Page 136 of Witchlight
She was bending and shaping everything, with Iseult right beside her. Exhausted, but alive. Threadsisters to the end.
With each Thread bound to stone, the world quieted. The storms softened. The screams and agony of the Exalted One faded—as did the screams and agony inside Safi. Until at last, there were no more Threads left to bind to stone. No more air storms or winds or thunderclaps. Just a defeated creature, fallen and bound.
Itosha crashed to the earth near Blueberry. Her Threads throbbed in time to her heaving breaths. Her birdlike body was crumpled and compressed. She didn’t look as Safi approached.
She did speak though: “This will not hold me. You can tie me, but it will not hold forever.”
“No,” Safi agreed. She too was heaving and hurting as a hundred new bruises and cuts made themselves known across her body. “It won’t hold. But… well…”We’ll figure that out then. Initiate, complete.
She stumbled past Itosha—ancient, sad—and aimed back the way she’d come. Back to Iseult and the first pillar, where yes… already, Threadswere loosing. Already, air magic was wavering free and building once more into Itosha.
But there was something else happening too. A vacillation in the Threads of the land, as if the very fabric that defined this canyon around them was ripping. It was as if someone came this way with scissors to snip-snap through the weave of the world.
Iseult,Safi thought.Oh gods, what’s happening to Iseult?
The world shivered and smeared before Iseult. Safi had taken the Threads from her, then she’d bound them in ways Iseult could sense at the edges of her magic… Already, however, the magic was tugging free. Even with these massive stones and all of Safi’s cleverness, it wouldn’t be enough to hold the Exalted One down.
So training took over. Iseult was nobody special, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find more inside to give.
She staggered to her feet. She readied her stance, arms lifting. Fingers opening. Itosha would break free, so Iseult would be ready. Probably. Maybe.
But that was when she saw it all change. The Exalted One’s Threads shivered… then tightened. Thenfrozein a way Iseult knew because Iseult had seen it so many times before. First at a lighthouse by Veñaza City, when he had tried—and failed—to control her. Then hundreds, thousands,countlesstimes since.
Moments later, he was there. A figure in white coalescing before her. Her Bloodwitch, back from the dead again.
Threads whispered off Aeduan, exactly as they had at the Well. It left a line through the weave of the world like a ship cutting through water, and although Iseult had no comprehension of how he could be here, she knew she couldn’t look away.
Blood. Witch. Blood. Witch.
Twice before she’d thought that Aeduan carried himself as if he came from another time. As if he had walked a thousand years and planned to walk a thousand more. Now, she had no doubt it was true—and that a thousand years was, in fact, a very short time for a man with a heart like his.
She watched him walk ever closer. His pace never slowed. Until at last, Aeduan came to a stop before her. Iseult was upright, if barely. He didn’ttouch her or reach out to assist. And she made no attempt to reach him. His clothing was as ruined as it had been in Poznin. She could see his six old wounds, bloodied and raw.
She wanted to touch them. She wanted to touchhim.And she wanted to cry and say,How are you here, Aeduan? Please, please, don’t go again.
But she didn’t. And instead she kept watching as he dropped to a kneel before her, just as he had in the snowy forest near the hunting lodge. As he bowed his head—where ice and snow still rested on his brown hair. Rather than offer vows, he instead offered her two tools.
A necklace and a sword.Thenecklace and sword Safi had made before they’d lost the power of Eridysi’s blade and glass. They radiated cold, and just as Threads avoided Aeduan, the weave of the world fled those tools.
Not because Aeduan was dead, but because he was alive. As were these tools.
Iseult reached for them, her hands so broken she wasn’t sure she could actually hold them. Her palms and fingers were blackened and shaking, but they obeyed her command. Enough, at least, that she could grip the hilt. A jolt of familiarity surged through her—yet there was something else too, for this was not merely the blade Eridysi had made. This was not merely the magic that Leopold had bound to people centuries ago…
This was a new blade, and it sang with truth. It sang with certainty. And above all, it sang with snow and meadows drenched in moonlight. With sun and sand and auburn leaves falling. With every magic that had ever been, from every place that had ever felt the goddess thrumming beneath it.
A song, Iseult realized distantly, that Aeduan echoed as well.
Iseult dragged herself around to face Safi. Her Threadsister was stumbling closer, her clothes and hair torn, her body sodden and spine exhausted. Her eyes—always the color of the Jadansi’s wildest waves—gaped at Aeduan like the ghost he was.
“Knifey,” she said, “you have great timing.” She grabbed the necklace and draped it over her head in a surprisingly strong move.
Then together, Iseult and Safi turned to face the Exalted One, still collapsed twenty paces away. Itosha seemed to know what items Iseult held and Safi wore. She seemed to know what awaited her.
And she could do nothing about it. She was held in place by the power Aeduan had always possessed to freeze, but a power that was now fueled by something so much vaster.
“Have I not suffered enough?” Itosha asked as Iseult and Safi took onestaggering step after another. “We were always awake, while the world feasted on our bones. Do not curse me again.”
“No,” Iseult said as she came to a stop before the Exalted One. “No one deserves that much pain.” At these words, Iseult glanced at Aeduan. He no longer knelt beside the stone, but simply stood, watching her with his eyes the shade of sleeping ice.
