from the sleeves of her robe, the fabric near the wrist stained with that glistening celestial blood.
“Her hands,” I whispered, drawing Adriel’s attention to Morta. “What happened to her hands ?”
The royal guard blanched as he noticed it too, and a clear, feminine voice rang out like a bell.
“She can’t stop spinning,” said the second sister. Her voice was high-pitched and girlish. She didn’t take her eyes off her work, and I caught a glimpse of eerie silver eyes, with no discernible whites or irises.
“What?” I stammered, unable to shake the image of Morta’s mutilated wrists.
“Clotho,” the weaver sighed, her fingers moving in a swift rhythm. “She can’t stop spinning. Nor can I stop weaving.”
A leaden feeling sank into my gut as I watched the sisters at their work. There was an unspoken “or else” in that statement, and I shuddered to think the sort of havoc it would wreak if the Three abandoned the tapestry.
“It all gets reused, in the end,” Diem mused, almost as if she were talking to herself. “Whatever threads Morta cuts get pulled apart into fiber for Clotho to spin again.”
“Her hands have been severed,” Adriel growled. “What happens if she cannot cut the threads?”
There was a long, pregnant pause, and for a moment, I thought the weaver might not answer. But then she said, almost dreamily, “If the threads of life are not severed, Clotho will run out of fiber to spin.”
Adriel and I exchanged an uneasy glance. If the third sister could not fulfill her dark purpose, there would be no thread from which to weave new life. Just as centuries of stealing souls to feed the demon king’s power had brought the Ravaging, disrupting Fate would have disastrous consequences.
“There’s a tangle,” I murmured, pitching my voice low so that the sisters didn’t hear. I pointed. “It looks as though someone has tampered with the tapestry. Disrupted Fate.”
“The souls he fed to Semphrys,” Adriel breathed.
I nodded.
“Do you think . . .” I grimaced. “Do you think preventing the souls from passing on somehow . . . I don’t know, tangles their fate?”
“Makes sense.”
“And if she can’t cut the threads . . .” I went on.
“Then the souls remained bound to Semphrys.”
I nodded.
The look in his eyes told me what I already suspected. The demon king was responsible for this. He’d taken Morta’s hands.
“Cut them,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “If Morta cannot sever the threads, then we must.”
My heart became a frantic drumbeat. So far, the Three seemed unbothered by our presence. Would they remain so placid if I interfered with their work?
For a long moment, the only sounds were the whirr of the spinning wheel and Diem’s soft humming as she continued to weave.
Dragging in a shallow breath, I took a step toward those golden scissors, which lay abandoned in the dirt.
None of the sisters moved as I bent to reach for them, my fingers closing around the golden —
“She interferes!” the Death Bringer hissed, those haunting silver eyes snapping to me.
At those words, Clotho and Diem whipped their heads toward me with a hiss, their lips drawing back to reveal rows of pointed teeth.
My stomach bottomed out, and suddenly my daggers seemed as useless as the stumps where Morta’s hands had once been.
“Foolish girl! You cannot do the work of the Three!” Diem cried.
“But if your sister cannot —”
“Only Morta may cut the threads,” Diem intoned. “That is the way of things. It is her sacred duty to cut each life at birth or sever it early if she chooses. No huntress, mortal, demon, or faerie may meddle with Fate.”
“I wasn’t —” I stammered. “I mean, I wouldn’t . These people are already dead.”
“Their souls are bound to an immortal,” she hissed. “Though their threads have already been cut, the fabric of life is flexible. Their existence will stretch as his does until they find rest in the Valley of Light.”
I glanced at Adriel. The threads could stretch as long as they were bound to an immortal’s life? But did that mean the demon king’s thread had no end or that it was simply longer than the others?
“You said yourself that if she cannot cut the threads, there can be no new life,” Adriel argued.
“Then so it shall be,” Diem hissed, her silver eyes flashing as she rounded on Adriel. “Now leave us, Morkahlf , or I shall reconsider your fate.”
My stomach clenched, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the way the blood drained from Adriel’s face.
A muscle in his jaw ticked as he glanced at me, and I could tell from his expression that he had no intention of disobeying Kaden’s orders to stay with me .
But he had offended the weaver, and I had the feeling that if he remained here, it would only make things worse.
“Go,” I hissed, keeping my gaze on Diem.
“ No .”
I set my jaw and nodded. “Wait for me at the top of the stairs. I’ll speak to them. See if there’s anything to be done.”
Adriel hesitated, logic warring with his sense of duty to the prince. After a moment, though, he seemed to realize that I was right. There was too much at stake to waste our chance with the Three.
“If I hear anything —” He glanced at the sisters.
“Go,” I whispered. “You’re no match for them anyway.”
