Page 111 of Witchlight
Blood,Iseult thought. This must be what Safi had meant, although it didn’t matter. Not now, not here. Once Aeduan was in the Well, the holes would heal.Hewould heal.
Iseult’s muscles shook, her lungs quaked. For some reason, the Well kept moving farther away. No matter how fast she or Safi moved, its waters kept drawing away. And Iseult didn’t want to, didn’t mean to, but her pace stopped. Her grip on Aeduan’s frozen arms released. He fell like a block of stone at her feet.
Blood. Witch. Blood. Witch.The words screeched through her, booming in time to her heart. In time to her blood. In time to the organs that felt as if they’d been removed.Mhe varujta. Te varuje.He was dead and frozen and she could do nothing but stand here and watch as the Well drained—literallydrainedbefore her eyes.
All while the weave of the world broke around her.
“What do we do?” Safi shouted. “Where do we go?”
Iseult shrugged stupidly. The wind beat her hair against her face, fanged and growing hotter by the second. Her eyes burned. Her lungs could not get enough air.
Then came a smell like petrichor and lightning. The heated winds turned to razors and slammed into Iseult like a hundred swords. So sharp, she could do nothing but scream. So all-consuming, she lost any sense of Safi, of Aeduan, of herself.
And it was, as Iseult felt herself lift and detach from the world, that she heard a voice rippling out from the crushing winds and the fraying Threads. It spoke in a language that was almost familiar, almost Arithuanian, almost tangible and real.
At long last,it seemed to say.At long last, we are awake and can reclaim what belongs to us.
The battle is supposed to be over,Safi thought, gaping at a sky turned to black with storm.The battle is supposed to be over.The Cahr Awen had finished their mission. There was nothing left for her and Iseult to complete. Thiswas meant to be, if not a happy, exuberant moment, then at least a moment of triumph. Because finally,finallySafi and Iseult could rest.
When Safi had surfaced from the Well, she’d seen the Sleeper’s Threads searing across the sky, great bands of color that wavered and danced—just like the old Nomatsi tale that Iseult had told her when they were children.
But then the Well had begun boiling and shrinking. And then a storm had spun into life. A shroud of cold and heat to snap Safi into its maw like a crocodile. Winds cycloned around her. Feral, furious, with lightning to clap and snarl. It lifted Safi, so high, so fast, she could do nothing but watch as ground vanished and violence punched in.
“Iseult,” she screamed, but her Threadsister was being carried a different way. And no matter how hard Safi reached for her, no matter how wildly she twisted or spun, she could do nothing against the winds that claimed her.
Safi still wore her nightgown, burned and sodden and frozen. Her sword was still belted at her hips, and it hit her with bruising force over and over again. Her hair turned to ice against her skull. Her ears popped like gunshots. She thought she heard Iseult screaming.
Only when she was thirty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet above the earth did she finally see what had become of the Well. No more water, no more bubbling heat. Now, it had all been made flesh: a person with pallid, grotesquely long limbs and strings of white hair. With laughter that rolled out like thunderclaps and winds that shredded off her, thick with rain.
Exalted One,Safi thought, remembering what Iseult had taught her about the origin of the Wells.Paladins so wicked, they had to be slain a thousand years ago.
But they hadn’t been slain. They couldn’t have been because there was one right here, dragging herself into life below.
The creature swiveled her gaze upward, and when her glowing eyes found Safi’s, she grinned with too many teeth, shaped all wrong for a human. Then the storm snapped Safi sideways. She lost sight of anything—of Iseult or the earth or Poznin, burned and ruined.
The battle was supposed to be over, but there was no denying it had only just started.
Safi was so cold. She was so hot. The laughter pummeled and thrashed around her. Until suddenly, when Safi thought it could get no worse—thatsurelythis was what waited at the bottom of the hell-gates—a new sensation exploded into her.
Emptiness. Complete and total emptiness.
This must be death,she decided, because she knew only absence. It devoured her, encased her, infused her until she could do nothing but crumple inward. Her mind, her muscles, her senses.
She forgot all about the storm that had claimed her. There was only a hole widening inside her and the storm carrying her ever higher into oblivion.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Merik’s home was gone. There was nothing left of Last Holdout. He stood in the center of the charred, scorching remains of the refuge he’d built, and he wondered how there could be so much hate in something as simple as fire.
He didn’t know what to do, so he stood there while smoke plumed around him and embers burned into his boots. The only thing left of this place was the stone shrine, twenty paces away, turned to shadow by smoke.
Snow fell. Thick, wet, freezing flakes that had been ensnared by the clouds for weeks. Now they fell, as if the sky itself wept for what had happened. Merik wept too, for the people who’d been here. For the targethehad painted on this place when he’d gone into Poznin.
The horns no longer blasted from the city, but the battle clamored on. Louder. Crueler.
He wasn’t sure when he sank to the smoldering soil—to the earth that had been soft enough to sleep upon. In a numb, meaningless sort of way, he sensed his knees were on fire.
How had everything gone so wrong? How had he failed so badly,again? Always the disappointment. Always the one who hurt those who got near.
