Page 74 of Sightwitch
Still he did not move. “There are people out there. I must help them.”
“You can do nothing.” I squeezed his fingers tightly. “The Exalted Ones will kill you.”
“I have to try,” he countered. “I cannot abandon my king.”
“Yet you can abandon me? And the girls?”
His eyes averted. “No. I …” Then he wilted into me, his forehead resting against mine. “We cannot walk away from this, Dysi. Someone betrayed us.”
“Or we were not careful enough.”
“Da!” came Cora’s call, muffled by the ice. A heartbeat later: “Dysi! Come! We have to hurry!”
“I don’t want to do this,” he murmured.
“I know. But you have to trust me and trust the girls.” I rested my hands on either side of his face—that beautiful, lined face that I had grown to love. “This is what the Goddess wills, and so we must obey.” Then, when he made no move to turn, I murmured the only No’Amatsi words I knew: “Mhe verujta.”
Trust me as if my soul were yours.
He gave a long, slow blink. Then whispered, “Mhe verujta,” and together we ascended the spiral.
A tomb waited for us with four gaps in the ice. If I’d had any doubt that Lisbet’s vision was true, it was gone now.
Though that did not mean I was ready. Cora went first, then her father. And I cried—it was selfish of me, but I could not stop the tears.
Everything I had worked for had crumbled away. The doors, the rebellion, and a life with my Heart-Thread, these two little girls, and the boy growing in my womb.
I was the last into the ice, for Lisbet told me I must write a final entry. “Leave the diary and your taro cards behind,” she ordered me. “The last Sister will need them.”
Yet as the ice scuttled over Lisbet, I had to ask her. I had to know. “How can you be so calm? How have you lived all these weeks and months despite knowing all that was coming?”
“Not despite, Dysi.” She gave me a sympathetic half smile, and it was not a child’s face that stared at me. “Because. We value things more when we know they won’t last forever.”
Then ice covered her completely, and she joined her family in the Sleeper’s embrace.
So I did as she commanded, and now it is only I to sit alone in this room of eternal cold and blue, blue, blue.
Whoever you are, last Sightwitch Sister, please make use of the time you have. Do not do as I did. Do not trap yourself away inside a mountain with your head stuffed in the past.
You have a life to live, and Sirmaya thinks it is an important one.
So go outside. Meet the world and embrace its trials head-on.
A lone sister is lost, you know, so never let yourself be alone.
Kullen Ikray
Y18 D218
Ryber tells me that I must write everything now that I remember it. “Nothing is real until you record it,” she insists, and though she laughs at my poor handwriting, I do as she commands.
She is not the sort of woman to be disobeyed.
Not that I would ever want to. Herfrownis
My name is Kullen Ikray, though Ryber still calls me Captain. I was a Captain, temporarily, and at the urging of my Threadbrother Merik, I led a crew of sailors and civilians to the northern border of Nubrevna. We were building watchtowers, and all was progressing with perfection.
Until it wasn’t. I received word about a possible Dalmotti tradesman willing to negotiate with Nubrevnans. Well, specifically withme.I decided not to tell Merik. After all, he is a prince and he has more than enough to worry about. I could fly down to this rendezvous point and be back in a day.
