Page 63 of Witchlight
For several moments, Safi didn’t understand what she was hearing.Domna? The Raider King must have heard I am no longer a domna.Shedragged her eyes open. Forced her pupils to find the king’s face. It was veiled by such deep shadows that it had become half shadow itself. His hair was dark and cropped close, his eyes…
Ah, his eyes.
“Prince,” she rasped, her voice a tragic, dying thing. “Is it really you?”
“Hye,” he murmured as her magic suddenly woke inside her and sang with a warm, blissful truth. “It’s me, Safi.”
That was the last thing she heard before Merik’s arms scooped beneath her and blessed unconsciousness swept in.
TWENTY-NINE
As Aeduan prowled and searched the unnatural forest, he had the gradual sense he was not alone. He smelled horse; he smelled dirt; he smelled old river and sulfur… But never did he smell humans.
Animals,he decided.Wolves, maybe.He scanned the trees with his sight. But he found nothing. Only snow falling in a slow, half-hearted twirl, as if the storm clouds overhead had given a tired sigh and expelled whatever they couldn’t still hold on to.
Aeduan reached carefully, silently for the knives across his chest, for the largest blade that hung at one end. All of his muscles were poised, his heart pumping with a steady, reliable strength. No agony from his old wounds; just the dull ache that had followed him an entire lifetime.
A branch snapped behind Aeduan. He wheeled around, slinging his knife upward and thrusting his magic outward like a net. But still,he smelled no one.
The hair on his neck stood up. He’d learned as a boy about storm hounds on the Arithuanian plains. And he’d seen as a man what their cousin, the mountain bat, could do. He could not fight against such creatures, even at the height of his powers.
Aeduan crept around the trees, sniffing and squinting. Something was near. Something that could keep itself hidden.
Ghost,he thought, and his mind shot to other stories—ones his mother had shared of Threads that became detached from dead bodies; snippets of memory and Aether that lived on long after a person decayed.The Sightwitch Sisters,she’d told him,have Crypts filled with written memories taken from the dead. Those memories sometimes break free, and they’re drawn to the souls of the living. Not hungry in a violent way, but hungry in a lonely way.
As a boy, he’d imagined a dark place filled with pale wisps of spirit. He’d imagined books that crawled off shelves as if they were spiders in search of a new web. He’d known now that his mother had meant to instillhim with awe, but at the time, it had only frightened him. Given him such bad nightmares that twice he’d woken up screaming.
Suddenly he felt like that little boy all over again, for there was a pale spot forming in the forest now. Exactly as he’d imagined a ghost in the Crypts might appear. It scuttled away from him.
Run, my child, run.
Aeduan did not run. Instead, he drew in a long breath, feeling the air rise into his nasal cavity. Then slide down his throat and against his vocal cords. He was not his mind, nor his body, nor was he his fears.
And that was not a ghost.
His grip tightened on his knife, and with his left hand, he reached for his sword. But he never got a chance to unsheathe it before a scent abruptly clattered against him: his own.
Iseult,his brain fired out.The silver taler.It was here, and it was moving into the trees—while mingling with it was a second scent, of mountain ranges and cliffs. Of meadows laced with dandelions.
Both Iseult and the Truthwitch were nearby.
Wait!Aeduan wanted to shout, but no voice left his throat. Instead, his feet propelled him forward like shot from a cannon. He ran, horses forgotten. Ghosts forgotten too.
The forest folded him in, and the night stretched on.
Perhaps if Aeduan had not been so focused, so fully detached from his mind and body as he always became on the hunt, he would have paused long enough to consider how the forest changed around him. How illogical it was for Iseult and Safi to have traveled this way. Or perhaps he would have pulled out the Truth-lens and used it to assess the truth of what he followed.
But Aeduan was fueled by his own failure. And so he could not relent.
Aeduan really should have paid attention, though. Heshouldhave pulled out the Truth-lens, and heshouldhave noticed how the trees were gradually replaced by stones. An illogical feature in a land made of damp earth—one made all the stranger when soon there were no trees at all but only boulders rising up in a way that reminded him of the Contested Lands.
The snow here looked almost like the asphodels that grew on that cursed peninsula. Small evergreens replaced the ferns. The gravel crunching underfoot could be the helms and blades from battles centuries ago.
The Contested Lands were cursed.
This place was cursed too. But the silver taler was so near—and the truth beneath snow as well. Iseult and Safi had come this way. Somehow, they were together and Aeduan just had to find them.
He didn’t, though. Not before he came to a hole that finallydidmake all his senses clamor with alarm. It was a perfect circle carved into the earth, with a wide ramp descending on one side like the ramp within a fortress, meant for horses and men side by side. At the bottom of the stairs, a faint glow throbbed, blue and frizzing in a way that Aeduan had never seen… but that Nadje had.
