Page 92 of Witchlight
FORTY-SIX
They all felt it when Iseult died.
Alma and Gretchya, too far away to help. Evrane on a shoreline, not far at all. Owl inside the forest where seafire burned, where ice and rock collapsed around her. Habim and Mathew hundreds of leagues away. Aeduan, so high in the Sirmayans and struggling to breathe. All of her Thread-family felt it.
And above all, Safi, running on the frozen river mere miles away.
She felt the Threads that bind tear asunder. She felt her heart cleave in two. And she felt the broken blade enter her as if she were the one being killed. As if it wereherblood coming out so fast that her organs were shutting down and her mind was detaching from its body.
A hundred Cahr Awen souls screamed inside Safi. A mourning, inconsolable sound because the dark-giver was being ripped away. Safi screamed too, with all their voices and her own. Her body fell to the ice. Backward, exactly as Iseult had fallen.
When Iseult died, Safi died too. In fact, if not for the Cahr Awen souls inside her, she would never have moved again—and everyone who’d ever been bound to her would have also felt her death as it severed her Threads from the world.
Instead, a Marstoki Herdwitch who had no reason to care if Safi survived this moment, who had no loyalty whatsoever to her or her cause, dropped to her side while his eyes glowed green. His arms dug beneath her and he lifted Safi, inch by inch. The sword at her hip dragged on snow and ice, an anchor trying to pin her down.
It seemed to take all of the man’s strength to fight the ice, to control his magic, and to manage the weight of Safi’s near-dead body. Once she was on her knees, though, the Cahr Awen souls stopped their screaming.
One minute, they were as loud as the horns in the city; the next, they were completely silent as they raced like worker bees down to save their queen. The souls reached Safi’s muscles.Initiate,they commanded. AndSafi stood. They surged up to her brain:You are not actually dead, and the dark-giver’s soul is not lost.Initiate and save her. Initiate and move.
Safi’s magic whimpered at that truth. And from her distant, out-of-body vantage, she couldn’t decide if she simply wanted her Threadsister’s soul to still be out there—and so her belief, her hunger, herneedmade her magic thrum.
Or was it really true? Did the core of her power recognize a fact she herself could not yet see?
Does it matter?the Cahr Awen souls demanded.Will it change what you are about to do?
No,she acknowledged.It won’t. Safi’s neck muscles shifted. Her jaw too, and suddenly she was moving again. Cracking her head side to side. Faster, faster, like a dog shaking off a bath.
Safi lifted her head and peered at the seafire-streaked sky. Snow fell thicker. The forest around Last Holdout was aflame. The horns blasted an endless refrain from the city.
But there was more happening than just the enemy’s triumph—there were people Safi had connected to during Iseult’s death. As if the act of ripping apart Iseult’s Threads had woven together all the Thread-family she’d left behind. Safi sensed Alma and Gretchya, their grief nearly as expansive as hers. She sensed Evrane, illogically close and shouting a war cry for the Cahr Awen. She sensed Aeduan, sprinting and focused in a way that Safi also needed to be.
And she sensed Leopold, furious. Violent. Grappling for his Aetherwitchery so he could make the world right again.
For a vivid half moment upon the ice, Safi saw the weave of Iseult’s Thread-family as if it were a taro game. As if she herself were one of several cards in an expert player’s hand—and each card was about to be laid down to win.
The Nameless Monk to double a hand’s strength.
The Fool to be played wherever needed.
And the Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth—a winning combination no other hand could beat. No other cards, no other assemblage could ever dominate.
And they are all me, while I am all of them.
Safi stepped away from the man who’d helped her. “Thank you,” she told Loued, although he couldn’t hear her. The horns and the seafire were too loud—and armies that appeared from seemingly nowhere now clashed upon the ice.
Ice that Safi was going to have to cross somehow, if she wanted to reach Iseult in time.
Iseult’s soul was not yet gone.
Safi’s quest was not yet over.
Her pace picked up. The dark slash where the river still flowed looked immense and uncrossable. Too vast for only her two legs. But Safi knew—sheknewbecause she had the winning hand in her grasp—that she could leap across it. Lady Fate would find a way. The hundred souls pulsing inside her would find a way.
Arrows whizzed by, silent and crunching into ice around her. Seafire hissed across the sky. Twenty paces to reach the river’s flow. Ten paces. Safi would make it. The gap was not so big. She reached it. She jumped; her muscles sang with truth and certainty and all the belief she had inside her.
She flew across the river’s black waters, wind lashing around her. She still wore only her loose sleeping gown. She imagined she looked like a ghost to the people on the shore.
A righteous, vengeful ghost for the Cahr Awen, and with a sword that sang of truth.
