Page 145 of Witchlight
Nadje nodded. He could not lift Rakel—he was too weak still, and she was too misshapen and changed. But he didn’t need to lift her to carry her into the goddess’s embrace.
The last thing he saw, before he took hold of Rakel’s other hand and winked them both into the Dreaming, was a shape in the trees. A figure in white that he knew instantly because he had worn that shape and body only a few months ago.
And on either side of him were the dark-giver and the light-bringer, the purest of bells to shimmer across the land.
The Bloodwitch nodded at Nadje, and as the walls between the realm that wastheirsand the realm that wasHersfell away, Nadje saw the Cahr Awen too. No longer did they wear corporeal forms, but instead they were simply two sides of a knife. The left and right hand to a goddess.
Then ice carved across Nadje and Rakel.
Come, come, the ice will hold you. Come, come, my children, and sleep. You are forgiven here in the ice, and you will be as you once were again.
The Paladins closed their eyes. Together, they slept.
THE WEASEL
The Weasel hates the Sleeping Lands. It is bitterly cold here. Barren and unwelcoming with no wind to displace snow. No breeze to carry sound. It is always midnight, yet no moon fills the sky. Only the Sleeping Giant constellation shining so bright it casts the world in a perpetual twilight glow.
Occasional shapes disrupt the landscape—if you are foolish enough to brave far. Mounds of snow that might cover forgotten megaliths or might cover nothing at all. Glaciers that thrust up sharp fingers made of pure blue ice. No animals are foolish enough to tread here.
Except, of course, for the weasel.
The only movement comes from beacons of color wavering across the sky, just like the old No’Amatsi tales described. Several hours ago, those Threads were not there.
The weasel shivers before a stone doorway wedged into a pyramid-like glacier at the heart of the Sleeping Lands. She wishes she could leap back through the frizzing blue light. Take refuge in the no less strange, but at least lesscoldmountain made of starlight. For although her fur might be made for snow, it is never thick enough to ward off the cold of this place that rejects all warmth and daylight.
The doorway gives a quake. It makes the weasel’s ears pop and fur ripple. She wriggles toward it, unsurprised when the man who believes himself her master topples through. When she was a human, the general who called himself the Raider King also believed he was her master. But silly men never could learn that she has only ever belonged to herself. And even in this much smaller, much stranger body with no magic and no voice, the last two months haven’t changed her.
She chitters at the tall, beautiful man. His pale curls shimmer green beneath the Threads of the Moon Mother. His greenish eyes ripple with other shades like iridescent fish scales the weasel used to see on the hot shores where she grew up.
On Leopold fon Cartorra’s shoulder is the bird that the weasel has grown toknow in recent weeks. He has spent a thousand years in this world, sometimes playing messenger, sometimes playing spy.
Today he will play a traitor.
The Rook swoops down to flap his wings at the weasel in greeting. He kicks up a fine, almost dust-like snow. It makes the weasel sneeze.
When she was a human, she had tried to come here once—into the Sleeping Lands—thinking perhaps there was some truth in the old tale about the monster gathering honey. But it wasn’t true. At least not for her. The Moon Mother never appeared; no task was ever given to her.
Leopold crouches beside his bird and before the weasel. His cheeks tick, meaning someone has made him angry.Veryangry.
But the weasel already knew that would happen. The strange sisters from the mountain already told her that.
She purrs as Leopold pats her head and strokes her fur. He was never a bad master, so much as a misguided one. And really, the weasel can relate. She spent her whole life focused on a task that bore no fruit—what difference does it make that he spent many lifetimes doing the same? A failed attempt is still a failed attempt, no matter how long it takes to get there.
“We have more work to do,” Leopold says, his voice a tired thing. He is angry, yes, but he is also lost. “No one has gone where I sent them, and they have not fulfilled the Lament as it was seen. So I must start anew. I can sense that magic has stabilized, but this isn’t the way She wanted it to be.”
“And how do you know that, Rook King?” The person who asks this is a child, her face young but her eyes ancient as she emerges from where she was hiding behind the ice.
Leopold spins toward her. He recognizes her immediately—that is evident in how his eyes flare. How he rears back for half a beat, before snapping his gaze toward the second girl now stepping out after her sister.
He gives a harsh laugh, his eyes sliding back and forth between them. They are both Sightwitches; they have both been gone a very long time. They do not approach Leopold fon Cartorra, but instead take up sentry ten paces away.
“Now you awaken?” he demands of them. “NowShe releases you from Her ice? I needed your help a thousand years ago. What good are your visions to me now?”
“Oh, Rook King.” This is the younger sister, Cora. “It isn’t always about you.”
“It never is, actually,” Lisbet agrees.
The prince’s nostrils flare. He stands taller, which prompts the Rook to clack his beak twice at the weasel. It is a signal that means nothing to Leopold, just as the weasel’s answering double chomp of teeth means nothing. But this was theiragreed-upon signal, and after they have both finished, they scuttle and hop out of the way…
