Chapter 29 #2
I held my breath. The thread lifted into the air of its own accord, stretching and twisting around and around, tying itself deftly into practiced knots. S?ren and I stared, his fingers winding with mine as we were encircled by gold on every side.
The Tapestry stepped out of the weaving, a humanoid among moving pictures of unrecognizable figures flitting through behind it. I turned in a circle, awestruck. Maybe it is a god, I mused.
It spoke with the same endless cacophony of voices I’d heard from its humanoid version when I went beneath the ice. “You have found us.”
I stepped closer to S?ren, our shoulders brushing.
His eyes were wide, mouth hanging open slightly as he studied our surroundings and the being before us.
I realized this was S?ren’s first time seeing the Tapestry.
My explanation of the experience could go only so far.
Somehow I knew no one outside of this enclosed space made up of the Tapestry could hear us. “We have.”
“Good.” It sounded serious. “We know why you are here, child. The fabric of the universe is not to be tampered with.”
I held my shoulders back. It had addressed only me, not S?ren. “Then you should not have offered me the power to tamper with it in the first place.”
It huffed a humorless laugh. “A stubborn one. Very well—the threads of the future tangle for generations at this moment. Your choices here will determine which threads will be pulled into the weaving and which will be discarded. Go forth.”
Then all was silent except for the hum of my Lurae song.
S?ren turned to face me. “Are you sure about this, Princess?”
“What choice do we have?” I felt the desperation leaking into my voice, impossible to deny. “You said it yourself—Bhorglid cannot afford another war.”
“I’m not asking about that.” His eyes flickered to the side, where Frode’s body rested outside of the Tapestry’s cocoon.
I deflated. “I…I don’t know, S?ren. I have to get through this first, see if resurrecting the queen’s husband even works, before I think about Frode.” Even his name made my throat tighten.
He squeezed my hand. “You’re right. One thing at a time.”
The pressure building in my chest eased slightly with his confident support.
He really isn’t going anywhere, I realized.
Deep down I’d wondered if S?ren’s care for me had limits—if I could manage to push him away when I grew volatile again.
But he’d more than proven his support for me was unwavering.
Bolstered, I studied the Tapestry, stepping closer to the interwoven threads surrounding us. “The queen said to look for the red thread. I don’t see it anywhere…”
“Why would it be red?” S?ren asked, studying the weaving himself. “And not gold, like all the others?”
I raised a brow at the Tapestry’s humanoid form, but it remained silent. “No help from it then,” I muttered. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll understand when we’ve raised him.”
I hovered a hand over the weaving. Nothing happened.
I walked in a circle, examining each section of the Tapestry carefully. When I’d gone almost all the way around, my Lurae song hit a discordant note. I stilled. Extended my hand again. The song grew louder, louder.
Like it was pulling me to one thread more than the others.
I peered at the section of the weaving calling to me. It was layered and complex, the threads twisting in constant motion over one another.
A flash of red snuck through.
“Found it!” I called. S?ren was at my side in an instant. “It’s beneath this top layer.”
Tentatively, I brushed a finger along the threads.
They snagged against my fingers, swarming over me.
I chuckled and pushed them back, pressing through the top images of weaving until I grasped the red thread.
It was taut, but I tugged on it gently and was surprised to find it disentangled itself with ease.
The moment it was fully unwoven, cradled in my hands, the rest of the Tapestry disappeared. But its voice echoed. “You have made your decision. Unwoven the threads of the past in order to weave your future. Now you will see the consequences of your actions.”
I blinked and a vision materialized—one clearer than any of the other dreams I’d had before.
S?ren stood next to me this time. He frowned, taking in the scene around us.
Aloisa stood, a crowd watching her from a careful distance.
She was young, no older than me. A man knelt at her feet, his expression murderous as he glared at her.
He was around the same age I’d estimate the queen to be.
His hands were tied behind his back, and Aloisa held a thin sword pointed at his throat.
They were in the wastes, surrounded by pines and snow.
“Esben,” she called, projecting her voice so the nearby crowd could hear clearly. “You are sentenced for your crimes of denying service to Nilurae patrons. We are all human and deserve to trade fairly. What do you have to say for yourself?”
