Page 110 of Witchlight
“Your Threads,” Alma shouted over the crunching earth. “What’s happening to them, Hell-Bard? They’re fading and changing!”
“Magic.” Caden’s voice was a hoarse exhalation. “It’s leaving.” He had felt this before—except this was worse than being lashed to the Hell-Bard Loom because it was slow. Drawn out. The noose had been a searing, instant agony; this devastation was a protracted, torturous pain.
If Caden didn’t keep moving, he knew he would pass out from the intensity of it.
That was when Alma suddenly clutched at his neck. At his shirt’s collar, forcing him to stop while she ripped the Threadstones from his gambeson. They winked in the morning—yet it wasn’t sunlight reflecting on the gems so much as light flashing from within.
“They’re near?” he rasped. “Is that what this means?”
“No.” Alma snapped the three leather thongs from his neck—and it was easily done because flames still pooled on his skin. The fire ate through the leather and clothes too, not that he noticed. Not that he cared. The loss ofhis magic, the moving pebbles and toppling trees—they were all external, meaningless,unthreateningthings compared to those flaring gemstones.
“No,” Alma repeated, louder as her Threadwitch stasis seemed to take hold of her once more. “They’re not just in danger now, but dying. Yours too, Caden. Yours too.” Her eyes, round and silvery, locked on to Caden’s face, as if she searched for some sign that he wasn’t dying. That he wasn’t shedding flames like a wildfire in a windstorm. “What have we done? What have wedoneto Moon Mother?”
FIFTY-SIX
When Iseult broke from the surface of the Air Well, it was to find almost nothing had changed. Seafire still burned, snow still plodded down, and sounds like a distant battle still echoed over the dawn.
Nonetheless, everything was different. For the world now had Threads.
There was no other way to describe what Iseult saw: Threads, everywhere. In the ground, over people, melting across the rapidly warming waters of the Well, and brightest of all, searing in vivid streaks across the sky.
It was blinding. Overwhelming. Especially after everything that had just happened to Iseult—after death and the Dreaming and thenothingnessthat had almost followed her forever.
As she paddled in the Well and gulped in dawn air, her attention gravitated to one spot beyond the Well’s shore. Strangely, these new Threads of the world did not reach there. Instead, the blazing colors scuttled around like rats avoiding poison.
That was when Iseult realized what she was looking at. That the smoldering corpse in the distance was Aeduan. Her Bloodwitch.
Iseult swam then. Fast and with such panic rising through that her she didn’t notice Safi shouting and chasing after. She didn’t notice Admiral Kahina, striding around the Well like an animal awaiting a meal. Nor Leopold fon Cartorra, slipping out of the Well’s waters and limping slyly away.
All Iseult had the capacity for was Aeduan.
She reached the edge of the Well before Safi. Winter air blasted over her, and the Well’s embrace fell away. Cold, wet, Iseult staggered over snow, blackened and cruel. Faster, faster, until she was sprinting toward her Bloodwitch.
She had seen dead bodies before—there was a stillness to them that life could never mimic. It was unsettling on a stranger. It was incomprehensible on someone she loved.
And it was made all the more damning by how these new Threadsavoided him. As if their colorful magic was repelled by his death; as if he frightened them with his emptiness.
Iseult reached Aeduan’s side, but rather than scrape off snowfall, or check for any pulse, she simply grabbed hold of his arms. He was frozen to the touch. Ice crunched off him.“Help!”she screamed at Safi.“Help me!”
Safi did not help. Instead she ground to a halt at Aeduan’s side and gawped at him. “Where’s the blood?”
Iseult ignored the question; it was a pointless, illogical thing to say because what did blood matter now?Blood. Witch. Blood. Witch.All that mattered was getting him to the Well, and if Safi wouldn’t help, then Iseult would simply do it alone. As she had done before, after all, beside the Aether Well.
“Blood,” Safi repeated stupidly. “Where’s all the blood? And the arrows?”
With one hand still on Aeduan, Iseult reached for the tapestry of Threads skating past. Fire had fed her at the Aether Well—had given her the necessary strength to carry Aeduan. So all these Threads ripping and reeling past could feed her now.
But it was as if Aeduan’s toxicity had crawled into Iseult too. The Threads reared away from her fingers. Back, back, sideways, around. No matter how Iseult swiped or pawed, the Threads would not let her touch them.
“Go!” Safi shouted now, and Iseult saw her Threadsister had finally moved. Was finally helping her. Together, they hefted Aeduan’s stiff body upward. Snow kept falling. Ash fell too. Swords clanged and pistols sounded. It took all of Iseult’s strength to walk. To breathe. She was not restored by the Well, but instead weakened by it.
Or weakened by something else.She had almost died, after all. And now her Bloodwitchwasdead—again.
Except there was more missing from Iseult than that. Like a vital organ had been carved from her abdomen. And worse—although Iseult didn’t know yet that it was worse—a wind was assembling. It billowed against Iseult and Safi, flapping and flipping with Threads. Reminding Iseult in a vague, dreamlike way of the wind-flags that hung throughout Tirla.
It took a hundred lifetimes for Iseult and Safi to reach the Well. Aeduan’s boots tore as they towed him over rock and ice and flagstone. His clothes too, sloughing away across his chest, ripping from the six holes already there.
With each new rip, more skin was revealed to the Thread-filled dawn—and it was not the skin Iseult had seen, had touched, had kissed. This was pale and shimmering, as if he were a rock with veins of ore weaving through him. And where his old scars had been, there were now dark, awful scabs.
