Page 108 of Witchlight
“Oh,” he finally said, and a laugh popped from his chest. “I do not need to become a man.”
“No,” she told him, and the smile that spread over her lips was as bright as the heavens above. “Because you were always good enough as you are, Little Monster. No human could have done all you have done or seen all you have seen. And certainly, no human could have done it with the same grace and patience that you have shown. But listen—I will give you a small gift for all your troubles.”
The goddess knelt and offered the monster two things. First: a necklace that smelled of a sky singing with snow and meadows drenched in moonlight. Of sunand sand and auburn leaves falling. It smelled, in fact, like all the places the little monster had visited.
“This necklace,” Moon Mother explained, “will remind you of who you are and how all your adventures have shaped you. And this…” She offered him the second gift: a small knife sharp as starlight. “This will help you build the world anew, Little Monster.Yourworld, for the choice has always been yours.”
The monster bowed his head. “Thank you, Moon Mother. For everything.”
“No, thank you,Little Monster. For my lands are better for having had you in them.”
PART 2
Complete
FIFTY-FIVE
It was another hour before Vaness awoke. Dawn had traded its gloaming for true sunshine—just faint tendrils to curl through steam rising up from the river. Zander slept. Lev slept, too. Vivia kept watch, steering with an oar whenever the river tried to sling their raft toward shore. She never saw people. Never felt any other vessels slithering through the waves.
It started with a twitch on the Empress’s left hand. Then a shove of her right foot. Then an imperial: “Where in the holy hell-fires am I?”
“Thank Noden, you’re awake.” Vivia knocked a gambeson aside. It made her admiral’s coat topple onto the Empress’s face.
In seconds, Vivia had all the layers off the Empress of Marstok and was helping her rise to sitting. Vaness looked significantly less imperial than she’d sounded with her hair fully loose and tangled around her face. With blood still crusted in spots across her cheeks and rips in her sailor’s uniform, from where treacherous ice had not been kind.
“Water?” Vivia offered Lev’s leather bag to Vaness. The Empress swatted it aside.
“Where are we?”
“We’re… on the Amonra.” Vivia’s voice shook, and though she wanted to speak Marstoki for the Empress, it wouldn’t come. All she could get out was Nubrevnan.
“The Amonra? In theContestedLands? Gods, Vivia, what happened to the mountain? How long was I unconscious?”
“Half a day, at most.” Vivia said this as flatly as she could. The oaks on the shore were golden now. The river a warming pink beneath the mist. “We were all frozen for much longer, though. At least a week, we think. The Sleeping Giant has moved in the sky, and the moon has grown.”
“And where are the others?”
“Zander and Lev are here.” Vivia motioned to the sleeping lumps wrapped in fog behind Vaness. “But Cam…” She couldn’t finish it. She couldn’t say it.
Vaness gave a little whimper. She swayed, and Vivia lurched to catch her.No, don’t pass out again. No, no, I need you.
But Vaness didn’t pass out. Instead, she sank against Vivia like a child who needed a hug. And distantly, in the farthest reaches of her conscious mind, it occurred to Vivia that this empress had never really known her mother or father. That she’d had no one to hug her for so very, very long.
And neither have you, Little Fox.
Below them, the river crooned without relent. Reached for Vivia with waves that wanted to climb aboard and caress. But Vivia shut them out, and in quick, poorly defined strokes, she explained how she, Zander, and Lev had awoken in the mountain. How they’d escaped through the first doorway they’d found—which had taken them here. And how eventually, Zander had used his magic to make a boat.
“This,” Vaness mumbled into Vivia’s chest, “is not a boat.” The imperiousness in her voice had melted away—leaving her words as loose and knotted as her hair. As filthy and torn as her clothes.
“I was worried about you.” Vivia held the Empress tighter, tighter against her. She wouldnotcry, she would not lose herself to the storm clouds in her lungs, here where the water salivated.
Vaness, in turn, dug her face into Vivia’s shoulder. It was exactly the sort of intimate moment they’d avoided so judiciously in Noden’s Gift, where there’d always been an audience, always been expectations. There was an audience here too, and expectations that Vivia maintain the helm. That she keep her bear mask firmly locked on—and not from the Hell-Bards, but from the entire river begging her to dive in and join it.
Vaness smelled like iron and salt. “I love you,” the Empress said quietly. So quietly, Vivia thought she must have misunderstood.
Vivia withdrew and found the other woman’s eyes. Dark, even in this rising dawn.
“When I saw the ice take you,” Vaness went on, sitting taller now. Bringing her face close to Vivia’s. “I thought we were done. I thought I would never see you again and never get to tell you how I felt.”
