Page 143 of Witchlight
Part of Caden couldn’t believe what was happening right now. He and Alma had just been in the collapsing Ohrins searching for these two people right here, and now they had found them in the thrice-damned ContestedLands, where Lev was talking about a mission and being in command. She was soaked but unharmed…
While Zander was dying.
Had Caden and Alma come all this way for nothing?
Caden pumped. Lev pumped. Caden shared his breaths, Lev shared hers. Over and over.Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear. Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear.Caden wasn’t sure when they both started saying it, but it gave them a rhythm to work by. It kept them locked into the moment, into Zan, even as the river lapped through trees.
Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear. Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear.
“He’s gone,” Alma said. One hand came to Caden’s shoulder; her other offered him the emerald that stood for Zander’s soul.
It no longer glowed.
“He’s gone,” she repeated, but Caden couldn’t stop. He kept pushing. He kept breathing. He kept murmuring the vow he’d lived by for so many years. This wasn’t supposed to be the end. This wasn’t supposed to be what he found here.
Eventually, Lev stopped pumping at Zander’s chest. She turned away, her shoulders shaking. Caden couldn’t stop, though.Toward death with wide eyes. All clear, all clear.It wasn’t supposed to be toward Zander’s death he went with wide eyes. It wasn’t supposed to beherethat it was all clear.
It was only when a fourth person joined them in the clearing that Caden finally stopped. He was crying, although he didn’t know when that had begun. He gawped at the girl before him, so small and unexpected with her big eyes and dark hair with silvery streaks. He knew she wasn’treallyjust a child, but right now, she looked it. She felt it.
Owl crouched on Zander’s other side. No glance for Caden or Alma or Lev as she curled down and rested her head on the big man’s unmoving chest.
She and Zander had grown close during their time together in Cartorra, and Iseult had described the Threads winding between them as one of Thread-family. A bond that had been as unbreakable as Caden’s and Lev’s were to Zander. Caden had known it was true then—he’d seen how Zander had cried after Iseult and Owl had disappeared from Praga…
Now, Caden knew it was true all over again. How else could Owl be here? How else could she possibly know she needed to say good-bye?
As Caden watched, his tears fell faster, hotter down his face. The eartharound him began to change. The plants first, roots and vines climbing closer so they could lattice across the man they’d briefly answered to.
Then came soil, although it didn’t clamber upward so much as crumble down, sucking both Zander and Owl into it.
Within seconds, both figures were gone. Buried and claimed by the earth with only a fresh burst of asphodels to punch upward and mark where they had ever been.
Caden reached for Lev across the expanse of fresh flowers, and together, they wept.
It had not been called the Contested Lands when Nadje had last come here a thousand years ago. It had simply been one more stretch of earth controlled by Lovats in his granite city to the west.
Nadje wondered where Lovats was now.
He was ashamed to admit he still feared that Paladin of Fire—as much as he’d feared Portia. Perhaps even more so, for where Portia had always kept her cruelty close, Lovats had spread it like the wildfires he controlled.
There were no fires here when Nadje had left the Dreaming with the Rook King. There had been nothing at all beyond a sunrise that held no promises of the battle yet to come.
But the battle had come eventually. Nadje had watched it from the edges, too weak to help but growing stronger by the second as the magic of the Witchlands had fed into him. Had bolstered him. He didn’t have the rage of Itosha or Rakel; he’d never had it. All he had was patience, and so he’d used that patience until the right moment came.
And that moment was now, as he watched Rakel flee from an onslaught of witches as powerful as Paladins. Three people whose very beings radiated in a way that told Nadje they were special. That they were the sorts of souls who could lead, who could lift up.
He’d forgotten how it felt to be near them—not a real sound, but a sense of ringing from the purest of bells or a feeling like the sun when she rises after a cloudless night. A sun much like what had been rising before Itosha and her storms had arrived.
Nadje found Rakel; she was wounded. A hundred blades from an Ironwitch pocked her heaving form like fishhooks caught on a whale. She would die like this, bleeding slowly on the riverbank, and Nadje could be the one to ensure it. Certainly, that was why he was here, wasn’t it? Thatwas what he’d told the Rook King when he’d awoken at the Well. This was the final battle; he was meant to fight in it.
And yet, finding Rakel so broken, rusted blades lying around her…
All Nadje could do was stride to her and kneel at her wretched side. Unlike he, who had awoken with—as far as he could tell—his original body, this was not the shape Rakel had once worn. There were remnants here, in the strength of her brow and the underbite on her jaw. But otherwise, she was a creature transformed by too many years drowning.
Nadje had drowned too. He didn’t know why it hadn’t changed him, but he did at least understand why Rakel had been so focused on possessing Monk Evrane’s body—and why, in turn, she’d been so angry when the Rook King had snatched it away.
“You,” she said in a voice defined by agony. It burbled with the watery depths of her soul. Blood spilled out.
“Me,” Nadje replied, and he took her wet, slimy hand in his. The sun was high enough now and the storm long enough gone that beams cut down, warm and welcoming.