He spat at her feet. “Why should I have to serve them? We have magic. Hasn’t anyone stopped to wonder why they don’t? What did they do to be so undeserving?”
Disgust enveloped me. This man was no better than the priests.
“A Lurae does not make a person better than someone else,” Aloisa argued. “Magic is a gift—you should be using it to make the lives of your fellow villagers better.”
“Easy for you to say.” Esben scowled. “You can commune with the dead. Raise them, even. I know you brought my son back after he perished.”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. My eyes widened. This was Callum’s father. Aloisa’s eyes flickered to the watchers before she set her jaw and gripped the blade tighter. “Callum, take his Lurae.”
Callum stepped up next to her. He’d aged as well, gangly teenage features replaced with budding young adulthood. I waited for him to stretch out a hand. His father was so much like mine—the man deserved his Lurae be taken from him.
But Callum leaned closer to Aloisa, his voice lowered to the quietest murmur. “I don’t want to.”
She hesitated. “I know he’s your father. I can’t imagine how difficult this must be. But if he gets away with this, it’s only a matter of time before there’s a huge divide between the Lurae and Nilurae. We can’t have that.”
“Why not?”
Aloisa raised a brow. “Do you hear yourself?”
He crossed his arms, frowning. “You and I have been touched by a literal god. That is how we received our magic. We’re”—here he moved closer to whisper in her ear—“immortal. Without us, there would be no peace for the dead and no magic. Why take people’s Lurae when they misbehave?
Instead, they should be bowing to us. They need leadership. Not whatever this is.”
“Callum.” Aloisa spoke through gritted teeth. “We can talk about this later. Not while everyone is watching. Take his Lurae. Now.”
He looked at his father for a long moment. “This isn’t over,” he said to Aloisa. He extended a hand and clenched it into a fist until his father swayed and toppled to the side, groaning.
Aloisa sheathed her sword and turned to face the crowd, looking for someone. The weaving changed to show the faces of the watchers. And there, staring back at Aloisa with an uncertain frown, was the Queen of Kryllian.
“Is that—” I started.
But the vision changed, and Aloisa sat outside a closed door, her back against the wall.
I couldn’t identify the building, but it was likely part of the village—the walls were planks of wood and she was wrapped in a shawl, her breath fogging in front of her although she was indoors.
As I watched, she twisted her fingers together and sighed.
“I’m not trying to be rude. I’m trying to be a good sister. ”
A voice sounded from the other side of the door. It was muffled but familiar in a way that itched against my mind as I tried to place it. “Well, you’re not.”
“Arraya, please.”
I inhaled sharply. “Arraya and Aloisa were sisters?” S?ren whispered. “How? Not a single record mentions their relation.”
“Maybe the records do mention it,” I said grimly. “The records the queen had removed from the library.”
S?ren had no time to reply before Aloisa continued. “You shouldn’t marry him. He’s going down a dangerous path and…I just think that if you give him more time to figure himself out, you have a better chance of a successful marriage, is all.”
“More time. What a terrible excuse. You’re just jealous. He may have been your friend first, but he fell in love with me. Time to stop pining for him.”
Aloisa frowned. “No, I’m not jealous. Callum and I have only ever been friends—you know that.”
“Do I?” Arraya snapped back. “The two of you have always had a strong bond, that I’ll grant you.
You raised him from the dead when you were children.
Met the god under the ice together—the Tapestry, is that what you said it was called?
Now you’re both immortal. I suppose if anyone was going to marry him it would need to be you or me. ”
Aloisa opened her mouth, closed it again, and then finally said, “I would think the most important part of a marriage would be love.”
“So you do love him?”
Aloisa threw her hands in the air. “As a brother, yes. But not romantically.”
The door opened and Arraya strode out, wearing a long-sleeved white dress and a white fur shawl over her shoulders. She held a bundle of flowers in one hand. “I don’t know, actually. Because no real sister would go this far out of her way to ruin my wedding unless she had feelings for the groom.”
The images began to fade, but not before I got a good look at Arraya’s face.
“The Queen of Kryllian is Arraya.” The words fell from my lips, but they couldn’t have been true.
And then I opened my eyes, feeling the bite of a blade against my throat, and understood just how big of a mistake I had truly made.