Page 130 of Witchlight
He also felt an itching, inexplicable urge to look backward. Because something wrong, something hateful was back there—something he needed to witness before it was too late.
He turned.
And he saw. It was a figure, stocky and stonelike, more mountain than human with a skull that melded directly into their shoulders. And on their strange, earthen face was the grin of someone safe in the knowledge of their triumph.
The figure waved.
Then Caden and Alma were subsumed by the mountain’s magic.
Do not snag the weave.
Do not snag the weave.
How many times had Gretchya or Alma or even Esme too said that to Iseult? Well, Iseult wasn’t just going to snag the weave. She was going to completely obliterate it.
For half a mile, she ran through oaks and hot winds. Clouds gathered, but they couldn’t fully block the sun. They couldn’t shut up the birds and insects and whispering leaves that lived here.
Sometimes, she imagined she smelled coffee, fresh-brewed from Mathew’s shop. Sometimes, she imagined she heard Safi laughing like she’d just won at taro. Twice, shedidsense Leopold nearby. A flicker in the shadows of dappled trees. A murmur of desperate, yet cunning Threads.
He never stepped into her path, though, and he never tried to stop her.
Iseult lost track of time. She lost track of her exhausted body or her mangled hands. She thought of Aeduan, over and over again. Her final image of him was so broken. She wanted to summon a different version of him.Anyversion. The one who’d met her gaze across a canal in Veñaza City. The one who’d dived into a river to save her. The one who’d held her hand and walked her through hundreds of raiders and monks locked in place by his magic.
Her feet kicked at ancient, rusted armor from battles long forgotten. Ferns and flowers brushed against her.
Why so much fighting?Iseult had asked Aeduan as they’d crossed these same forests where humans might never live, but where other life always thrived.Is the land so valuable?
At the Monastery,he’d answered,they taught us that when the Paladins betrayed each other, they fought their final battle here. Their deaths cursed the soil, so no man can ever claim the Contested Lands. I think it is all a lie, though.
Why?
Because it is always easier to blame gods or legends than it is to face our own mistakes.
Yes. Iseult could see how true that was. No one had cursed this soil; the final battle had not even come yet—it was happening herenowbecause a Trickster god had made it so.
Eventually, a shape hefted itself up from the forest, as if the earth itself were coming alive. Then a scent like soil and time curled into Iseult’s nose, and to her shock, she felt her lips twitch with a grin.
“Hello, Blueberry. Is Owl w-with you?” She would not be able to hold back her tears if Owl were to appear, in this place where Aeduan had first found the child and saved her.
But the mountain bat only swatted his tail. It made a nearby boulder hop.
“I need to get close to that Exalted One in the distance. The thing making all the skies build with storm.”
He opened membranous wings and squatted over to offer Iseult his back. The ground rippled around him—literally rippled like waves, because while magic might drain from the Witchlands, it was not abandoning the creatures to which it had always belonged.
His fur was hot and sunbaked. Iseult couldn’t fit her legs across him like a horse, so she stretched herself flat against his back instead. Iron and stone scuttled up, moving with Blueberry’s guidance from the forest floor. It crawled over Iseult’s legs, her ankles, her waist and bound her to the bat like shackles.
Smart,she thought, since she couldn’t use her ruined hands to hang on to him—and she would need these useless things soon, once they were near to the Exalted One.
Blueberry hefted himself up. Dust and ferns blew wide around them. White and yellow asphodels too, so beautiful. So alive. Then Iseult held her breath, closed her eyes, and the mountain bat took flight.
SIXTY-SIX
Well, the weasel had turned out to be useless, and Sky kept thinking of something her mam used to say:Over the falls and into the rapids.Sky might have gotten out of the seafire, sure. But now she was in the middle of the rutting city where, instead of flames, there was a giant hole filled withice.
And not normal ice either, like she was used to finding all over this city and Last Holdout. This was weird, veinous ice that carved across the ground in evenly spaced lines like the spokes of a wheel. And all those spokes moved toward a single mound where wet snow gathered.
The mound looked an awful lot like a corpse, and sorry, but Sky had had enough of those to last a lifetime. She shivered. She was literally the only thing alive here other than the weasel. Nothing moved except the snow, slopping down. There wasn’t even a wind, which was about as unnatural as things could get here on theWindsweptPlains. Also, hadn’t this whole area been the Well? That’s definitely what the map in the book was saying, but if a whole Origin Well could just disappear…