Adriel looked insulted that I thought he couldn’t take three females in robes, but he didn’t argue my point. He’d seen their silver eyes and the celestial blood that ran through their veins. He knew they weren’t of this realm.
He hesitated, clenching and unclenching his fists, before turning and heading back up the stairs.
Taking a deep breath, I edged around the perimeter of the chamber, studying the glistening tapestry. There were so many threads, all of them intertwined in a beautiful, intricate pattern that only made sense from a distance.
It was a design that represented the divine intersection of lives. Of apparent happenstance. Purpose. Destiny.
My gaze drifted to the ugly mass of tangled strands that hung near the floor. There were so many threads. They couldn’t all represent souls Kaden had taken for the demon king, could they?
Where the tangled mass met the rest of the tapestry, the weave was pulled too taut in some places and too loose in others, as if the lives of those stolen souls radiated out to impact many more .
How would I ever discern which threads represented the lives bound to Semphrys? Would severing them mean cutting other threads short?
But as I peered closer, I saw a strand that was thicker than the others, as if the threads had all been woven into one.
The thicker strand was made of the same shimmering golden fiber, but I sensed a wrongness in the weave — an unnatural strength to the way it pulled on the hundreds of threads around it.
Kaden had been right. We could not end his father’s existence without severing the threads of the lives he’d bound to his own.
Fighting a sinking feeling of hopelessness, I followed that thread down to the base of the tapestry, where a smaller strand branched out and intertwined with another.
It was this third strand that called to me. Hummed with an innate familiarity that felt a lot like . . . me .
“Why is my thread joined with the demon king’s?” I asked aloud.
“That is not the Dark King’s thread,” Diem replied in that eerily childlike voice.
My throat constricted. I hadn’t really expected her to answer me.
“Look closer.”
Sheathing my daggers, I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. There was a conspiratorial quality to her demand, as if she knew a secret that I was not privy to.
Once again, I followed that vicious strand with my gaze, noting everywhere it pulled at the fabric.
She was right. Though the thread that joined with mine originated from the demon king’s, it was merely part of his strand .
Unbidden, my hand reached for the filmy golden fabric, stopping a hair’s breadth from the tapestry. I didn’t know what would happen if I touched those shimmering strands, but something told me I would not survive it.
This close, I could feel a familiar hum of dark power emanating from the string. It was different from the magic that came from the Great Oak itself, and the moment I felt it race over my skin, my stomach dropped.
“That thread belongs to his son, doesn’t it?”
Diem gracefully inclined her head, those creepy silver eyes glowing.
Taking a step back, I studied the rest of the tapestry, where strands looped around each other and wove together in repeating patterns.
“I-I don’t understand. It looks as though my thread is somehow . . . joined with his. Why is that?”
I might have allowed Kaden to drag me along on this disastrous mission, but I was my own person. I’d lived twenty-four years without the demon prince, and I intended to go on living — just as soon as we killed his father.
Diem’s lip curled, and she let out a coquettish giggle that seemed wrong for a celestial being. “That is how the threads of life intersect when two are joined by Fate.”
“Joined by Fate?” I repeated dumbly.
“You are the prince’s mate, are you not?”
My heart lurched as I stared at the weaver, the ground beneath me disintegrating. “His . . . what?”
Diem flashed a simpering smile. “Whatever it is you hunter folk call two souls that are joined.”
A flash of heat flooded my skin as blood pounded in my ears. My stomach roiled. I was going to be sick.
She didn’t mean . . . she couldn’t .
No. The weaver had to be mistaken.
I wasn’t fated to the demon prince. I wasn’t Kaden’s mate.
It was absurd. Ludicrous — a twist of Fate the sisters might have dreamed up if they’d all gotten a little tipsy one night. Though there was something about it that made sense.
It would certainly explain things that I’d questioned but never learned the answers to.
Why Kaden claimed to be able to sense my presence.
Why he was unwilling to sacrifice my life at the mere chance that I could end his father’s.
Why I felt this infuriating pull toward a male I hated . . .
And I did hate Kaden, even if my body sometimes reacted . . . inconveniently to his touch.
Even if I’d begun to trust him.
My mouth went dry. I had begun to trust Kaden, and I’d felt real terror back in the canyon when Semphrys had tried to breach his mind. Not fear for myself, but fear for Kaden. Fear of what his father would do to him if he learned we were working together.
Had Kaden known all this time, or did he only suspect I was his mate?
The thought made my blood boil. It was just another way he’d deceived me.
My mate.
The words rang in my head with a disturbing certainty that had all the other pieces falling into place.
“You should go, huntress,” said Diem dreamily, her voice startling me out of my reverie. “Your beloved will be worried.”