Page 24 of Sightwitch
Movement in the scrying pool.
Nothing unusual. I see flickers atop the water all the time. Ripples of sunlight or the Rook’s reflection as he coasts past. I’d already dismissed this particular distraction before my gaze had even locked upon it.
I was wrong, though. For once, it was not sunlight, it was not a reflection.
Shapes were forming on the water. One after the other, elongated figures that grew clearer and larger with each passing boom of my heart. It was as if they walked toward me, people trapped in a rainstorm and reaching for my help.
Before the image had crystallized, I found myself stumbling down the stairs, grasping, clawing for them as desperately as they clawed for me.
Then I was at the pool’s rim and falling to my knees as every single Sightwitch Sister stared at me. There was Trina, there was Birgit, there were Gaellan and Ute and Lachmi.
There was Hilga.
There was Tanzi.
Their mouths worked in unison, saying the same phrase again and again. I couldn’t hear them, but I didn’t need to. I’d heard the words often enough in my dreams.
“Find us,” they said. “Please, Ryber, before it is too late!”
“Where?” I cried. My fingers ached to grab at the water; my legs itched to jump in. “Where are you? How do I find you? How, how, how? Please, Tanz,” I begged, staring at her. Then at Hilga. “Please, tell me how to find you!”
But the Sisters gave me no answers, and in moments, the entire vision had melted away.
I stared, too scared to exhale. Too scared to do anything that might break this moment and keep a second vision from coming.
Surelyanother vision would come.
Minutes slid past; no second vision showed.
I touched the water then. I punched my fist into the pool and screamed at the stained-glass ceiling overhead. I screamed at Sirmaya, I screamed at the Sisters, and I screamed at myself.
For never had I felt this truth more sharply than in that moment.
A LONE SISTER IS LOST.
Eventually, my throat was too raw to keep shouting. My soul too tired to care. I sank to the stones, curled onto my side, and wept.
Only the storm prompted me to move.
Not the Rook, who tried for an hour to nudge me off the observatory floor. Not my bladder, which had long since moved past discomfort and into misery. Not even my bloodied knees—the result of falling to the stone floor—could wrest me off my spot beside the scrying pool.
The storm, though, was not to be ignored. So bright was the lightning that it seared through my closed eyelids, and so strong was the thunder that it shook through my body with each crash.
This storm was not confined to the sky. The mountain herself was moving.
I pushed myself upright. Stars dotted my vision. Everything hurt. It was in this moment, as the Rook cooed happily that I was finally moving, that a second vision appeared.
Hilga. Alone. Her lips forming new words.
I did not move. I did not breathe. I can’t even gauge how long I sat like that, my gaze fixed on her face—on her mouth, silently working with words I could not discern.
Until she wasn’t silent anymore.
“Twelve turns,” she said, her voice a mere sliver of muted sound. “Twelve turns. Then it will be too late.”
Twelve turns. She meant the hourglass in her office. Each flip sent quicksilver dripping down for exactly one hour.
Which meant I had twelve hours until it would be too late to save my Sisters.
