Page 98 of Witchlight
Safi couldn’t guess why, but it felt important. It felt like she needed to keep following it.
She pointed, and her three-sided Hell-Bard shield launched up a hill. They crested it in moments. Threads gathered behind. Many,manyThreads all chasing this way.Please,she prayed,don’t lead me wrong, ice.
She sprinted onto a crumbling road, but rather than find the Well, she found only an empty pond bed filled with bodies and surrounded by the remains of a house.Only three walls,she thought, gaping at it.Just as I have only three.
Safi searched for a new road, a new escape, but there was nothing. Only people, Threads, raiders with weapons and witches with magic. She saw fire, rock, ice, and wave.
This was a dead end.
She and her Hell-Bards tried to double back, but were met with more of the same. The ice had tricked Safi. The Cahr Awen souls inside her had been wrong. Now these three Hell-Bards, whose faces she’d never seen and neverwouldsee behind their helms, would die. As would Safi.
Lightning arrived. A giant explosion that hit the Hell-Bard on Safi’s left. Their armor and helm roasted them in seconds. The remaining two, their weapons drawn, sank low and prepared for the same. They would fight until they couldn’t, to protect the Empress who had once been noosed like them.
“No,” Safi tried to say. “We’ll surrender. We’ll surrender.” She lifted her arms to show her guards how.
But it was too late. A spear made of stone shot through the Hell-Bard at her front. A blade of ice sliced into the one behind. Then there was no one standing, except for Safi.
She had only moments. These people were here to kill her. They would never let her reach Iseult. Their Threads throbbed with shared bloodlust.
The lightning soared out. It hit Safi. First, she locked up as tall and as strong as her body could ever be. A magnified, all-powerful version of the Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth.
Then she burned and burned and burned.
Merik wished he could say this was his first chaotic reunion with someone important. He wished he could meet the people he loved ineasyconditions that afforded time for conversation. Instead, here he was, one of tens of people being tended by healer witches inside a sagging tent. Painstones pulsed, filling the space with pink light as Merik was literally dragged on a litter toward a mat at the back. He heard the sounds of war outside, but he couldn’t see any of it.
The person dragging his litter dropped it. “Noden save me.” Evrane half leaped, half fell to his side. “You were dead, Merik. You had no pulse. Your bones were shattered, there was water in your lungs. Yet here you are, waking up.”
“Well,” he ground out from a throat that didn’t work, “you must have been expecting I’d wake up, if you brought me here.”
She didn’t respond. Her dark, dark Nihar eyes were wide with horror, forcing Merik to look away. Every shame he’d ever carried from childhood was suddenly churning to the surface, as if the Hagfish in his mouth had sucked it up for examination in the light. And this was the greatest shame he could imagine: being a mostly Cleaved man who clung to life through a Threadbrother trapped in the ice.
There was no dignity in that. No Nubrevnan strength.
He tried to push upright. His muscles resisted. Or maybe that was his spinal column, finally giving way after too many deaths.
“Not so fast.” Evrane gripped Merik with strong, ungloved hands. They were winter-reddened and flaking from cold. And ah, there it was: the familiar chant of her magic to weft through Merik’s body.
The sensation of being a boy again ballooned hotter. “You can’t help me,” he told her, as he tried to push her away.
She gripped him harder.
“You were dead,” Evrane repeated, and this time, she closed her eyes. Her grip was strong as the Hagfishes had been: “You had no pulse. Your bones were shattered, there was water in your lungs. But…” Again, her magic chanted through him. “My witchery reaches you, and that means—no matter what strangeness I feel on your blood—there is still life left inside you.”
Hye,Merik wanted to say, although suddenly he couldn’t speak. Evrane’s magic coursed through him, sparkling and real. He was still a boy, but not a cowering one any longer. Not a shamed one. This was the crash of the Jadansi on the Nihar shore. This was the river beside the Origin Well, still clean when all the rest of the land was dead. This was all the between moments when he hadn’t been looking and his aunt had quietly loved him simply by being there when no one else in his family had been.
Merik wanted to say something. He wanted todosomething. But this was the problem with rushed reunions in the middle of a collapsing world. Cannons blasted outside. Horns bayed in the distance like wolves on the hunt. Soldiers—many limp and losing blood—were being rushed into the tent.
Merik couldn’t stay here; whatever he might want to say or share with Evrane, now could not be the time.
“Who fights outside?” He drew in his legs to stand, and Evrane finally released his arms. “When I fell into the river, there was no battle.”
“And the battle was only just beginning when I retrieved you. I am here with Cartorran soldiers and Hell-Bards—although the Raider King had anticipated us.”
“How many of you?”
“Not enough. Only twelve thousand.”
And Ragnor has at least double that,Merik thought. But there was no need to say it aloud. Evrane must know, just as she must know that Ragnor had the better position defending behind his walls.
