Page 113 of Witchlight
“Gone,” Vivia agreed, and something that might have been despair flashed across the Empress’s face.
“Why?” This came from Lev, who crawled toward them from the back of the raft. It made theCommanderrock and sway. “Why do I feel like I’m being noosed all over again?”
“Magic,” Zander now choked. He was the only one who had pushed to standing, although his posture was half collapsed. “It’s gone, I think. I think magic… is… leaving.”
Those words made no sense to Vivia. Magic couldn’t just disappear. It couldn’t justpunchout of a person like water ejected from a drowning man’s lungs. Someone had totakeit, like the Hell-Bards with their Loom.
Maybe someone is,she thought uselessly.Maybe Noden Himself has decided He will lay claim to everything.
Their raft was rocking now, tipping everyone on white chop that Vivia could see, but that she couldn’tfeel. As far back as her memories went, she’d been bound to that water. Now it was simply something she observed. Something she fought against on this raft that was…
“Breaking!” Lev barked. “This rutting thing is falling apart!”
The Hell-Bard was right. The oak branches that Zander had wound together were now sliding apart. As if the branches had forgotten how they’d been ordered and arranged.
Vivia, Vaness, Zander, Lev—they would topple right into this roughening water. And they would drown, because no matter how well they might swim, this river had become ravenous.Yes,said a slippery voice in Vivia’s mind.You will all drown, and I will delight in watching it. Because I was drowning for so very, very long, and now it’s your turn, Little Fox, Little Hawk, Little Bat.
“Paddle,” Vivia barked, clawing to her feet. She might not be able to control the water, but she had other instincts inside her. Other training and power. “Get us to shore!Now!”
They made it a few feet. Lev on one paddle—which was already crooking and changing in her hand—and Zander on the other.Row, row.Vivia, meanwhile, shoved her legs off the back of the collapsing raft and kicked as hard as she could. More white foam to add to the already churning river.
But they were too slow. Or too weak. Or maybe simply too late to fight back against a magic so vast it could command not only the Amonra, but the steam now roiling to life around them. An unnatural fog that heated toward boiling.
The branches of theCommandercracked. Vaness screamed and Vivia reached for her, straining to cross water now burbling upward. Ripping them apart. But she couldn’t fight this river. She couldn’t fight these branches.
She did, at least, manage to grab on to the Empress.We’ve survived this before. We’ve drowned and lived. We’ve faced a navy and kept breathing.
Silly words from a silly mind trapped inside a sinking body. She couldn’t hold on to Vaness because the waters wouldn’t let her. Like they’d done to the raft, they now shoved up to separate. Vivia lost the Empress’s hand. She lost sight and sound and breath.
The last thing she saw before the river crashed up to cover her—and to claim the woman she loved—was something heaving through the fog. A blobbing, almost formless figure, like a fish from the deepest pockets of the Jadansi. It called to a piece of Vivia that wasn’t her magic over tides, but was some other cluster of key Threads that defined her.
Then slimy gray skin clamped around Vivia’s waist and gurgling laughter filled her. “There you are, Little Fox. Let us find the others, shall we?”
Vivia was yanked down into darkness.
Kullen,
We were wrong.
We were wrong and the Wells should not have been healed. I need to fix this. Ineedto make this right before it really is too late.
The Rook King had it all wrong.
And the Raider King had it wrong too—although I suppose out of everyone in the Witchlands, he was the closest to seeing the truth. I understand that now, from this diary left for me. I have read the whole thing, you see? I had the second half before, now I have the first…
And oh, by the Sleeper, it was a text meant to be read whole.
I must now track down the missing girls from the tombs, Lisbet and Cora. They were the Raider King’s daughters and the closest Eridysi ever had to apprentices. Lisbet was the most powerful Sightwitch who ever lived, so if anyone will know what to do, it is she.
Yet only in death, could they understand life. And only in life, will they change the world.
—Ryber
FIFTY-EIGHT
High in the Sirmayans, the Aether Paladin called Nadje shivered on a flat stretch of earth beside a crater that had once been the Aether Well. He tried to stand, but his muscles were confused and displaced. His time in the Bloodwitch’s body had reminded him what weight and muscles and organs felt like, but that body had moved like hot wax from a candle.
Nadje’s actual body was more like wax that had cooled.
