Page 146 of Witchlight
Right as the third child finally arrives.
In a blast of stone and power, she thunders through the magic doorway. Fast, hard, and with the mountain to seal up behind her. A zipping of granite. A silencing of magic.
And now Leopold fon Cartorra understands what is happening.
The weasel, if she were still a human, would have laughed. After all, this is exactly how it was in the old fable, when Moon Mother’s Little Sister Owl trapped Trickster and the world once more felt peace. He, of all people, should have known how much truth there is in those stories.
“Owl,” Leopold says. “You must let me back into the mountain.”
“No.” She shakes her head, and her dark hair—loose and tangled like a nest, with silver lines gleaming—flips against her pale cheeks. “You are finished now, Rook King.”
The Rook King’s cheeks tick faster. He knows he is in trouble, for the Dreaming does not work here. The walls in the Sleeping Lands are not merely thin so much as torn down entirely. One cannot use magic of any kind, and that is why Owl lured him here in the first place.
Or rather, the weasel and the bird did, bit by bit as they helped the last Sightwitches—Cora, Lisbet, and Ryber—do what needed doing.
“You have failed no one,” Lisbet says, offering a sweet smile that belies her near-infinite knowledge. “Except perhaps yourself, Rook King. So many years with your Paladin soul fixated on one thing—a thing that never really was.”
“You mean the Lament was not real? Is that what you are telling me? Butyousaw it.Youwere the one who told Eridysi what to transcribe.”
“Yes, but it was never meant to be interpreted. It was never meant to be collated and used as a guide.”
“And yet,” the prince bites out, “so much of ithascome true, has it not? The one turning on five, and now…” He opens his arms to them. “Five appear to be turning on one.”
Cora laughs. She is the youngest of the three girls and the silliest at times. “It onlyappearsto be true because you’re looking backwards. You’re fitting what was written to what came before—but you could have just as easily fit other words here instead.”
“Yes.” Lisbet nods. “That is the thing about our Goddess. She dreams what she dreams, and we Sightwitches do our best to make sense of it. But the truth is never so easy and the words—as you know yourself—are never so clear. Sometimes what Sirmaya dreams happens more than once. Sometimes, what She dreams is so strange, we cannot express it in words.”
Leopold sniffs, a hateful sound that puffs steam from his nostrils. “So you have cornered me here, in the Sleeper’s own land, to tell me that She”—he flings a hand toward the sky—“made a mistake,and I should not have spent the last thousand years doing what I did? Yet I have healed Her, have I not? The sky no longer splits, the mountain no longer quakes.”
“Yes,” Owl replies quietly, and she extends an arm so that the Rook will fly to her. “And in this, you did well, Rook King.”
The prince’s cheeks twitch again as he watches his bird obey. He glances at the weasel, expecting her to follow. But she stays where she is, several paces away. Not because she has chosen Leopold’s side, but because she recognizes her own sly ways within him.
He has one more trick left to play.
The weasel respects that about him. He coordinated so many and managed so much over the last thousand years. Countless puppets doing as he wished without ever building a Loom. It might not have worked as he’d hoped, but there can be no denying the scale of his accomplishments.
The same was true of Ragnor. Silly men she learned from but never truly served.
Leopold’s cheeks are red with cold. His nose too, yet he gives no outward indication that the chill bothers him. He is the poised performer. The prince trained for this moment since birth. Then it comes: the trickery.
He swipes his cloak aside in a flicker of silvery gray, and he withdraws what remains of the broken Blade of Eridysi. It whispers with a sound that is too loud for the Sleeping Lands. That makes the ribbons of the sky flare momentarily with Severed Threads and makes a wind kick up with icy claws.
But where the weasel expects the prince to turn this blade on Owl, he instead turns it on himself. Jagged, cruel edges that are barely longer than fangs—but vicious enough to pierce his clothes, his skin, his abdomen.
He makes no sound. Only a sharp exhale followed by a widening of his eyes as the pain punctures in. His knees give out. He hits the snow. Blood splatters across white.
“That which is closest,” Lisbet murmurs, “she cannot see.”
“A knife with two sides,” Cora adds.
Then together, they murmur: “Blood on the snow.”
Leopold sinks down, his life draining fast. And not just his life, but his Threads too. The weasel does not need her old magic to see how the sky soakshim up. How the goddess is taking back what she had once given out to a man she loved.
Owl is the only one to approach Leopold, her steps careful with the Rook now on her shoulder. She sinks to Leopold’s side and places her hands atop his. He stares up at her, the sea green of his irises growing duller by the heartbeat.
“I only did what I thought was right,” he says.
