Chapter Thirty-Eight
At my touch, everything stops.
I gasp as a force like a storm wind roars through my body, and the hairs on my arms and scalp prickle and stand on end.
I never attempted anything like this when I’d threadwalked—actually seizing the threads I’d passed.
The guide thread had been ordinary, of course, of this world and not that one.
I’d tried hard not to touch those threads at all.
Where they had brushed against me, they’d sparked and burned a little.
And now that I hold them in my grasp, I feel they are indeed like no threads I’ve ever handled before.
They are not wool or silk or linen, nor do they feel remotely like any of these ordinary fibers.
Instead, they feel hard as metal and yet as pliant as the sea silk had been, and they vibrate, very subtly but very fast, as if at the end of each one there is bound a small and angry bee.
This is not a power given to any, mortal or immortal, Lachlan had told me. It has been tried, and the price is always death.
Well. Lucky I’m due for a death already. Might as well go out on my own terms.
All this I digest in a moment’s time; once I realize I’m not dead or reeling back from the punishing slap of a Fate’s hand, I look around and see that everyone around me is standing frozen in place.
Even the leaves falling from the Dwirra are fixed in the air.
I am surrounded by a terrible tableau. Conrad’s eyes are locked on me, his bloodied arm hanging at his side, his throat a hairsbreadth from the tip of Lachlan’s plunging sword.
The iron knitting needle still juts from Lachlan’s abdomen.
Morgaine is on the ground, her arms wrapped protectively around Sylvie.
Further back, at the crest of the hill, I see a red-faced and clearly panicking Mrs. MacDougal with her left leg extended in a sprint, as she was trying to catch up to Sylvie, and Captain is frozen mid-bound beside her.
Without letting go of the threads, I turn and look over my shoulder at Elfhame. All over the enclave, and up and down the hillsides, the fae of both sides are locked in battle. Some are in midair, some lie on the ground, perhaps already dead.
And all of them, every last one, is held in place by me.
Mouth dry, I turn back to the threads.
“All right, then, Rose,” I mutter. “What now?”
I study the strands clenched in my grip.
There are perhaps several hundred of them, but it’s difficult to tell; they don’t behave like normal threads and seem to change width depending on how I look at them.
Most are duller shades—gray, green, brown, and white, corresponding to the Dwirra and the plants and the very earth.
Even this place, burrowed into the underside of the world, has its own underside.
If Elfhame is the tapestry, I have got a firm grip and a solid look at the back of it.
My fingers are burrowed in the weave, and now all I have to do is . . .
A lurch in my chest nearly makes me drop them altogether.
I manage to hang on but let out an awful rasping breath that sounds eerily like a death rattle, the final exhalation of air from the lungs.
Stark, feral panic explodes in my mind, but then I manage to inhale again. But how many more can I draw?
I look around helplessly, thinking that all I’ve done is postpone the inevitable, when my eyes fall on a thread unlike any of the others, a thread with no color at all.
When I very gently prod it, it does not sting me as the others do.
It reminds me of a dead sparrow I once found on the street, when I was a girl at the charity school.
I’d lifted it into my hands and felt how limp and light its body was, and I’d cried until a teacher found me and snapped at me to throw it away, finally snatching it from me when I couldn’t manage it myself.
That is how this thread feels: dead and broken.
This thread should be alive and singing and whole. Morgaine had known this, to some extent, and had tried to revive it with Conrad’s life force. But she’d been grasping aimlessly, channeling energy with all the precision of a bucket of water thrown from a high window.
But I know just where to focus my effort. It only takes a bit of thread to change fate itself.
And I have just a little life left to give.
I already know I cannot channel in Elfhame, so I don’t try.
Instead, I reach in and deep, plunging the outstretched hands of my mind into my own self, past my fluttering, dying heart and my scalded ribs, past my stomach tumbling with fear, behind every doubt and regret and hope, and the fragile, unfolding stirrings of new love, and there—at the heart of my heart, at the core of me—I find it: another thread entirely, one that is still bright and warm and pulsing with life.
My life. I’ve never noticed it before, because always I’d reached out for energy, and not in.
This isn’t something they taught us at school; it isn’t something I’d ever heard of before, not in any of my uncle’s books.
Not even in the stories of the moorwitches, who walked on the wrong side of the world and wove mighty magic and died here, at the foot of the Dwirra, by the hand of a faerie king terrified of death.
I’ve heard of dark Weavers who pulled energy from animals or even other humans.
I’ve never heard of someone who wove with their own life.
Come, I whisper to that glowing light. Come along now with me. Your work is almost done.
It reaches back easily, almost too easily, like a trusting bird hopping into my palm.
It coils upward and outward, suffusing my body, warming me from the inside out.
It swells in my breast and expands, rushing over my heart and for once quieting the pain there, just briefly.
Brilliant and bright, it flows through my arm and burns at my fingertips, like ten white stars trapped beneath my skin.
I feed the energy into the gray, limp thread of the Dwirra Tree.
I hold nothing back, even though in the recesses of my mind, the voice of an eight-year-old Rose weeps, angry and afraid.
I know what I’m doing, and what the cost is.
But I also know I’d pay it a thousand times, over a thousand lives, because I love Conrad North, and I love Sylvie, and I love the moors in the fog and the bustle of the markets and the sunlight gilding the lovely houses of Wimpole Street, and I don’t want any of that to stop existing because I was too afraid to fight for it.
I won’t let Lachlan’s fear of dying and fading spread like poison to consume everything and everyone I love.
Not if I can still do something to stop him.
Not even if the cost of that something is me.
A fuzzy sense of calm falls over me; it’s how it feels when you fall asleep in a pleasant room when you’re very tired.
Slow, and sweet, and gentle. I go willingly enough, as the last of the warm energy flows through my fingers and into the thread, the thread which was once gray but is now beginning to glow like the others, pale as the Dwirra Tree.
So tired and languid am I that I only barely note the other thread that comes snickering through me after it, tethered to the end of my life like a creeping, poisonous vine. Dark silver, it seems to hiss as it feeds into the thread.
With a final sigh, I release the threads and slump onto my side. The last thing I see before the darkness is the battle around me bursting back into frenzied motion, and the last thing I hear before the silence is a wild scream of pain and rage from the Briar King:
“Witch, what have you done?”